November 23: Rain Shadow Meats

[Last day in business: May 18, 2018]

"Rain Shadow Meats is really close to our new building." -- multiple people in our old corporate headquarters, a year ago.

"Have you tried Rain Shadow Meats yet?" -- multiple people, the last three months.

"We had Rain Shadow Meats for lunch. It's so good!" -- more co-workers, last week.

In an effort to save the best for last, yes, I tried Rain Shadow Meats today. It's only two blocks down Occidental, and is primarily a butcher shop, with restaurant counter-service appearing slightly secondary.

It's a typical late November day in Seattle, 48°, overcast, a little windy, and threatening showers, so I'm drawn to the hot sandwiches on their menu. Steak? French dip? Chorizo? They all sound good, but I decide on the porchetta, described as "slow roasted pork loin and belly, crispy pork skin, sauce verte, French bread." The cashier subtly corrects my horrendous pronunciation: it's "por-ketta" not "porch-etta." Derp.

The menu cautions that there may be a 10-minute wait, but I'm in and out in five, and bring it back to the office where I'm scrambling to finish a pile of work before the holiday weekend and an out-of-state trip. I grab a cup of coffee on the way past the kitchenette.

Unwrapping the sandwich, I'm surprised how, well, green it is. Very verte. Parsley, olive oil, garlic -- and maybe lemon juice and chives? --  combine to visually shout its presence. The bread is a crusty baguette-style, which does an outstanding job of absorbing the green sauce yet isolating it from the outer layer, preventing it from dissolving the bread. As I chow down on one end of the sandwich, chunks of pork are plummeting off of the other end onto the wrap. More to eat later.

The pork is great: solid but tender, mildly flavorful, and not at all greasy. It's just a tiny bit on the dry side, but the sauce verte covers up that minor flaw successfully. Chalkboards on site mentioned that they source their pork from Tails & Trotters in Ephrata, probably just down the road from Quincy's fields of data centers. The pigs are finished on a 60-90 day diet of hazelnuts, which allegedly adds flavor and increases the healthy fats. It might just be done for the prosciutto pigs, but I know it tasted darn good. I grabbed a fork from the kitchenette to get the leftovers off the wrap.

And with that, my three-month lunch project is complete. What's next? Slower updates, repeats, and a little hyper-local restaurant news. Details in my next post.

Rain Shadow Meats
404 Occidental Ave. S (joke about 404: not found)
Porchetta sandwich, $14.25