It's going to be in Edmonds. West Seattle got robbed!

Press release with more info than anyone could possibly want after the jump.

And: Happy 87th birthday, Dick of Dick's!

The handmade pork rinds at Capitol Hill's new La Bête cost $5 an order, and they are—excuse my French—fucking fantastic. More about them and all the other great stuff La Bête's serving—including the world's best gnocchi, socks-knocking-off veal sweetbreads, and (hello!) banana splits—right over here.

• Kelly O / The Stranger
• WANT NOW.

• WANT NOW.

A gentleman named Ken called with a tip about a new place in Pioneer Square called the Berliner. The Berliner serves doner kebab, the Turkish version of a gyro or shwarma, which, when well-made, is a mighty good sandwich. From Ken's voicemail:

It’s fabulous food. I think it would be well worth your while to go there and taste it. It’s called the Berliner. I just wanted to give you a heads up. I’m not connected to the restaurant at all—I’m a psychoanalyst who happens to really enjoy eating there, and I want it to succeed.

I took Ken's advice, and Ken is correct. The sandwiches—chicken or lamb—come in the customary pita bread, or stuffed into a Grand Central ciabatta roll, or as wraps; they're messy and spicy and great, with variations like the Fiery Kreutzberg Doner (chili sauce, banana peppers, more) available for the adventurous.

Local guy Victor Twu became such a fan of the doner kebab served on the street in Berlin that he opened the Berliner a few weeks ago in a space that used to be a Quizno's. It's order-at-the-counter, with tables to sit at, high ceilings, and some nice old Pioneer Square exposed brick. Lines at lunch are long but move fast. Find the Berliner kitty-corner from where Elliott Bay Book Company used to be. All lunch besides a lamb Berliner doner on pita now seems unsatisfactory. Sigh.

The legally binding poll has closed, and (for once!) I am right.

In the Southcenter mall:

Yum!

On average, by the hour, fine-dining chefs de cuisine make about as much as school bus drivers. (Which is the worse work environment: a broiling-hot kitchen or a bus full of screaming kids?) They also work almost twice as many hours a week and don't get summers off.

More restaurant industry numbers (and nice graphs) over here: Executive chefs and chef/owners make more than chefs de cuisine, but most of them still aren't getting rich. The salary gap between the lowest-paid rungs on the kitchen ladder and the top is widening. Women still make "egregiously" less than men (surprise!). Culinary degrees make very little difference in income.

And some good news:

...by and large the restaurant industry seems to be maintaining, and in some cases even improving, its financial health in these less-than-salutary economic times.

The owner of Madrona's newish Vietnamese-influenced French restaurant (who also owns Queen Anne's more classically French restaurant Portage) holds forth on grapefruit ketchup, unusual meat, and which of his family members qualify as "doughnut people" here.

Weekend brunch at Monsoon is great. They've got fancied-up French toast, the best pho in the city (oxtail broth, with Wagyu eye of round and braised brisket in it; yes, it costs $10, but it is so good), and excellent dim sum. They used to have $4 glasses of rose at brunch too; Monsoon, please bring that back.

Secret: Some of Monsoon's excellent dim sum is made at the excellent Jade Garden in the I.D., so if you don't mind waiting quite a while and eating in a more cafeteria-type setting, you can go have it there and it's cheaper. Jade Garden is also quite a bit louder than Monsoon—unless there's a certain baby at Monsoon, in which case, Monsoon is the loudest place you've ever been.

We'll call this baby Hawkchild. Hawkchild was there this past Sunday, having brunch. Hawkchild was adorable, maybe eight months old, ready for the Gerber label. Hawkchild was silent, except for an intermittent, soul-piercing shriek. Have you ever heard a hawk scream, very high up in the sky? Like that, except you're trapped with the hawk in a container made of floor and glass and wall and ceiling, trying to eat your $10 bowl of pho.

How can a being that small produce a sound that loud? It is probably evolutionarily beneficial for the human vocal cords to develop early and strong. More importantly, what should a parent do in such a circumstance? My brunch companion wondered. I opined that the second time your offspring does something that other diners might find irritating, you are obligated to take it outside and not return until such irritation will no longer occur. (You are obligated to take it outside the first time, fast, if the irritant behavior is sustained, or never, if you are at Chuck E. Cheese or Vios.) I also opined that a pacifier might be just the ticket, although pacifiers have probably been found to cause irreparable dental and/or mental damage.

The parent in question chose to smile fixedly and stare into the middle distance whenever Hawkchild made a hawkshriek, fooling exactly no one.

The parent in question had probably not read this article.

How about a poll?

It's Esquire's best new restaurants of 2010. Neither Seattle nor Portland are is represented. As you were.

Sun Chips recently abandoned almost all of its biodegradable bags because they were too noisy and people freaked out. The bags were made out of nonspecified "plant material."

Now, across the pond, a British chips-maker—they call them "crisps," because in their daft world, chips are fries—is talking about making chip bags out of potato peelings. There is no indication how loud a potato-peel chips bag might be, but: the poetry! It'll be almost like eating a potato.

• Kelly O

Then read about the place that made it—the new Cheeky Cafe at 17th and Jackson, which according to Paul Constant "gives grandma's comfort food a multicultural kick in the ass"—here.

(And seriously, props to Kelly O for being able to take gorgeous photos of food, a talent that's missing from too many people who photograph food and whose work looks like portraits of surgical waste.)

Says Mayor Bloomberg:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg sought federal permission on Wednesday to bar New York City’s 1.7 million recipients of food stamps from using them to buy soda or other sugared drinks.
Related in Opinion

The request, made to the United States Department of Agriculture, which finances and sets the rules for the food-stamp program, is part of an aggressive anti-obesity push by the mayor that has also included advertisements, stricter rules on food sold in schools and an unsuccessful attempt to have the state impose a tax on the sugared drinks.

Soda isn't food; it's poison. And the government doesn't need to pay for anyone to drink poison. If people want to drink beer, smoke cigarettes, or chug high fructose corn syrup by the vat on their own dime, let 'em. But don't spend taxpayer money buying it. We already subsidize corn syrup for the soda business to the tune of billions of dollars a year. Big Soda is a gassy, bullshit political machine. They're opposing the proposal from Bloomberg using their hackneyed old line that says he's trying to control what goes into America's grocery bags. (Again, soda isn't groceries; it's an artificially cheap, artificially sweet diabetes-machine and fat-maker.) Nobody is proposing a prohibition on soda, only that folks pay for the poison out of their own pocket. The American Beverage Association's interest isn't liberty of the supermarket shopper or defending the poor. It's their own fat coffers. For proof, look to its equally disingenuous campaign in Washington state, where the American Beverage Association has contributed a record $14.3 million to repeal a temporary tax (a tax that helps the poorest people in the state) on soda, bottled water, and candy. That sugar crap isn't food either, but the soda lobby is running a campaign to claim that it's should-to-shoulder with the building blocks of good nutrition. Using food stamps on soda is only further subsidizing the soda industry's profits, which in turn go toward lobbying efforts that ensure the government has less money for the poorest folks, who needs things like food stamps to buy actual food.

Marti Jonjak profiles the beloved Ballard chili parlor—home to secret-recipe chili and scenes from forgotten Gene Hackman films—here.