A Regular Guy's Guide To Ritzy Restaurant's Menu

Sometimes a menu speaks louder than words. Here's what the lunch menu at the Eastside's most exclusive restaurant, Fall City's Herbfarm, was saying the other day:

Duo of Miniature Sally Jackson Cheese Souffles (blue sheep with chives and fresh goat with tarragon served a la hen). Wine: 1986 Salishan Pinor Noir, Lot 2.

(This was two eggs with their tops cut off and filled with scrambled eggs. You ate them with these tiny little spoons. The spoons looked like they were gold-plated. I liked the sheep better than the goat dish.)

Roast Boneless British Columbian Quail (stuffed with sage smoked corn and bacon with homemade melon pickles, baby sweet corn and autumn greens).

(This dish tasted - and looked - like a little chicken with stuffing. Pretty tasty, but the melon balls on the side made your mouth pucker.)

A Trio of Early Autumn Sorbets (Lemon verbena and sweet cicely. Concord grape with rosemary. Peach with Anise Hyssop).

(Little dishes of homemade ice cream. Real good, but doesn't dessert usually come at the end of the meal?)

Ring of Columbia River King Salmon (with a merlot-lemon-thyme onion conserve and a fresh tomato-thyme sauce accompanied by miniature potato-and-zucchini-stuffed ``cabbage.'') Wine: 1988 Bonair Chardonnay, Chateau Puryear Vineyards.

(Big piece of salmon with some kind of red sauce on top. Wasn't ketchup. There's this circle of onions around the edge of the salmon.

What looked like a small head of cabbage turns out to actually be a cabbage leaf stuffed with mashed potatoes and zucchini and made into a ball.)

A Late Summer Salad Straight From Our Gardens (With Herbfarm Meadow's Edge Salad Dressing).

(No lettuce in this salad. Matter of fact, there isn't anything in this salad that you usually associate with a salad like lettuce and tomatoes. Instead this salad looks like it was picked from a flower garden rather than a vegetable garden. The chef tells the group that a salad isn't considered a salad if it has less than 30 different things in it. This one has 31 ingredients.)

Honeyed Italian Prune Plums and Blackberries (With Armagnac Puff Pastry on a Lavender Custard Sauce).

(Now this was the real dessert. The ice cream between the quail and the salmon was just a ploy. The pastry is good for soaking up the sauce and the plums are quite tasty.)

But it's not over yet.

A Selection of Small Treats: Chocolate Ephemere Truffle, Lemon Verbena & White Chocolate Leaves, Dipped Tri-Star Strawberries, Rose Geranium & Raspberry Jelly and Assorted Crystallized Flowers).

(Apparently there is nothing on the plate that shouldn't be eaten. You can even eat the flowersfloating in the sauce for dessert.)

The meal started with basil and sun-dried tomato bread with circles of butter with nasturtium blossoms mixed in for a colorful

design. Each table had a bottle of Haymaker's Switchel, a drink from the Shaker community in New England. The Shakers used to drink this stuff when they were cutting hay. It's made out of mint, lemon balm, fresh-squeezed lemon juice, orange juice and sugar. The Herbfarm shares with its customers, and the bottle has a card with the recipe on it.

Finally, there is a selection of 18 different herbal teas and coffee.

The bill: $32.50 per person. The meal took almost three hours and included a tour of the Herbfarm gardens.

There were 30 people joining the lunch. Just six of them were men, the rest women who seemed to enjoy the event more than the men did.

The Herbfarm hasn't had a vacant seat in five years for its lunches and dinners. When they opened the reservation lines last April to book for the coming year, every available seat through August was taken in three hours.

Now, to give some people a better shot at getting in, the restaurant started to leave 25 percent of the seats open. On Fridays, the restaurant will take reservations for those remaining seats for the next week.

They go fast.