Review: Ginger & Scallion is making supreme comfort food

LESS IS MORE at Ginger & Scallion. It’s a place that does just one thing, exactly right.

A tight menu can be a relief. In an overwhelming world, it’s fewer choices to have to make; in an often mediocre one, it’s the hope that each dish has gotten all the attention it deserves to attain all the greatness that it possibly can.

Ginger & Scallion bills itself as the “Chicken Rice Specialist,” and it’s just that and very little more. Open since January on the little bar-and-restaurant strip in the zone of Ballard called West Woodland and/or Stumbletown, Ginger & Scallion offers three variations on the comfort-food favorite that is Hainanese chicken rice. To go with that Singaporean specialty, there are four sauces and three small plates. One Malaysian/Thai-style chicken curry is available — it’s good, but, in context, seems extraneous. One vegan option is offered, five-spice braised tofu — it’s less good, but friends probably don’t take vegan friends to the Chicken Rice Specialist anyway.

The specialists here are Akarawin “Boss” Lertsirisin and Jakkapat “JP” Lertsirisin, the two brothers who are also behind Secret Congee, which specializes in that comfort-food standby. They grew up near Bangkok. (“Lots of good food there,” Boss understates.) They’re not hung up on any notions of authenticity, and they decline to construct any kind of elaborate backstory. Boss has worked as a server at the late Thaiger Room and Rom Mai Thai; JP tended bar at Pestle Rock and, at one point, worked as a busboy at a Vegas casino.

Now the Lertsirisin brothers run two places that both keep it simple and elevate that simplicity with sheer excellence, making some of Seattle’s best food and drawing long lines.

“As a city, Seattle has limitless potential. When it comes to food, we can eventually rival any city in the world …” JP says, thinking big-picture. “We just need more specialized concepts.”

“We don’t have a long background in cooking,” Boss says by way of biography. “We learned to cook after moving to Seattle. Our Thai chef friends taught us how to make a few dishes. Congee and chicken rice are one of the few we know how to make and have confidence in.”

This confidence is not misplaced. The chicken in this dish is usually poached; it’s pale and plain-seeming, but it must be done just right to act as companion to the rice and vehicle for the sauces. The bird can get overcooked, the skin too rubbery. At Ginger & Scallion, the chicken is Northwest-sourced from Draper Valley Farms and cooked sous vide, which precisely serves the cause of cooking correctness. Order breast meat, and find it uniformly, almost uncannily tender; the dark meat is a study in succulence, with richness provided by more variation in texture. 

The chicken for the Classic option stops, simply, there. The Drunken option gets sous vide’d with Shaoxing — Chinese rice wine — which imparts a slight extra salinity, then it’s drizzled with sesame oil for a touch of that flavor and added velvety softness. (The Drunken chicken is supposedly served cold, though mine was not chilly, nor were other choices piping hot.) The BBQ, breast meat only, gets Chinese five-spice blow-torched onto the skin, which is exciting to watch if you’re seated at the open kitchen’s counter. I thought I’d love the BBQ the best (roasty skin, after all), but the allure of the dark meat Drunken-style won me in the end.

The bowlful of pale-gold rice, glistening promisingly, that comes with each set represents a superlative version of the form, which gets cooked in chicken broth enriched with chicken fat. Ginger & Scallion’s rice tastes more intensely chickeny than chicken itself; it’s barely garlicky and whispers of ginger, savory in the extreme, faintly floral, buttery, humble yet majestic. Once, a few bites were a bit mushy, but every other time, the rice was cooked perfectly — each grain distinct but clinging lightly to its friends. The big bags in the back of the restaurant read “KING STAR BRAND JASMINE SCENTED” — my stellar rice-liege, I bow to you.

Tiny dishes are provided for mixing and matching sauces, which is where you achieve your own specialized super-tastiness. The ginger-and-scallion sauce is goopy and golden-oily, with visible scallion bits and shreddy ginger; the scent is allium-forward, and the flavor is such that if you start eating it alone with a soup spoon in an attempt to analyze it, you will not want to stop. The green, Thai-spiced herb sauce has a faintly minty, grass-clippings nose that hints of violence; one server warned about its power and wasn’t wrong, with a few drops providing a lingering heat, vinegar, salt and distant fruitiness. This sauce will hurt you if you let it, in a good way. The Singaporean pickled chili sauce, a thick orange-red purée, offers a citrusy acidity and a quick spiciness that dissipates nicely. Try a little drizzle of this with some of the sweet soy sauce; thick and molasses-y, it’s the only one that’s not made in-house (it’s Kwong Hung Seng brand from Thailand).

The small bowl of tingly, gingery, clear broth that comes with each chicken option works as a palate-cleanser, or dip some bird and/or rice into it. Don’t ignore the wisps of cilantro nor the frizzled tangles of scallion. Now is the time to play with your food.

Portions are large enough to make Ginger & Scallion’s three small plates unnecessary, but the crisp, cold, crunchy rounds of baby cucumber are refreshing and arranged in an exceptionally pleasing geometry. The fried chicken skins I got were a bit tough, but served with a nicely nuanced sweet-and-sour sauce. The shishito peppers wanted a bit more roasting, but still tasted buzzy-tender dipped in gently spicy house aioli. 

Short but carefully calibrated, the drinks menu matches the food one. For beer, it’s Tsingtao and two kinds of Stoup. Three wines come chilled in filled-to-meniscus 8-ounce pours: Radley & Finch chenin blanc, mildly lemony-tart to cut the chicken fat, salve any spiciness and ready the maw for the next bite; Two Shepherds sparkling orange for a more puckery, citrus-rind pairing; and a sparkling red, also from Two Shepherds, for fans of a little astringent bitterness. Nonalcoholic offerings: Thai iced tea, hot teas and local sodas. 

The setting, too, keeps it real — the midsized room is airy and bright, with colorful bottles and jars on shelves acting as storage-as-décor. The walls are imperfectly painted; the lacy-looking divider above the kitchen counter is held together with zip ties. The likes of the Arctic Monkeys play at an energizing but unannoying volume. Clearly, no design firm has been involved here, and frankly, that feels as great as the chicken rice tastes.

SECRET CONGEE ISN’T a secret anymore, and it never really was. The Lertsirisin brothers started it as a walk-up window in Wallingford during COVID, then moved it out to a small Shilshole Bay spot with a modicum of seating. The secret part was that they wouldn’t give their names — gimmicky, until you heard they wanted to share the credit as a collective, and until you tasted the congee, at which point, nothing else mattered. 

If you ate Secret Congee in the car alone on a rainy gray afternoon during the sensory deprivation that was the pandemic shutdown, you gained a new, nearly synesthetic understanding of comfort food. This was immersive happiness in the form of savory rice porridge: creamy, brothy, soothing like a hug from someone you love. The sheer deliciousness of the red-orange-oil-slicked tom yum version — with huge wild-caught Gulf shrimp and just-right spice — makes sense now, knowing the Lertsirisins’ story. 

The current menu at Secret Congee contains eight kinds made with high-quality ingredients, including the tom yum shrimp, traditional-but-better chicken, slow-cooked brisket with kimchi, and Hokkaido scallops with fried garlic. The few add-ons — soft-boiled or century egg; crispy rice noodles; the golden-fried savory dough-sticks that are youtiao — ought not be neglected. It’s only congee, but it’s next-level stuff.

The Lertsirisin brothers’ dual specialty shops also make more sense if you trace them back to their Seattle beginning — their first enterprise, a stall called Congeez in the Uwajimaya food court, served both. And the Secret Congee experience is congruous with the Ginger & Scallion one beyond serving variations of one great dish. They both have pleasantly low-stakes aesthetics and unfailingly friendly service, including Boss circling like a benevolent owl if he’s in the house — everyone seems to already know him. 

And, warning: They’re both mobbed. Four years in, Secret Congee’s cultlike following means it often sells out before close, especially on weekends. Those fans (and influencers) have already gotten to Ginger & Scallion, which can mean 45-minute waits and/or that arrival just after 8 p.m. finds the list full up through the 9 o’clock closing time.

The best option at Secret Congee is ordering online to-go — it tastes just as good in the car, or at Golden Gardens, if you can wait. After getting turned away at Ginger & Scallion, I had luck on Thursday and Monday, arriving early, and they’re newly open for lunch, which may be less hectic. This kind of comfort-food joy is worth the perseverance.