(The prompts: Peppered Steak, smirk, eclectic)

When I was a child we rarely ate out.  Sunday meal were huge pot roasts we ate for days, meals were hearty, healthy and unremarkable.  Sorry mom.  But they were.  If my dad was working and it was a summer day, my mom might drive through McDonald’s for burgers and fries, but that was after HOURS of begging and she had to be in just the right mood.

If we went to the movie as a family, it was usually just my dad and the older kids, mom stayed home with the baby, he would take us out for pizza before the movie.  It was a cozy and compact little pizza parlor, an actual Italian restaurant, and we loved it.

In our family, when one of us kids turned thirteen my parents would take *just you* out to dinner at a fancy fancy restaurant of our choice. I chose Clinkerdagger, Bickerstaff and Petts.  If you are not familiar with it, it was an English pub styled steakhouse where the waitresses dressed like wenches and the busboys wore knickers.  It was jolly good fun.

Flash forward ten or fifteen years and I am now dating Scott.  I do not know if he grew up eating at fancy restaurants regularly, I cannot imagine they did, but in any case, he knew where the fancy restaurants were and he took me to them.  In my imagination they were snooty places where the waiter said things in French with a smirk.  In truth, I was with Scott, and I was in love and it was all lovely. It was my first regular experience with “fine dining.”

Over the years we ate at a lot of them, Anchorage has a surprising array of better restaurants.  We finally settled on a favorite.  And actually, it is were we went on our honeymoon which we spent in Girdwood, so it really is special to us.

Once the only five-star rated restaurant in Alaska, The Double Musky in Girdwood was the perfect place to eat and relax after a long day of skiing at Alyeska.   The reality was, it was not “fine dining” so much as an eclectic mix of ski-lodge meets rustic and funky, Canjun fare, it was a Lousiana-meets-Alaska sort of place.

I ate scallops there for the first time…. “Shrimp and Scallop Cardinal:White onions, mushrooms, butter, white wine, tomato sauce andcayenne pepper all blended in veloute sauce.
Served over rice or fried zucchini pirogues.”

And it was there that Scott had his first Pepper Steak. “French Pepper Steak: 16-20 oz. New York Steak, crusty with cracked pepper and covered with a spicy burgundy sauce.”

The jalapeno cheese rolls are absolutely legendary!  In fact, as Scott has expanded his baking experimentation, he worked to make the Double Musky cheese roll and has mastered it!  He mastered it with the help of “The Double Musky Inn Cookbook.”

So we moved to Ketchikan.  There are several lovely places to eat here, but nothing… nothing to rival the Double Musky, heck, there are few places in Seattle that rival it.  My sister-in-law turned us on to similar…yet different…. place in Seattle that we love, but that is for another blog… Toulouse Petit.. Aaaamazing!  We haven’t eaten at the Double Musky in twenty years now, but we hear from our Anchorage friends that it is still as good as ever, which is not surprising since it is a family owned place.

Here is the Link to the Double Musky Inn: Double Musky

Toulous Petit in Seattle: Toulous Petit

Double Musky Inn Cookbook: DM Cookbook

You can still eat at Klinkerdaggers (although you will feel like you took a time machine back to the 70’s).  It is worth it, in Spokane and possibly Tacoma: Clinkerdaggers