We're tempted to change the title of this week's column to de l'Ouest, as this week's featured restaurant, PPQ Dungeness Island, is not just great food prepared very simply, but a definite call to gluttony.

We'd heard a lot of good things about PPQ, so we skipped lunch in training for the evening's anticipated feast, which meant we were wasting away to almost nothing when we arrived at 25th and Clement. We slumped, near death, into our seat and ordered the Shrimp Roll appetizers ($5.25) and a couple of 33 Lagers (charmingly nicknamed "Tiger Piss" in some circles, we chose to order it by its given name). The shrimp rolls were fine, nothing too exciting, just those cold rolls with noodles and shrimp in a transparent rice-paper wrapper served with a peanutty dipping sauce. It's hard to screw those up, and equally hard to make them terribly interesting. However, they took off our edge of hunger and enabled us to concentrate on the menu.

PPQ offers a number of prix fixe family meals, that you might enjoy. We're just the kind of bitches that all of them contained an item we didn't want, and we stuck to ordering ala carte, which meant that we ended up with way too much food, and we spent way too much money. But it's so easy to blow your wad at PPQ, because everything there looks so good!

Made magnamious by the 33, we decided to just order a ton of stuff and to share it all. It's times like this that we're happy to be in a relationship, when purely by chosing to share your life with someone you also get to try twice as much food as you might otherwise. Ah, love.

All photos by Tim Ehhalt

Gourmand