[Union](http://www.unionseattle.com/) is a downtown Seattle restaurant helmed by a freakishly talented young chef named Ethan Stowell. Most nights, Union serves delicious and expensive things like venison loin with brussels sprouts and bacon, or wild sturgeon with french lentils. Stowell is particularly brilliant with fish.

I had dinner at Union on Sunday. Dinner consisted of four bowls of chili.

You see, Stowell is not one of those chefs who believes that his high-end cooking is the end of the story. So on select Sunday nights, he collaborates with some of his regular customers to produce what he calls Sunday Dinners. The first one I attended was Oktoberfest-themed. I went in expecting Union’s refined take on traditional German favorites. What I got was huge platters of sausages, sauerkraut, wienerschnitzel, and pickled herring. Delicious, but nothing refined about it.

In the same vein, last Sunday was Union’s first annual chili cookoff. Professional chefs squared off against members of the public, including several of my friends. Unlimited beer and Fritos were included with dinner.

There were fourteen chilis to taste, and I got through most of them. I’d never been to a chili cookoff before, and it answered something I’ve long wondered: is there really much difference between good chili and great chili? I’ve been cooking chili since I was a kid, and I’ve learned that if you put some beef, tomato sauce, chili powder, and onions into a pot, it’s going to come out pretty tasty and pretty much like the last pot you made, whatever the recipe.

But at the cookoff, it was very easy to sort the chili into three tiers. Some of the chilis were bland. Some of them were quite good (many of these featured a lot of bacon). And one of them was simply awe-inspiring. I love chili, but this chili, #8, was better than I had believed a chili could taste. It was extremely simple, just chunks of beef in sauce, but the sauce was magic. It was spicy but with an unexpected and perfectly balanced acidity. It won by a landslide. (Ethan Stowell’s chili came in last.)

The magic chili was made by Steve Smrstik, the tattooed chef of 35th Street Bistro in Fremont. Yesterday I sent out some frantic emails trying to track down the recipe. That quest is still in progress. But I’m dying to make Smrstik’s chili my house special, and not just so I can say, “Who wants another bowl of Smrstik?”

Union’s Sunday Dinners strike me as savvy marketing, the equivalent of Amazon making money by turning a shopping site into a community site. Admittedly, I have no idea whether Amazon–or Union–is making a profit these days. But even though I can’t afford to eat at Union very often, the Sunday Dinners make me feel like a participant in the restaurant, not just a diner but part of an ongoing and occasionally goofy project.

Now, I have got to get my hands on some Smrstik.

**Update:** Hsiao-Ching Chou covers the cookoff in the P-I, and Smrstik isn’t talking. But he did say it was made with pork, not beef.

**Update 2 (3/17/06):** I just got email from Smrstik and he’s working on getting the recipe into publishable form. Stay tuned.