Saturday, June 16, 2012

Canlis

Not looking a day over 52

Canlis is a fine dining restaurant in Seattle, just on the south side of the Aurora Bridge.  It's best known for excellent Northwest cuisine, impeccable service, a great view, and their Puzzle Hunt Contests.  As they say on Sesame Street, one of these things is not like the other.

Canlis is a family-owned restaurant, and it's the third generation of owners, Mark and Brian Canlis (grandsons of the founder), who have been driving the Puzzle Hunt Contests.  The great food, service, and view have been there since the beginning.  Or so I've been told; I had never been there until December 2010, when the restaurant was already almost 60 years old.  It's not coincidental that this corresponds to their first contest.

Contest #1 - Cheap Eats

Your key to cheaper fine dining

 

For the restaurant's 60th birthday, the Canlis brothers hid 50 facsimiles of the restaurant's 1950 menu around town, one at a time, usually one per day.  After hiding one, they would release a clue via Facebook or Twitter (for example, "Squash a beetle in your hand", referencing the Fremont Troll, who holds a VW bug in one of his hands).  If you found the menu, you could bring it into the restaurant for a dinner for two at the prices on the 1950s menu (so, for example, $6 for a lobster instead of $60).  In actuality, if you won you got to order off a 2010 version of the 1950 menu, as some dishes they weren't going to do, like 1950's extensive selection of pickled seafoods and shrimp cocktails (my son was actually disappointed about that).  Still, $5 steak and $6 lobster was quite a draw, and thousands of people tried to find the menus.

Some clues were harder than others, but in general they got harder as they went along.  Usually one of the brothers would be on hand to congratulate you when you found a menu.  Sometimes they would even give it to the first person who spotted them and asked for it, particularly if it had been some time since the clue had dropped and no other hunters were in sight.  The sole exception occurred late in the hunt, when they left one at the old Rainier Brewery overnight and tweeted the clue at around 4am.  Sometimes they would each have a menu and you had to find one of them, or they would give a clue that indicated two locations, such as the two ends of the Burke-Gilman Trail and one would be stationed at each spot.

How Church got from Here to There
As a rule, the clues were structured like poems (see below), although they also used simple ciphers and photos.  The clues used a diverse number of tricks about a diverse group of places, although they generally referenced Seattle history, especially Seattle restaurant history.  Most of the answers were Googleable, at least in hindsight.  For example:
Never fear, Church is here, but how did she get from here to there? 
Clearly Church is or was a woman.  But Googling for 'Seattle Church' gets you nowhere.  Wikipedia comes to the rescue, as they have pages of famous people who have a particular surname, which leads you to Ellen Church, the first flight attendant in history, whose plane is on display at the Museum of Flight.  This was the menu I found, which my wife and I used for a delicious and heavily discounted meal on our 14th anniversary.

But that wasn't all, as all the menu winners were invited to participate in a final hunt on New Year's Eve Day.  Everyone could have a team of up to three in a car, and as many as you could get helping at home.  You can read the whole story, but here's a summary:  I assembled a formidable team, and together we solved five clues and a final puzzle in Gasworks Park to find two buried gold Canlis cards, each good for 2 dinners for 2 every year.  One we get to keep; the other must be given away to a philanthropic person in Seattle.  It reminds me of being a character in a Jane Austen novel.  Mr. Darcy is worth 2000/year, Mr. Collins is worth 500/year, and I'm worth 2 fancy meals/year.

Contest #2: Pop-up

Spot the Morse Code (photo by Joshua Longbrake)

 

Early in 2011, the Canlis brothers started a slick online campaign to help their chef, Jason Franey, win an online poll.  They took a series of black-and-white photos of themselves in famous Seattle locations (The Space Needle, Safeco Field, Gasworks Park) wearing signs such as 'Vote for Jason'.  This was clever enough, but there was another contest hidden in the campaign:  each photo had had a letter or letters Photoshopped into it in Morse Code.  After finding 'w', 'w', 'w' and '.' in the first four photos, it wasn't hard to determine that it was a web address.  One enterprising couple paid for a reverse whois lookup and discovered the domain before it had even been set up.

By this point, I had decided it was best to enter these contests as a team (particularly since I was about to go out of Internet range for a Mt. Rainier vacation).  Eventually, our team found "www.qth", which was good enough to guess the correct web address:  www.qthseattle.com (QTH is a 'Q code' from ham radio, indicating "my position is").  This address was subsequently used in Contest #3, so it's no longer secret (and the content has changed).

On the website, there were originally instructions to send an e-mail for a reservation to a pop-up restaurant, where Franey and the rest of the Canlis staff could try something a little different for a couple of nights.  The members of our team, as well as the couple mentioned above were the only ones to get a reservation before the reservations were open up to the general public, and we all got a free meal for two.  I took my older son, who declared it the best meal he had ever had in his life.

Contest #3: Keys

Key #1 was here (Photo by Brian Canlis)
By now, people were beginning to catch on that the Canlis brothers liked putting on these contests, so there was quite a frenzy when they started another one in late September 2011, with a link to the mysterious image above and little other explanation.  Crucial to this contest was the fact that JennyLee Lieseke, who had hunted unsuccessfully for a menu but did manage to get a free meal at the Canlis pop-up, had set up a Facebook group, Menu Hunters Anonymous, back in 2010.  Soon after this contest started, JennyLee started promoting MHA on the Canlis Facebook page as the place to go to talk about the new contest.  This time, the Canlis brothers cryptically mentioned that "you can't do it alone", so everyone seemed eager to collaborate on a solution, and MHA's membership grew from a couple of dozen to over 500 by the end of the contest.

After the first few days, it became clear that each photo represented a sign located somewhere in Seattle, and the signs in the pictures all had a hidden key attached.  After a few days of finding one key a day, the brothers released more details:  there were 30 keys in all, and each represented a table at the restaurant for a special dinner on Sunday, October 30.  Crucially, though, the keys were all already out there.  This started somewhat of a frenzy, as people started looking for and finding keys without clues.  After a day or so, with all the keys mapped on one Google map it became clear that the key locations formed the outline of a shape, which made searching even easier, as the keys could only be on the lines of the shape.  By the 9th day of the contest, all the keys were found.

1 of a precious set of 30 (Photo by Justin Tittelfitz)

But what to do with the keys?  The shape they formed was a giant arrow, and the keys were safe deposit box keys, so even with incomplete information it seemed logical the key bearers should go to a bank at the tip of the arrow.  At the bank, the employees would take your key and let you open a special box which contained your official invitation (and told you how many people were at your table).  On October 30, everyone met for a nice dinner party with great food.  In a great community gesture, many of the people who made contributions to the solution but never found a key (such as the compiler of the map, and the first person who suggested the 'giant arrow theory') got invited by key winners who had room at their table.

Contest #4: ???

There's no reason to think that's the end of the Canlis contests.  On their 61st birthday in December 2011, the Canlis brothers with little warning hid a menu at St. Marks Cathedral on Capitol Hill and released another clue.  They indicated they'll probably continue to hide a menu every year.  But the smart money says there will be another big contest sooner or later.  With great food for free, or at least cheap, a lot of people will be eager to try to win it.  If you live in the Seattle area, like Canlis and Menu Hunters Anonymous on Facebook, and join us for the next hunt.

News and Events

Where you need to be to win a DeLorean from the author of Ready Player One

 

Geocaching puzzle of the week:  I've been working on the Puzzler's Puzzle, which has a number of good puzzles.  Here's one I solved after a fancy dinner (at Place Pigalle, not Canlis) this week:  An Odd Cache.

And there wasn't much of a puzzle to this one, but the Amazing Race analogies continue, and this story has a Seattle connection:  James E Rogers grad wins space trip.



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