Another 25 for $25 is drawing to a close on Thursday. This month I tried out Yarrow Bay Grill and Six Seven, two very different experiences. At Yarrow Bay, things were inexplicably muddled — for some reason they kept patrons waiting for their reserved seats for over half an hour, and then ran out of food and had to substitute. Considering that they’re a regular at the 25 for $25, this sort of behavior is rather mysterious. At Six Seven, I had a rather better time, not to mention some nice eye candy to look at in the form of server “Chris C”.

Regardless of the ambience, however, I’d have to say I much prefer YB to 67 for one simple reason: you really got a good impression of their regular menu from the tasting menu. Meanwhile over at 67, the dishes were crafted for the promotion, which gave me no opinion on the restaurant at all, other than that they have this special set of dishes they trot out in order to meet the $25 category.

But what I actually wanted to talk about today was the KCTS Chefs 2006 show that I caught the repeat of, over the weekend. Ah, thank goodness for Tivo, because I used to have to sit through the membership drive, and now I can simply fast forward straight past people reminding me every 5 minutes that if I donate money, I can get a cookbook.

This is the 11th annual Chefdrive, where Washington chefs get guilted into giving up their recipes in order to help out our local KCTS station. Frankly, I’m astonished that we can all get away with it for so long, although, in the case of Bellevue, we apparently cheated and put in two chain restaurants instead.

Since I was able to watch it without being driven mad by the membership drive, I did sit down and for the first time, watched the chefs back to back, teaching us how to cook the stuff they serve up every night. Most of the chefs behaved well on camera, but I couldn’t help wanting to kick “Greg” on their behalf. I could sense his role was to fill in the silent bits with some cooking chatter, and assist the chef with the dish, but he did neither well, and instead what really came across was a sense of claustrophobia, especially in the case of the poor little pastry chef from Julia’s, who was dwarfed and hemmed in by two giant men. Probably a good thing, since if she had bolted, we never would have figured out how to make the double chocolate vegan brownies after all.