Taste of Tacoma will taste a little more like Tacoma this year. Or at least it will taste a little like Tacoma’s Sixth Avenue restaurant core.

Asado and Masa, the across-the-avenue neighbors owned by X Group Restaurants, will serve marinated steak skewers from its booth at Taste of Tacoma, the annual food and entertainment event at Point Defiance Park, taking place Friday through Sunday.

Other participating Tacoma restaurants are Southern Kitchen (gumbo), Joeseppi’s (tortellini and chop salad), Porter’s Place (barbecue) and

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The owners of Sofia Bistro in University Place are in the process of buying Mandolin Cafe, the central Tacoma coffeehouse, cafe and live music venue that opened in 2004.

“We are scheduled to close on the purchase of the Mandolin Café near the beginning of next month,” Marla Simms told me in an e-mail yesterday.

My colleague Kathleen Merryman has some hungry Tall Ships sailors on her hands. They’ll be in Tacoma next month. They’ll probably want pizza. Merryman recently sailed aboard The Eagle. She noted sailors’ struggles to get pizza delivered in Astoria, Ore.:

… other cadets in uniform shared pizza parlor flyers. The dialed their cell phones and tried to negotiate to have pies delivered to the city dock. It was surprisingly frustrating. They were assigned to the ship for the evening.

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Kelli Estrella will bring her award-winning cheeses to a new farmers market in Tacoma.

Kelli Estrella’s cheese are sought after by chefs from Seattle to New York. Tacoma shoppers will soon have a chance to buy the Montesano cheesemaker’s products at a new farmers market.

Estrella is among 24 farmers who’ve committed to selling their cheese, vegetables, fruit, meat and flowers at Tacoma’s newest farmers market, which will debut July 15 at corner of Sixth Avenue and Pine Street.

More info from the press release after the jump.

The 6th Ave Market, Tuesdays starting July 15, 3:30 to 7:30 p.m. on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Pine Street.

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Let’s eat out of the e-mail bag today. Here’s one from a vendor at the Proctor farmers market, responding to my challenge for food vendors to incorporate local ingredients into the foods they make and sell at farmers markets:

So I tried to find organic ingredients at the Market, that I could use in my dog treats. The only thing I could find is organic goat cheese,

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Are you ready for some really fatty, really delicious salmon at reasonable prices? Hold the Canadian Copper River king salmon. Get ready for Alaskan Yukon River king salmon.

"Copper River is insane," said Edna Crawford, whose company, Graham-based Boreal Fisheries, has bought and sold Yukon River salmon since 1974.

"We’re jealous that we don’t have the marketing campaign they have. Our fish has twice the oil content. But we come after Copper River. We still don’t have the market awareness that Copper River does."

Crawford is currently in St. Mary’s, Alaska, where Boreal

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Since double espressos come with ample shots of pulchritude at Hot-Chick-a-Latte, I ordered mine with milk. A pasty-breasted barista at the Lakewood location happily poured a shot of milk. But the milk didn’t mix in, so she helped it along, stirring my iced double espresso with her finger as she leaned over the the coffee hut’s window to hand me my cold drink. Hot? Hardly. Ewwww? You betcha.

It’s going to be a dry weekend at 21 Commerce and The Loft Live in downtown Tacoma. The martini bar-restaurant and nightclub’s liquor license is suspended today through Monday.

“We got spanked,” a guy sweeping up outside martini 21