Offbeat Eats

After sending our hiker friends on their way, before heading home to New England we spent a few days hanging around with friends of ours in Redmond, generally having a relaxing time cooking, playing with the kids, and playing mini-golf. Afterwards, we decided to go wander around Redmond Town Center with the kids, and find spots for dinner and ice cream. Just off the central plaza at Redmond Town Center we came across a good-looking option, Kizuki Ramen & Izakaya.

After our visit to Piroshky Piroshky and some touristic wandering of Pike Place Market, we decided to continue our explorations of Seattle’s major tourist attractions with a visit to Chihuly Garden and Glass (which was still finishing construction on my last major visit to Seattle). After a short ride on the monorail (which is uniquely suited to this purpose, and few others), and a nice morning enjoying the gardens and glass art, we decided to grab a light lunch before everyone started to split up for their future travels. Turns out, we didn’t need to go anywhere, there’s a great spot right at Chihuly Garden and Glass: The Bar at Chihuly.

On our last day in Seattle before heading out to visit friends in Redmond, we hung out with our friends Julie and Howard, checking out a few of the tourist sites around downtown Seattle. One of our first destinations was, admittedly, one of the more touristy spots, adjacent to Pike Place market: Piroshky Piroshky.

“After the doing… there is the undoing.” We’ve had a long tradition of celebrating our longer backpacking trips by finding a good celebratory dinner spot, often a steakhouse when this is viable. So after we got back to Tacoma after a week backpacking in Mount Rainier National Park, we decided to find a spot suitable for a good celebration. A quick check of various reviews led us to a Brazilian steakhouse located near downtown Tacoma, El Gaucho.

One of the things I like to do when visiting various metro areas is to visit their art museums, and I was surprised to realize that, despite 8 visits to Seattle since the 1990s, I had not yet visited the Seattle Art Museum (SAM). So, after a rather pleasant visit (pictures here), we found ourselves looking for a light lunch. By this point Pike Place was getting pretty busy (it was a Friday), but we found a nice, quiet spot just around the corner from SAM, Musubi Kai, an informal restaurant focusing on musubi and poke bowls.

Over an extended Labor Day holiday, Carol and I did another Fitpacking backpacking trip to Mount Rainier National Park, and that was a good opportunity to catch up with friends and revisit some favorite locations (well, we tried to do this back in 2022, but Covid-related complications threw a big wrench right into our plans). Before we headed out on the trail, we were meeting up with my college roomate Steve and his wife Emily at their house in Seattle’s Wallingford district. There are a number of good smaller restaurants and breweries in the area, and one I was interested in revisiting for a simple meal after our travels was a favorite from a 2016 (my, how time flies), TNT Taqueria.

Sometimes we get into comfortable patterns. Much earlier in my career, I had project assignments that had me visiting Edwards AFB frequently, and for a variety of logistical reasons it was far easier for me to fly into LAX than other area airports, and then drive up to Palmdale. Usually I’d take a late arriving flight (to avoid the worst of LA-area traffic), and on the way out of town, I’d stop off at Pink’s Hot Dogs for a late evening treat.