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.

After our trip to Rainier we met up with our friend Jules to tour around the area doing some light sightseeing and exploring the area wineries and distilleries. Wanting a light lunch, we were looking for a place that was dog-friendly with outside dining (due to some Covid concerns in our group), and happened across a nice little hidden gem: Lifted Taco.

Before our group headed out to Mt Rainier, we had an introductory dinner to get to know each other. It’s best if we avoided carpooling, and the area around Seatac has an interesting assortment of diners, beer bars, and such that you expect near an airport, as well as a few gems (like the previous review, 13 Coins). With a group that included vegetarians, vegans, spice lovers, and spice haters, there was one obvious choice that easily covers this group, and that was Mango Thai.

Here at Offbeat Eats, every once in a while we do a “health check”, revisiting one of our old favorites and see how things are doing. In this case, our planned backpacking trip to Mount Rainier with Fitpacking had us all rendezvousing at a hotel by Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. After going to the airport at 0-dark-30, by the time we arrived at Seatac we were quite hungry, it was lunch time, and, conveniently, our walking route to the hotel took us right by one of our favorites for airport dining: 13 Coins (our previous review from 2014 is here).

(Closed) In addition to the places we visit on each “Death March”, we traditionally try to have a nice dinner outing the evening beforehand. Like finding a place to have breakfast the day of the March, it’s always a bit of a challenge, since it usually involves finding a spot that can handle a reservation for a large group (usually all of the hikers, plus a few spouses, so it’s usually around 20 people), that’s not terribly crowded, and can handle the ephemeral nature of large groups always needing to adjust their exact arrival time and number in their party. However, a check of the usual online resources had indicated that one place in Seattle was particularly good for this: Orfeo.