Offbeat Eats

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).

As I mentioned in my previous review of Surdyk’s Flights at MSP, there are good and bad airports for layovers, at least if you are looking for good dining options. And unfortunately, SEA seems to be perpetually locked sometime in the mid-1990s when it comes to airport dining. Aside from a number of Starbucks that would be considered implausibly high in most other places (I passed three just walking from my gate back to security, this is Seattle, after all!), aside from Ivar’s Seafood Bar, the options at SEA mostly involve… Sbarro and McDonald’s (the latter being a fairly recent addition). But there’s actually a good, non-obvious option at SEA, at least if you’ve got a layover of at least two hours: Leave the airport! In a mere five minute walk from any gates but the N/S concourses (which have the little tramway connecting them to the rest of the airport), you can not only be back through security, but outside of the airport, and in another 5 minutes of walking, you can be off the airport entirely, and sitting in the warm comfort of 13 Coins.