Offbeat Eats

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.

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.

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.

(Closed) Well, sometimes one of my “Death March” hikes goes according to plan. And sometimes, you’ve got to adjust the plan. In the case of Seattle, our initial plan was to hike through the SoDo neighborhood and cross over to Alki Beach, potentially ending at Sunfish. But like a lot of plans (especially those put together by folks not completely familiar with a metropolitan area), a few hitches arose: first, we got behind schedule. Looking at our watches, it was obvious that even if we hustled, we’d probably get to Alki beach right as most places were closing up shop. Second, most of the Marchers were getting tired, enough so that “hustle” wasn’t really in the vocabulary anymore. Third, the SoDo neighborhood, aside from having the rather cool ORB (Old Rainier Brewery) isn’t the most exciting neighbor. So, as we started to thread our way over to the bridge to Alki (which also isn’t the most pedestrian-friendly), a short stop at Burger King to use the restroom turned into more-or-less of an insurrection. A quick check of the map and Yelp indicated that SoDo isn’t exactly a food mecca, either. But then we noticed one place on the list that had a lot of good reviews: Schooner Exact Brewing. And the single mention of “beer” made it official, Schooner Exact, at approximately 21 miles into the route, became our new, official destination.

Starting with one of my trips to Seattle more than 20 years ago, I had noticed that the Seattle area has a distinct love of fish and chips, with the region having more fish and chips joints that I’m accustomed to, even for a fairly large area. Indeed, I’ve remembered more than a few trips out for fish and chips at Spud Fish N’ Chips after having beers with college friends in Kirkland, and even having more than one person in Alki get in an argument over which of the two Alki establishment (another of the Spud locations, or Sunfish just down the way) was the One and True[tm] place for fish and chips. Seeing that our Death March route had us looping around Green Lake in northern Seattle, it seemed almost mandatory that we at least stop by for a quick mid-day snack (at this point, we were right about the nominal halfway point). (And, confession time: we had originally planned to finish at Sunfish for comparison, but we got behind schedule and didn’t make it out there).

(Closed) One of the challenges of planning one of my “Death March” 20+ mile hikes through is city is figuring out a route of the right length. Some cities (like New York) this is pretty easy, but for the more compact cities (like Boston) this often means taking some interesting loops through the city. In the case of Seattle, I wanted to do a basic “S” curve, starting near the center of Seattle, looping up through University of Washington to Phinney Heights, down through Downtown to Georgetown, and over to Alki Beach (we didn’t quite make it that far…). The map had a nice, fairly intuitive route if I started from Volunteer Park, but looking over the map, Volunteer Park and the surrounding part of Capitol Hill is still strongly residential. But I did notice one place that had fairly consistently good reviews: Volunteer Park Cafe.

One of the things I enjoy about visiting more metropolitan areas than my own is seeing the food fads that show up in particular cities. Like the sudden resurgence in fruit juice in 2013, or 2015’s bone broth craze, or the still-with-us circa 2005 cupcake craze (we’re past Peak Cupcake, but there are still a lot more cupcake places about). In Seattle, one of the 2016 trends was poke: the Hawaiian dish made from cubed, raw, marinated fish served over a bed of rice with a selection of toppings like garlic, the infamous “krab stick”, edamame, ginger, and various seaweed products. It’s actually a dish I rather enjoy (or, more usually, the closely related Japanese-inspired donburi, which is more common out my way). But it was definitely one of the current food trends in Seattle, since during our march we saw no fewer than a dozen places advertising their poke. And there were few better examples of the craze than the 45th Stop N Shop Deli.