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Seattle is a rather magical metropolis.
Or at least it is when it’s sunny, and when you rent a pad that overlooks almost everything, and when you’ve secured reservations at some of the top tables in town. It doesn’t hurt to have tickets to a sporting match in this sporty city, but to mostly rely on should-do plans that are softly scheduled rather than set-in-stone, leaving you nimble to adjust and stay stress-free.
This was the skeleton of my experience last weekend, the latest in a long-running series of annual adventures with close childhood friends known affectionately as KIA, for “Keep It Awesome.” Longtime Full Belly Filers will recall previous tales, from New York City back in 2012 (prior to its KIA christening) and our COVID-era jaunt to Palm Springs to foraging in Asheville (prior to their hurricane), culture-consuming in Mexico City, and sticking closer to home last year with some Avila Beach exploration.
The throughline — other than an appreciation for long friendships and the sort of familiar ease and constant hilarity that they provide — is that we tend to eat and drink more than is medically advisable, even though a couple of our comrades are rather esteemed medical doctors. We kept up such behavior during our Seattle sojourn, although as we all approach 50 years of age, we do wind up at home much earlier than usual, and often, but not always, in bed at relatively reasonable times.
By the time flights were booked, there were only four of us this year, which made the mansion we rented in East Queen Anne a bit more expensive per person than originally predicted. But with a balcony overlooking Lake Union and views that stretched from downtown and Mount Rainier to the U of Washington and Mount Baker, we quickly made peace with the price. Even my friend Karin (Lee) Angelo — a UCSB grad and former Indy staffer who’s lived in Seattle for about 20 years now — seemed pretty stunned by the setting.
As 49er fans, we were mildly perturbed by the ridiculous wealth of Seahawks gear in the theater room downstairs, but failed to bring our own memorabilia to purify the space. The Niners’ win over the Seachickens the Sunday before was salve enough, and seeing them lose again on TV to the Broncos while we were there wasn’t bad either. (The two of us who are Giants fans also relished the Dodgers being swept as we watched on the small kitchen screen.)
Beyond the home itself, the Queen Anne neighborhood impressed immediately. We frequently walked down its leafy blocks where, yes, Queen Anne–style homes perched over fluorescently blooming Japanese maples and end-of-season heirloom tomatoes. Halloween decorations lingered in many yards all the way to the small downtown strip, where we stopped twice at the Hilltop Ale House and shopped for snacks at Safeway and bottles at the Legacy Wine Co.
Despite its rather residential feel, Queen Anne is a very central part of Seattle. We walked from there (downhill, thankfully) to the Museum of Pop Culture, which sits at the base of the Space Needle. MOPOP is very much worth a couple of hours, so long as you like playing instruments and video games, or diving into sci-fi and horror films, or getting a crash course in the history of African-American music.
From there, we continued walking all the way to Pike Place Market, where salmon and other finned fish do indeed soar through the air. We did opt for an Uber back uphill to Queen Anne, mainly because we picked up Dungeness crab, two whole rockfish, and bags of produce to cook that night. Our legs were also extra beat because we scoured Pike’s entire place — a labyrinth of stairs and shops and more stairs and shops of all sorts — in search of a restaurant called Matt’s in the Market, which turned out to be across the street and around the corner after all. The bartender suggested Matt’s “at” the Market may be more accurate, and I agreed while sipping on a Parisian spritz, trying to share deviled eggs, and dumping hot sauce all over my fishwich.
That evening’s menu was a roasted corn chowder with crab, masterminded by our doc friend who came all the way from Virginia, and the two big fish, cooked whole on the grill. The chowder turned out perfect, while the rockfish, which were my charge, proved a little more difficult to get right, requiring a bit of post-grill frying to finish off. We ended that evening in the theater, watching Eastern Promises.
Seattle’s restaurant scene seems to be at peak buzz right now, combining the fine dining flare of Chicago and New York with the eclectic ethnic availability of Los Angeles and San Francisco. The cuisine was repeatedly mind-opening in its diversity of both approach and ingredients, yet never lost sight of staying delicious. The service was genuinely kind and attentive, feeling more excited than obliged.
Our first taste was at Atoma, where cocktail illustrations and backstories spread across the pages of their own comic book-like menu. It’s very cheffy yet still homey, being inside of an old Craftsman. The menu was the right size to order a bit of almost everything, like mortadella dripped across a skewer with burnt honey and calabrian chile, lamb tartare with green harissa and sesame lavash, and pork chop with geoduck sambal.
Maybe my favorite meal, in part because it was more of a casual lunch after a long walk, was at Taurus Ox in a neighborhood called Stevens, which rivaled Queen Anne’s quaintness quotient. We’d just checked out the rare plants inside the Volunteer Park Conservatory, the graves of Bruce and Brandon Lee at the aptly named Lake View Cemetery, and the Black Sun sculpture by Isamu Noguchi in which you can center the Space Needle many miles away. Taurus Ox’s Laotian cuisine completed the afternoon, being just familiar enough to Vietnamese and Thai cuisine to be comforting, but with its own unique spin to feel educational.
That night, after a quick drink at Good Grief in the more urban-leaning Ballard area, we sat for our last fancier meal of the trip at Hamdi, which sits toward the edge of the adjacent Fremont neighborhood. The menu is traditionally Turkish in inspiration, thanks to owner Berk Guidal’s Istanbul upbringing. But the execution is at the highest levels of contemporary global cooking, for Guidal’s resume includes Café Boulud, Eleven Madison Park, and SingleThread while co-owner/GM Katrina Shult helped open SingleThread after working at The French Laundry.
But this is not a slow-paced, white-tablecloth experience. Rather, the food comes out fast and furious, and the wine is priced to drink, especially the Turkish bottles. We went through all manner of dishes, from mezze dips to the pide, which is somewhere between pizza and khachapuri. The dry-aged ribeye sat atop a velvety pepper puree and the chicken thigh floated on foam, but “The Kebap” may have stolen the show.
“My wife is Persian,” said one of the doctors, “but this is the best kebab I’ve ever had.”
Our last full day started with a frittata by me, then involved more wandering before it was time to head toward Pioneer Square to get ready for the Sounders game. Seattle’s soccer fans march together from that area — technically, they walk from Occidental Square — but we wound up at Sluggers, a massive and seriously packed bar just a block from Lumen Field. It was not a great meal, but was just what we needed.
We had solid midfield seats — maybe too close to the field? — for the game against CF Montreal, which the Sounders were supposed to win easily. Instead, they wound up in a 1-1 tie, without much action to speak of. The slow walk away from Lumen felt much more like a march, albeit one with fans who were disappointed rather than fired up.
We finished our last night doing what we’ve done since high school: drinking whatever we could find, cooking up snacks from leftovers, talking both utter bullshit about each other and real-world truths about our lives. Career moves, money stress, house renovations, ailing joints, kid issues — they’re always all on the table. If only we could sit at that table together more often than once a year.
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