Seattle’s evolving food scene

Within an hour of landing at Seattle’s Sea-Tac airport, I’m standing in front of the counter at Piroshky Piroshky, the Russian pastry shop in Pike Place Market I’ve been dreaming of since my last visit to the city a decade ago. I order a hot potato and cheese bun just out of the oven and head across the street to a perch overlooking Puget Sound, alongside other hungry people devouring various market vendor delights.

I immediately burn my tongue on the delicious but scalding shredded potato hidden inside the crescentshaped roll, but after that first impatient bite, I let my piroshki cool and stop to take in the scene around the market.

It’s a Wednesday afternoon in early spring — not exactly high tourist season — but the street is full of people. I’ve come to Seattle to attend Taste Washington, the largest single-region food and wine festival in the U.S., which returned for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic in mid-March. But I couldn’t resist the siren call of the market, making it my first stop.

There are obvious out-of-towners like myself, well-heeled suburbanites, crusty punk rock kids, and laidback locals out with small dogs, all enjoying cuisines from all over the world. I can’t help but muse that America would be a very different country if more of it looked like Pike Place Market.

Here in Seattle, like everywhere else, food tells a story. This is a city of contrasts — it’s shinier and more moneyed than nearby Portland, thanks to the presence of big tech firms like Amazon and Microsoft, but also coloured with a palpable Pacific Northwest grit. Grunge may have died everywhere else in the late ’90s, but its ethos is still very much alive in Seattle. In the food and drink scene, you’ve got genuinely eccentric eateries throughout the city, along with ritzy fine dining restaurants rivalling those in any major North American city.

There’s no better illustration of this than Pike Place Market, Seattle’s biggest tourist attraction, with the possible exceptions of the Space Needle and professional sports venues (just try to find a downtown hotel room when the Blue Jays are in town). The 115year-old market is a nine-acre site boasting 500 businesses, five onsite social services, including a seniors’ centre and a food bank, and low-income housing for 450 residents. Officially, the market encompasses multiple city blocks, in addition to the actual market building.

Miraculously, Pike Place has defied gentrification without falling into dilapidation. There are upscale spots like the historic Virginia Inn, which opened in 1903 as a skid-row watering hole and now operates as a charming bistro specializing in sustainable seafood; a charming, Spanish-inspired cocktails ’n’ tapas tavern called JarrBar; and rows of posh shops selling fine cheeses and artisanal popcorn.

But the heart of the market is its oddities, like the achingly oldschool Athenian Seafood Restaurant, and lower levels full of dusty rummage shops, along with generations-old stalls selling produce and, most famously, fresh fish. Yes, there is a Starbucks, but only because it’s the very first location, allowing it to skirt the market’s strict no-chains rule.

“I couldn’t create this bar anywhere else,” says Bryan Jarr, a sixth-generation Seattleite and the proprietor of JarrBar. Looking at his collection of eclectic memorabilia and the chorizo-garnished martini made with piparra pepper brine in front of me, I’m inclined to agree.

As all-encompassing as Pike Place is, there’s a lot of Seattle to explore beyond the market. Fine dining in the city predates the tech boom: Canlis, Seattle’s swishest restaurant — known for its traditional service, house pianist, beautifully stocked wine cellar, and an Asian fusion-inspired prix fixe menu that rings in at $165 (U.S.) per guest — first opened its doors in 1950. But even this grandaddy of Seattle society is unmistakably quirky.

The sprawling waterside restaurant offers its most intimate regulars personalized wine glasses, with the shape of the stemware morphing over the past seven decades (the original glass, awarded to “Riley,” is now used by that patron’s grandchildren). Also, each night one lucky party is led through the maze of back rooms to access a perch on the building’s roof to enjoy a bonus course in front of a roaring fire pit and a spectacular view of Union Lake.

Tomo, located about 20 minutes south of downtown in the White Centre area, is a product of Canlis’s considerable influence. James Beard Award-winning chef-owner Brady Ishiwata Williams was the chef at Canlis for several years before opening this sparse, tastingmenu-only restaurant in 2021. (An à la carte snack menu is also available at the bar and on the patio for walk-ins only.)

It’s the kind of no-rules-apply restaurant in vogue these days, with its informal dining room and wildly experimental dishes influenced by seasonal ingredients and the chef’s personal background. The fivecourse dinner menu, $86 per guest, changes constantly, but you might experience dishes like Japanese sweet potato served with kimchi and milk buns; spot prawns with grenobloise sauce and salsify; and Tomo’s signature kakigori, a loaf of Japanese-style shaved ice augmented with rotating flavours such as yuzu, coffee and vanilla.

Naturally, a rich selection of Washington wine is available at Canlis, Tomo and like-minded restaurants. While Washington wines aren’t as well-known to Canadians as those from neighbouring Oregon, the Washington wine industry is the second largest in the U.S., behind only California, with over 1,000 wineries, including many interesting small producers rarely seen outside the state.

As unassumingly elegant and spendy as Tomo may be, it proudly sits next door to a sketchy adult video store — since the restaurant doesn’t have a sign, customers are instructed to look for Taboo Video to find it.

It’s also down the street from the Southgate Roller Rink, a legitimate neighbourhood dive bar with a busy karaoke room in the front and a relic of a roller rink in the back. It’s equally popular with ultracool and shockingly proficient skaters, neighbourhood types looking for a drink, and some genuinely eccentric clientele. Similar scenes play out at bars back in the city centre, like the grimy, clown-themed pinball bar Shorty’s, which also carries an oddly appealing vibe that feels authentically Seattle.

Similarly themed bars would come off as self-consciously hipster almost anywhere else, but here they feel organically unique and full of potential for authentic human interaction — ironic from the city that invented the monoculture of Starbucks and Amazon, but that’s part of Seattle’s contradictory nature.

Like the scene at the market, these bars are full of colourful characters and a wide swath of patrons looking to keep things real, without getting too wrapped up in the trappings of pretentious restaurant and cocktail bar culture.

This in turn keeps the higher-end places orbiting a little closer to the Earth, knowing that even the city’s most celebrated tech execs and millionaire rock stars may be dining at Canlis one night, but standing in line at the regional Dick’s Drive-In for cheap burgers the next. Because if you don’t explore and celebrate both ends of the high- and lowbrow experience, you’ll miss the best of what it means to be in Seattle.