COVER STORY
We start our tour a colourful alleyway where the walls are covered in what appears to be abstract art but is, in fact, thousands of pieces of chewed gum stuck to the walls (not that appetising). Our
first official stop is for mini maple bacon doughnuts — the most popular flavour created by the Daily Dozen Doughnut Company. And from here on it’s a non-stop feast that includes Beecher’s Handmade Cheese Cafe, where we tuck into the deliciously creamy macaroni and cheese, and scrummy Breadzel rolls made of heirloom grain flour, Beecher’s cheese, garlic and herbs.
Next stop is Pike Place Chowder. Its world-famous-in-Seattle signature dish is made with seafood sourced from the market. It’s thick, creamy and you can see why people queue to get their fix. From here it’s a short walk to the Tom Douglas Rub With Love Shack, where the menu includes clam chowder (what Seattle eatery doesn’t?), smokey barbecue chicken and wild salmon burgers. Tom Douglas is a local food hero and the force behind 13 restaurants and a multitude of cookbooks. Before our tour comes to an end we squeeze in a visit to Piroshky, Piroshky — where there is another queue out the door to try their Russian pastries. Sweet or savoury? I’ll take both, thank you very much.
Brunch or die
Okay, so if you’re in Seattle and worrying that you’re not getting enough to eat (unlikely), Saltys (saltys.com/seattle )is the place to go. This award-winning (year after year, apparently) seaside restaurant is particularly famous for its killer weekend buffet brunches. You name it, they’ve got it: Pacific Northwest Dungeness crab, Alaskan snow crab legs, peel-and-eat Gulf white prawns, Puget Sound clam and mussels, seafood chowder, Steelhead lox, salt-crusted salmon . . . and that’s just the seafood section. There’s also the salad section and then bread, hot meat dishes, cold meat dishes, pastries, pasta, cookies, cakes, waffles, pancakes . . . And that’s not the half of it. With big booths and views of the harbour, this place is a must.
Capital of cool
No visit to Seattle is complete without spending some time hanging out around hipster Capitol Hill. Here the streets are lined with boutiques. Totokaelo (totokaelo.com) is a must with its curated mix of designer fashion and ceramics; indie stores, record shops (Everyday Music everydaymusic.com is excellent for old vinyl), book stores (the brilliant Elliot Bay Book Co. with creaky floorboards, and comfy leather armchairs), gay bars, karaoke bars, cat cafes, fancy restaurants, the list goes on. Posters advertising up-coming gigs are splashed on street corners, you’ll find a statue of Jimi Hendrix (Seattle’s electric guitar god), while kids shoot hoops and skateboard in the parks.
Our barcrawl started at The Redhook brewlab (redhook.com) housed in the old brick Pike Motorworks Building. Every punter here is key to the development of the brewery’s beer as the bar serves as a testing ground. There are 16 taps of rotating small-batch beers, all brewed on site. If something's a success it will go into wider production. We’re given a tour by head brewer Nick Crandall — who talks us through the rotating array of house IPAs — before we get to work tasting. This is accompanied by a steady flow of impressive bar food, including fried chicken, tacos and burgers.
The night rolls on and it is appropriate that we find ourselves in the garden bar of Linda’s Tavern (lindastavern.com) where, apparently, a certain Seattle rock star was last seen in public before he died, and one of the few remaining bars in the area from the grunge era of the early 1990s. There’s not a checked shirt in sight but the music is good and the company even better.