Seattle's Top Two

Wait, don't get your hopes up, it's not a replay of Quincy Pondexter, has nothing to do with March Madness. It's Seattle's top two independent restaurants. Can you guess? Number one, duh, is Sky City at the Space Needle, which serves over 250,000 meals a year at an average of $60 per, for a gross of $14 million. In national terms, that puts the Needle in 33rd place, right behind Chops Lobster Bar in Atlanta, Georgia. The Top 100 list, compiled by trade mag Restaurants & Institutions, is weighted heavily to Noo Yawk and Vegas, the country's biggest markets for big spenders. (Number one in the country, in case you were wondering, is Tao Las Vegas, which served 600,000 meals and took in a cool $60 million. Old Ebbett Grill in DC served a million meals, on the other hand, and only took in $24 mill; two huge Bavarian joints in Frankenmuth, Michigan, for their part, served roughly the same number of diners apiece, but the average ticket was under $15, so no big deal.) We promised you two, so here's the second Washington entry in the top 100: Salty's on Alki, described admiringly in these very columns some months back, where 200,000 locals and visitors spent about $50 apiece in 2009.

Now the point of these numbers is grim: these are the most efficiently run restaurants in the country, fine-tuned and professionally managed. And their gross sales were down a collective ten percent from 2008. Not good news, and it explains all the plummeting prices, give-away happy hours (synonym for cheap drinks and bad food) and stretched staffing at your neigborhood bistro. When the big boys are in trouble, everybody suffers.