One hour. A flicker to some, forever to others. For us, a fantastic opportunity to get our juices flowing at Café Presse. The front room is fun, but we like the elbow room and more relaxed atmosphere of the tables in the back. We also appreciate the helpful and unrushed service. One hour is what you’ll wait upon placing your order for the famed roasted chicken. Time for us to kick back with our demi-pichet......

We were introduced to In the Bowl: Vegetarian Noodle Bistro on Capitol Hill a few days ago and have been planning our return ever since. New (to us anyway, apparently it's been around since at least February), In the Bowl is a welcome addition to the quick, cheap Asian-fare genre on The Hill. A bonus: It's all-veggie and every meal comes with Black Rice Pudding for dessert. The restaurant is small, with an atmosphere reminiscent......

Look up the definition of “hot-to-trot” and you’ll find two sets of meanings: (1) willing and eager and (2) sexually exciting. To us, hot pot is both. All the recent hot pot talk on food message boards and in the local and national newspapers tempted us to do a turkey trot to Seven Stars Pepper (at 12th and Jackson, our favorite food corner in Seattle) on Thanksgiving Day – thankful to the Chinese for having......

As a soukous band plays and the audience noshes on couscous, red rice, and chicken, all doused with a hearty amount of spicy peanut sauce, a man sways to the music while carrying a fluorescent light to the center of the floor. We whisper to our companion for the evening, "I think it's started." Festival of Lies is the powerful Seattle debut of Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula and his company Les Studios Kabako. The......

Baby, it’s getting cold outside. Not that we need that excuse, but the nip in the air has us craving something volcanic. Time for some soon-doo-boo chigae. Head north on 99, and you’ll start hitting some Korean restaurants at the upper reaches of the city limits. Many are mediocre, while one is great for grilled meats, but continue on to our prime pick for a special soup that’ll cure the winter blues. Destination: Hoosoonyi, where......

This fall we are combining our love of the football and our dream of learning to cook. On Sunday morning, following a trip to a local farmer’s market/major supermarket chain, we will be preparing a meal from the city of the Seahawks opponent. Then at halftime we will throw our badly burned hands in the air and make hot dogs. Seahawks vs. Toasted Ravioli Preview Honestly not much to say about this week’s meal. Very......

Our country is in restaurant danger. In many parts of America, pizza is Pizza Hut, Mexican food is Taco Bell, and chicken is Kentucky-fried. YUM. That’s not praise, but the stock symbol of Tricon Global Restaurants, which represents that trio and is trying to reintroduce Taco Bell into Mexico after failure the first time. (Will renaming the tacos “tacostadas” and adding French fries to the menu add to the Americana appeal?) For many Americans, cheesecake......

We're not very strong on commas -- maybe that should be "Our Post About Lunch, With Elizabeth Hurley"? Oh well! We had the chicken ciabatta ($9.95) at the Nordstrom's Grill. That's the lunch part. Wait, we had a cup of decaf, too. On our way in, we noticed all these people standing around the cosmetics department, not moving, which annoyed us because we were a little hypoglycemic and they were between us and our food.......

Last night, we trekked over to Madison Market to get our favorite toothpaste. (Yes, it is strange to like a toothpaste enough to go out of our way for it, but the stuff widely available does not make us want to stick it in our mouth and brush away.) The store is always insanely packed, and we dread going there because the lines, oh the lines. But yesterday found the store a relative ghost town,......

(This fall we are combining our love of the football and our dream of learning to cook. On Sunday morning, following a trip to a local farmer’s market/major supermarket chain, we will be preparing a meal from the city of the Seahawks opponent. Then at halftime we will throw our badly burned hands in the air and make hot dogs.) Seahawks vs. General Tso's Chicken preview. As we wandered the aisles of Safeway shoplifting the......

(This fall we are combining our love of the football and our dream of learning to cook. On Sunday morning, following a trip to a local farmer’s market/major supermarket chain, we will be preparing a meal from the city of the Seahawks opponent. Then at halftime we will throw our badly burned hands in the air and make hot dogs.) Sunday's NFC West showdown in San Francisco leads to many culinary possibilities. The best burritos......

(This season we are combining our love of the football and our dream of learning to cook. On Sunday morning, following a trip to a local farmer’s market/major supermarket chain, we will be preparing a meal from the city of the Seahawks opponent. Then at halftime we will throw our badly burned hands in the air and make hot dogs.) Seahawks vs. Cincinnati Chili preview. Staring at the list of spices we felt a bit......

North of Seattle, in Lynnwood, is the restaurant Kirirom. Lurking low in the shadows of the big box stores, the chain restaurants, and the Alderwood Mall, Kirirom means “mountain of joy” and is a national park in Cambodia. Perusing the picturesque menu, we really wanted to order the Chocolate Rice Soup, but Seattlest’s dining companions just weren’t biting on it. Guess they don’t see the humor in calling organ meats “chocolate.” We’re still not sure......

Chicken broth-based soups are some of the ultimate comfort foods, and are especially good when sick. We love them all, from matzo ball soup (a.k.a. “Jewish penicillin”) to tortilla soup to good ol’ Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup (or, better yet, Chicken & Stars – our childhood favorite, though we shudder to think about the sodium content). Last week, Dishin’ lamented the lack of good xiao long bao in Seattle. This week, we decided to go......

Our cooking habits this summer have followed a peculiar pattern. First we go the farmer’s market when ravenous (always a bad idea), then we impulse-buy produce, and finally at home we wonder: what sort of a meal could we possibly fashion out the eclectic collection of ingredients now sprawled out all over our kitchen? The resulting meals are multi-course oddities in which we pit our desire to eat well-prepared food against blinding hunger. We start......

Back in Emeril's pre-Katrina heyday, chefs and serious foodies used to dismiss it as the Bam! network. Now it's disdained as All-Rachael, All-The-Time. You know, the Food Network, not about cooking so much as lifestyle (travel, glitz), weaponry (knife-wielding, cake-frosting) and tours of candy factories. Deliberate programming choices, made to draw viewers too sedate for Housewives and too chicken for Survivor. But step-by-step instructions on how to boil water can only fill so many......

Seattlest isn’t really a discriminating diner. We don’t have a sophisticated palate. We don’t demand impeccable service. If we get what we order, the food is reasonably priced and tasty, and the wait staff leans friendly, we’re content. We do, however, expect near-perfection from new restaurants. And fair, unbiased criticism from those who evaluate them. After reading a “first look” review of new Ballard eatery Austin Cantina, and subsequently eating there Saturday night with our......

Quoting the Letters of Transit, er, email:Casablanca Menu Begins Starting August 1st the diverse delicacies of Moroccan cuisine will be showcased at Coastal Kitchen. Come visit us as the decorations go up and you are transported to the famous romantic hideaway. So, accompanied by friends who've long lived in Morocco, we drop by. Uh-oh. Decorations, good. Romantic hideway, not so much. Diverse delicacies, no way. Of all the gin joints in the world, we've walked......

"I hate 'guessing' trivia," a friend of ours said yesterday. "I don't care if we don't know the answer. But there has to be at least a nonzero chance that some applied consideration will get the team within spitting distance of it." He was speaking about another quiz he'd been to, but by the end of the quiz at Fremont's George & Dragon pub we were chuckling wryly at his foresight. Applied consideration left......

We'd just polished off the Poulet rôti à votre commande, potage aux légumes de printemps (“Chicken roasted to order, on a celery-scallion-sultana ragout and salt-roasted fingerling potatoes”) at Le Pichet ($34, serves two, allow an hour for the roasting) and life seemed particularly pleasant, generous, abundant. There was plenty of daylight still and we realized we hadn't been to Zig Zag to see Ben in forever, so we set off, past Victor Steinbrueck Park and......

Over in Ballard, Archie McPhee sells a cheerful Lunch Lady action figure for $9.95. Tell the disgruntled lunch ladies in Chicago, who are demanding respect from a school system that pays them peanuts (well, $10.46 an hour) and expects them to serve slop to thousands of kids. "We're looking at each other like, 'I wouldn't eat that.' We wouldn't give our kid that at home," one lunch lady told the Chicago Sun-Times. No wonder that......

All across the Ist-A-Verse (or at least the American parts thereof), writers and editors are in the midst of enjoying their three-day weekend. But after the week we've all had, we feel like the break is not only needed, but deserved. Just look at everything we've been doing! Gothamist headed into the Memorial Day weekend with a number of tasks accomplished. They worried about Long Islanders giving New Yorkers a bad name. They tried......

Yes, technically it’s spring, but here in Seattle temperatures are still bouncing from arctic to downright balmy and almost everyone we know (including yours truly) is sick, so we’re going out on a limb and declaring Seattle safely inside the Chicken Soup Zone. Enough has been said about chicken soup’s use as a tonic for what ails you, so we don’t feel the need to rehash it here. Chicken soup makes you feel better.......

Are you looking for the finest pasta on the Eastside? How about some real, old country eggplant parm or chicken picatta? Kirkland boasts a trio of restaurants that proudly fly the green, white, and red flag. But which is best you may ask? Over the course of the next three weeks the Seattlest will sample the best of all three Italian-themed restaurants located in the heart of downtown Kirkland : Mama Lucia's, Ristorante Paradiso, and......

Stems. Leaves. Flowers. In the Asian market, the sea of green can be a tough section of store to navigate. You’ll see some stuff you recognize, and sniff some, too. But some herbs will be new, yet well worth exploring. One of our favorites – something that first drew us to Thai cooking – is Thai basil. This is not the basil you use to make pesto. Thai basil, with its lush green leaves and......

BoingBoing has a post up today about homeowner holdouts: those citizens who refuse to sell their property to whatever development happens to be swallowing their neighborhood. Sometimes it's a mall and you end up with a lone house in the middle of a suburban parking prairie, sometimes it's a highway or a block-sized skyscraper--there are lots of examples in the BoingBoing post from all over the place, but two come courtesy of our area. First......

Yelpers give it 4 out of 5 stars. The Accidental Hedonist says: "If you're a sandwich fiend, you can do no better than here." The Stranger suggests you get drunk and go (but what else is new). We'll never forget the first time we visited Baguette Box on Capitol Hill -- it was either cloudy or sunny or rainy and it was around lunchtime a year or two ago, we recall every detail. We'd......

MUSIC: The L.A.B. at Seattle Drum School hosts a birthday party for the wife of one of the dudes in Chicken Starship. It's all-ages, so there's no booze, but there will be birthday cake. Considering John Moe's in the band and the entrance fee go towards funding the school, we'll give the lack of alcohol a pass. 7pm // 12510 15th Ave NE // $5 FESTIVAL: Comedy, variety, burlesque, and vaudeville rule in Fremont......

The Ides of March is nearly upon us and we just realized that we've made no progress on one of our new year resolutions. We had promised ourselves and the universe that we would compensate for our disappointed idealism and deep-rooted complaintive nature by volunteering some time each month for a good cause. Sitting for an hour at an Obama for President rally doesn't quite fulfill the requirement. The local affiliate of the Hands On......

Seattlest and Mrs. Seattlest have been getting take out on Friday nights at Chantanee Family Thai Restaurant in Bellevue for almost 3 years and have found no better Thai restaurant on the Eastside. From time to time, we eschew the styrofoam containers and eat our meal in the gold and purple themed interior. The service? Efficient and friendly. Mrs. Seattlest is the more adventurous of our duo and has eaten her way around most of......