What better time to talk about beer and food than with the holidays coming up? We enjoy wine with a good meal just as much as everyone else, but we hate the perception that beer should not be paired with anything except pizza. Unless you are still drinking that macro crap, you can enjoy beer with a wide variety of food. This Seattlest is currently reading "The Brewmaster's Table", written by Garrett Oliver, the......

We really hesitate to head out for curry, as it’s a staple in our cooking repertoire – sort of our emergency food. But when we found ourselves at Racha recently, we decided to give the exotic sounding Jungle Curry a try. It’s not that it was bad… we just don’t get it. A small sampling of vegetables along with some slices of pork (our choice of meat) cooked in a curry paste for $12.50. (Prawns......

So, the Seattle P-I restaurant critic writes that "Safeco's got some of the worst food in the major leagues." That statement struck a nerve with this Seattlest, as we tend to think that Safeco has some of the best food in MLB parks. The variety and quality of food you can get at Safeco just cannot be matched by very many stadiums around the country. Just a sample of what you can get:Dixie's BBQ -......

Having never been to the Triple Door, we did a 'lil looky-loo on the series of tubes that is the internets. The place seemed a little more hoity-toity than we were used to, with its plush half-moon booths and candle-lit tables. Reluctantly, we ditched the jeans we'd worn for three days and dappered up a bit. Upon arrival at the Triple Door, we're greeted by a lovely hostess who shows us to our table,......

Unopened moving boxes. Furniture in temporary locations. No clue where the closest pizza, Thai, or Indian delivery places are. All signs that even though we've moved all of our possessions from Wedgwood to Rainier Beach, Seattlest is still in the liminal period between our North Seattleite and South Seattleite identities. One of the many things long-time Rainier Valley residents have dealt with that we're learning: the MLK Way light rail construction. In the abstract, when......

Since our last Uwajiwhat focused on coconut milk, it seems appropriate to address the other staple in our Thai pantry: curry paste. And the best of the bunch is again Mae Ploy. Purists might insist on pounding out their own paste, but Mae Ploy provides a shortcut that we welcome wholeheartedly. (Kasma Loha Unchit, our Thai cooking guru, also endorses it.) Mae Ploy offers several flavors, including red, yellow, Panang and Massaman (a.k.a. Matsaman), but......

Sometimes it seems like every Seattle street corner has teriyaki, Tully’s, or a Thai restaurant. Everyone’s got a favorite place for Thai food (ours are actually in Issaquah and Tukwila), though we prefer to cook and eat it at home. Thai cooking is fairly easy once you get the hang of it. One of the staples—used in soups, curries, stir-fries, drinks and desserts—is coconut milk. Sure, it’s simple to make on your own, as Mark......

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......

As usual, Seattlest has donuts on our mind. Since we are compelled to endure that barbaric time of day known in some parts of the world as morning, we can't help but have our thoughts wander toward more pleasant morning-related topics. It's not just us, however; our colleague-ists have been thinking about them too. Last week, Chicagoist wrote of a devious, healthy plot on the part of Krispy Kreme. Rightfully, they retorted with a hearty,......

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......

When we found that Gorditos was getting out of the lukewarm kitchen that is Queen Anne hill’s restaurant business, we started keeping tabs, via a biweekly stroll, on the eateries closing (and, less frequently, opening) in the neighborhood. That wasn’t often enough. Down went Banjara. Firefly croaked, but from its chrysalis came the more expensive, presumably more flavorful Sorrentino. Pete’s Pizza was shuttered—long live the Calzone King. On last pass, Q’s window still bore a......

It's a huge menu, somewhere between "too many notes" and "there's got to be a pony in there somewhere." Chef Bruce Dillon, most recently in Florida, offers an almost overwhelming panoply of Indian, Chinese, Thai, Indonesian, Cuban, and Carribbean flavors at the soon-to-open Marazul. Perched atop Whole Foods, adjacent to the Pan Pacific Hotel, the restaurant's 170 indoor seats focus inward on a wood-and-copper décor that suggests palm trees and a whiff of the exotic.......

What in the world is that? And just what do I do with it? If you’ve ever walked down a grocery aisle and wondered those things, you’re now in luck. Welcome to Uwajiwhat. With a focus primarily on Asian food, we where going to call it Viet What (Wah-t?), but Uwajiwhat seems, well, bigger and better. We’ll start simple, but before too long we’ll work our way to wacky. First up: Thai eggplants. These golf......

These pictures have a distinct "Usual Suspects" air about them, like something's about to happen and it's going to involve automatic weapons fire and European accents with a few mutants or extraterrestrials on the side. Harbor Island probably isn't really as exciting as all that. It's probably just a couple of guys from Shanghai drinking coffee, smoking a million cigarettes and walking around, which is still oddly compelling when you put it in the......

Jagshemash! Borat is a hit. It's getting rave reviews, grossing millions, and definitely the most quotable thing we've seen in ages. But Borat seems to have missed most of the -ist cities, and we were all wondering how the film would have been different if he'd made his way around the world on the -ist tour. In Shanghai, Borat would be observing Inane Learnings of Penis Photos for Make Benefit Glorious Flat World of......

How bad is it? So bad that anybody, anybody, can open a storefront on First or Second; within an hour it will be filled with dozens of under-30 bodies. Cute, pulsating, throbbing 20-somethings. They come in all shades; the females invariably petite, wide-eyed, smartly dressed, the males chunkier, slovenly, indifferent. They sip brightly colored cocktails and pick at whatever the kitchen has delivered. (It could be grilled garbage, for they seem to care.) No pleasure,......

If you haven't already checked out Black Bottle (a "gastro-tavern") at 1st and Vine in Belltown, and you're into sharing great food but aren't into spending a fortune, it's about time. Truth be told, we are so not cool enough to hang out there, but the food is excellent, so we just don't care. Besides, someone has to fill the tables at 6pm so the place looks full for when the real wine bar crowd......

Our day started early at the KEXP Backyard stage where the Mountlake Terrace trio, Mon Frere, woke us up, got us moving, fed us our delicious brunch of new wave keyboard and guitar anthems. We headed straight there – hadn’t even had our coffee yet, still a bit bleary-eyed from the night before. But this seemed the way to go. Jump right in. Don’t tip-toe into the lake like a pussy. Just get in......

Lo and behold, we love lotus! This mud-loving water plant found in ponds, flooded fields, lagoons and the like in Vietnam is the central figure in Lotus Root Salad. And we like it nowhere better than Green Leaf (418 Eighth Avenue South)—one of the best new restaurants to open in Seattle in the past year. Everything we've tried on Green Leaf's menu has been a winner. If you’re not sure what to order, ask the......

What a workload, what a record! For close to ten years, 3,500 nights in a row, the barkeeps at Tini Bigs have been shaking, stirring & pouring. Not to mention researching, developing & testing, testing, testing. (Who can say as much? 13 Coins and Denny's, those always-open stalwarts, don't have the same reputation for innovative drinks, to say the least.) To celebrate, owner Keith Robbins dropped the price of libations to $3.50...for a couple......

This has been a rough week for your -ist pals, though you wouldn't know it from the great posts all over the network. Plagued with server problems, our tech team (led by the great Neil Epstein) toiled around the clock to solve the glitches as they arose. Seriously, we've said, typed, and thought the phrase "server problems" more in the past week than we have for the last 35 years combined. Why not say......

Pho. Take a look at the sign, and the Vietnamese text looks like it’s asking you questions: Want a piece of me? Can you even pronounce me? (Try “fuh”.) This beef noodle soup is the perfect remedy for fighting a cold, a depleted wallet, or the winter blues. And our favorite place to get it is Pho Than Brothers. There are a few in the area (the cracked vinyl seats at the University Ave location......

There was a time about a year ago, when we went to dinner at the Oasis Cafe for the first time, and, after receiving average food and abominable service, we vowed never to go there again. Fast forward to last night: we were hungry for sushi, while our companion for the evening was hungry for Thai. So we figured, what the hell, we'd give that pan-Asian Oasis another try. This time around, the food was......

The Seattle Town Hall is officially On Notice, for having the Elizabeth Kolbert Science Series lecture in the basement. Far too many people were interested in her lecture based on her climate change writing--we were third in line when they locked the doors and turned us away, and the line was still snaking around the corner. They're not quite Dead to Me, because Seattle Channel is filming Kolbert's talk, and will broadcast it online sometime......

Seattlest had never been to the O Lounge until last weekend, and, given the service there, we may or may not return in the forseeable future. It's a swank 'n' posh little bar/music venue that acts as an adjunct to Orrapin, the Thai restaurant next door. With its warm orange walls covered in candles and Hindu-inspired wooden bas reliefs, the space is (in the words of one of our companions for the evening) "very top-of-Queen......

Seattlest eats too much meat. Let's start from there. A few weeks back we decided that a good experiment would be to not eat meat for lunch for a one week period. These would be dine-in or take-out lunches in and around the Pioneer Square area, not something we brought from home. They have to be fast and relatively cheap and they can't contain Pad Thai, which we hate. They also need to be pretty......

This week Seattlest was craving Thai. Something simple and something nearby--but since we live only five blocks from where we work, it's hard to avoid eating dinner at the places we frequent for lunch. We find our lunch haunts unseemly for dinner. Not that there's anything wrong with them, it's just that we eat at them practically every day and we associate them with daylight hours. So when we walked down to Ayutthaya for dinner,......

The outside world holds a vision of Seattle's relationship to salmon that has us spooning pink fish flakes from a bowl of milk in the morning or simply grabbing one from the nearest body of water for an anytime sashimi snack. This view is not altogether unfounded. Is the tide ebbing, though? Maybe your last out-of-town guest ordered the tilapia after countless past visits spent tentatively ordering blackened salmon from the foreign seafood menu. Or,......

We think it's pretty clear by now that Seattlest is squarely in the "omnivore bordering on carnivore" category when we write about food. So we should not have been surprised when a vegetarian wrote us asking for some suggestions. We shouldn't have been surprised, but we were, mostly because we're selfish narcissists. (We're working on that...honest.) Seattlest admits to knowing little or nothing about vegetarianism when going out to eat in Seattle. So we improvised:......