Twenty years have passed since Rick and Ann Yoder opened the original Wild Ginger, an unusual café with a pan-Asian menu on the Western slope below the Market. In 2000 they moved uphill and took over the spacious Mann building at 3rd & Union, remodeling the upstairs in to a multi-sectioned 450-seat drinking & dining emporium and converting the lower level (a one-time porn theater) into one of the city's leading music venues, the Triple Door. Last year they expanded again, to the Bravern in Bellevue, a ready-made village of ultra shops, power offices and millionaire condos. more ›

The new Zagat is out, at least the one "devoted to Seattle" restaurants. And with "all due respect" to "local editor" Alicia Comstock Arter (who also contributes to Northwest Palate), it's "a freakin mess." The trouble, "brewing for years," is that the "capsule reviews" take isolated "nouns and adjectives" from "reader comments" and string them together to make "nonsensical" and "often inaccurate" profiles. It's a Fox News approach to dining, all pseudo-oracular, disjointed headlines with "little substance." more ›

Are food safety and food tasty mutually exclusive goals? You have to ask after both Zesto's and Wild Ginger show up on the P-I's list of Seattle's dirtiest restaurants. more ›

We usually run from restaurants that have pictures on the menu. They remind us of steakhouse chains from our childhoods or Chinese takeout places where the food tastes like the box in which it’s packaged. But we find endless delight in staring at Malay Satay Hut’s full-color menu. If we could resist distraction, we’d laminate our takeout copy and hang it on the wall. more ›