Washington State | other North America (and Hawaii) | Europe | notes and explanation
This is my collection of restaurants we have either tried and liked, or heard were good and mean to try. We are a family (husband, wife, two children) who live in Northeast Seattle. We have, in the past, travelled to other parts of North America and Europe. My wife and I both went to graduate school at the University of Washington, and my wife works in the University District.
This list was originally for my reference only, and that is still its main function. I've been slowly adding more description and organization so that others can use it, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time making it a resource for other people because that isn't the point.
There are three pages of restaurants, one for Washington State, one for other cities in North America (including Hawaii), and one for Europe. Each page is broken into two main sections: Yet to try, listing restaurants we've heard are good but haven't been to, and Tried and liked, listing restaurants we have been to and liked enough to want to go back. Note that we only generally compile lists of restaurants to try just before we go somewhere, and we haven't been to Europe in a while, so there is no Yet to try section on the Europe page.
Each of these sections is further broken down geographically. On the Europe page, this goes country/city. On the other North America page, it's (state or province)/city (note that US and Mexican states are mixed with provinces, in alphabetical order by state/province name). On the Washington State page, it's by city only.
Four cities are broken up even further: Seattle, New Orleans, New York and Portland. For more information on those cities, see the sections below.
Each list is alphabetized by restaurant name. Note that leading articles in any language are ignored (so Il Bistro is alphabetized under 'Bistro').
I tried to break up the New Orleans restaurant list by neighborhood, but most of them still end up in the French Quarter. Beyond the French Quarter, Central Business District, and Garden District, I'm quite hazy as to what the neighborhoods of New Orleans are called, so these divisions may be quite arbitrary.
All the New Orleans restaurants were checked in May 2002 to verify they still seem to exist (using an online phone directory and New Orleans Citysearch).
New York restaurants are divided by borough. The borough of Manhattan is further subdivided into divisions of my own devising. There's one each for the areas east, north and west of Central Park. One for south of Houston Street. The remaining chunk is dividing into four quadrants, with the dividing lines at Fifth Avenue (which divides East and West Streets) and 34th St. (a somewhat arbitrary choice on my part).
Prices in New York are higher than in most places, plus I got many recommendations from the New York Times, which uses a scale incompatible with mine (see below), plus most of my information from New York is about ten years old. So take pricing info for New York with a big grain of salt.
All the New York City restaurants were checked in May 2002 to verify they still seem to exist (using an online phone directory and New York Citysearch).
Like Seattle below, Portland's listings are broken up based on the directional designations that go with the street names: NW, NE, SW, SE, N, E and W. For example, the NW in 21st Ave NW. W and E appear only on one street, Burnside, so they are grouped with NW and NE respectively. Burnside and the Willamette river do a pretty good job of dividing the city into the four NW, NE, SW and SE quadrants. N is a triangle north of downtown and the river.
The Seattle restaurants are divided based on the ten different zones that govern which directional indicators are added to street and avenue names. For example, in the NE zone, all streets and avenues have a 'NE' in the name. Analogously, for the NW, N, W, E, S and SW zones. In the downtown zone, no streets or avenues have a directional designation. The two tricky zones are what I term the central district or CD, the area east of downtown where streets have an 'E', but avenues have no directional designation, and what I term the north zone, the area north of downtown where avenues have an 'N', but streets have no designation. (If you're morbidly interested, the zones are essentially in a 3x4 grid, with the zone west of downtown missing (no streets in Elliott Bay), and what would be the SE zone combined with S for some reason).
For orientation, I have listed a few of the neighborhoods that are at least partially in each of these zones in the Yet to Try section. It also helps to know that the east-west zone 'dividing lines' are the ship canal, Denny Way, and Yesler Way.
Also, everyone who lives in Seattle knows that directional designations go after Avenues (15th Ave NE) but before Streets (NE 45th St). Being a lazy sort, I often drop the 'Ave' or the 'St' in the address if it has a direction (e.g., 15th NE or NE 45th).
Here's a mythical example listing of a restaurant we haven't been to:
Joe's Bar and Grill, 500 4th Ave [behind the tattoo parlor] (M-F 11:30-9pm, $$) {Joe's Guide to Peoria, 1997}The name comes first, followed by the address. Any extra locational information goes in square brackets, followed by hours, pricing, and any other miscellaneous info in parentheses. For all the listings, I try to find a reliable source for more information, either a URL (with the restaurant's name as the anchor text), or, if I read about the place in a book or magazine, the name of the book or magazine in curly braces.
A price designation of $$ means a main dish (or equivalent) costs US$10-20, while $$$ means a main dish costs US$20 or more. If there's no dollar designation, either I don't know the prices, or the place is cheap (< US$10 for a main dish). This is annoyingly ambiguous, I know. As a rule of thumb, assume I know the price if (a) the restaurant is in Washington State, (b) I list the hours, (c) I give a source. You can also assume listings from Let's Go or Berkeley Guide books are for cheap places. See sources below.
There's no guarantee all this information will be in a particular listing, and in this format. This is the format I use for new listings, and I try to update old ones when I can, but sometimes I don't notice a problem and some information (particularly hours and pricing) is hard to come by. Hours and pricing isn't particularly reliable for restaurants, anyway. Also, sometimes we just notice a restaurant that looks good and add it to the list, so there is no source to refer to. This is more likely to happen with places near our home or office.
Here's a mythical example listing of a restaurant we have been to:
*** Fred's Bar and Grill, 501 4th Ave [across from the tattoo parlor] (M-F 11:30-9pm, $$) --- Great burgers. [August 1999] {Fred's Guide to Peoria, 1997}Most of this information is the same as that given for restaurants we haven't been to. I add the approximate date we last ate there in square brackets near the end. If the listing has three asterisks (***), it means that we particularly liked and recommend the place. There is no scale of 1-5 stars or anything like that; I just chose three asterisks because they stand out. For some of the listings, particularly those we particularly liked, I tried to give a brief explanation of what was particularly good or notable about the place (e.g., "Great Burgers").
I usually recommend a place based on the food, but sometimes I will recommend a place for other reasons, such as speed of food preparation or convenient hours, if I feel those features are important. If there is no explanation for a recommendation, you can assume I thought the food was particularly good. If the place doesn't serve full meals (e.g., an ice cream parlor), I try to mention that as well.
If I say a restaurant is good for kids, you should recall that our children were born in May 2000 and June 2003, look at the date we last visited, and do a little math. Obviously, we have no clue what a place is like if you come with, say, a 13-year old. Not yet, at least.
Some of our recommendations are based on visits that were over ten years ago. The restaurant business is ever-changing. Call ahead or at least look the place up in the phone book to make sure it's still there. If it's not, or it's significantly changed from my description, please send me e-mail with this information.
And obviously, your tastes may differ from mine. You can send me e-mail if you think my opinion is wrong, but don't expect me to do much about it.
Foodwise, I used to eat anything that reliably had an IQ no greater than a pig's. So, no primates or cetaceans, but everything else was fair game, including the standard 'gross' food, such as squid, tripe, or blood pudding. There are no major ethnic varieties of food we won't try, and spiciness isn't a problem (more of an asset, really).
Since about 1995, I have decided not to eat beef. My wife generally abstains as well, although she occasionally has a steak or hamburger. So if you're looking for a recommendation for the best steakhouse in Seattle, you've come to the wrong place (but the best burgers are at Red Mill). My wife also has trouble eating most North American dairy products.
As for our children, we try to feed them off our plates, and try not to assume they won't like a particular dish. Because they are so young, we did and still do follow some standard rules to try to avoid creating food allergies; for instance, little fish before 2, no peanuts before 3.
As for philosophy, we're more interested in food than decor and ambience. Having essentially lived as a college student for 12 years, I'm also willing to patronize and even recommend a cheap, dingy place if the food is good or it's particularly notable in some other way.
We try not to eat at franchise restaurants, or recommend them.
Our main source for Seattle restaurants is The Stranger, a local alternative newsweekly. The reviewers seem to match us demographically, and seem to prize a good value. They've turned us on to a number of invaluable finds (off the top of my head, Red Mill, Luau, Maple Leaf Grill, and Agua Verde). The Stranger also has put out a guidebook, The Stranger Guide to Seattle which reviews many restaurants, some they've already reviewed in the paper, and some they have not.
Other local papers whose recommendations I sometimes use include Tablet, which skews demographically a little younger, and The Seattle Press, a North Seattle paper with a more working-class bent.
Locally, of course, we also go by word-of-mouth and our own observation. The Seattle Times and P-I are not very reliable, although I believe they were the first to recommend Thai Dusit and Nasai Teriyaki to us.
For Portland, OR, we generally look at the Stranger's sister paper, The Portland Mercury.
Otherwise, I rely mostly on guidebooks, and what I can find on the web. There are a lot of horrible restaurant guides on the web. Generally, the best are written by a single person (not an average rating from whoever fills out the form on a webpage), concentrate on one or two cities, and include some bad reviews so you know they haven't been paid for. (Note that by my own criteria, this is not one of the best restaurant guides on the web. But I never said it was.) You'll find links to a couple of such guides in the listings for Whistler, BC, and Albuquerque, NM.
The Kauai restaurants were chosen from The Ultimate Guide to Kauai, written by a Kauai resident. This self-published book fulfills the 3 criteria above for a good website and, in fact, feels much like a good website transferred to paper. The same author has guides to most of the other Hawaiian islands.
Finally, I have some hard/impossible-to-find restaurant guides for New Orleans (the STOC '91 Restaurant Guide) and New York City (a New York Times article from the time of the '92 Democratic Party convention). Both were superlative at the time and still useful, but by now obviously old. You could track down the New York Times article if you wanted, but it's so old I don't know why you'd bother. The STOC '91 guide was largely taken from Tom Fitzmorris's 1990 Guide to New Orleans Restaurants, so if you're going to New Orleans and there's a more recent edition of the guide available, look it over.
Washington State | other North America (and Hawaii) | Europe | notes and explanation