Don’t Ask Me to Recommend a Seattle Seafood Restaurant
But I will tell you this: Don’t go to a “seafood restaurant”
As a food writer in Seattle, I get asked for restaurant recommendations a lot — and nothing gives me as much joy as treating my near-encyclopedic knowledge of local restaurants like a machine: Input which part of town, what kind of meal, culinary preferences, and price range, and I’ll spit out the most exciting, intriguing, and delicious spots.
But when visitors come from out of town, rightfully stoked about the local specialty, and ask me for the best seafood restaurant, that machine jams up and starts emitting tiny, exasperated puffs of smoke. Yes, the region boasts fabulous seafood — I wrote a whole book called “The Pacific Northwest Seafood Cookbook” about how great it is — but you won’t find it in a seafood restaurant. Seafood is in the DNA of the Northwest: It’s not a category of restaurant; it’s a given.
Wherever good food is served in Seattle, great seafood is sure to follow: at our quasi-celebrity chef restaurants, in the Vietnamese restaurants of Little Saigon, and at laid-back neighborhood Italian joints. Seattle’s waterlogged location forms much of its identity, so a love for seafood in every form is embedded into the city’s heritage; saltwater courses through the veins of Seattle. But the…
