The plates that define Seattle: what they are, and where to eat the canonical version.
The plates that define Seattle. what they are, where they came from, and where to eat the canonical version.
Seattle's defining shellfish: sweet, dense, snow-white meat from the cold Pacific. Eaten cracked at the table with drawn butter, or chilled in a cocktail at Pike Place.
Where: Pike Place Chowder, Westward, Taylor Shellfish Oyster Bar Pioneer Square, Shaker + Spear, The Walrus and the Carpenter
Price: $30 to $48 for a whole crab
The American version of grilled-then-glazed chicken on rice that Toshi Kasahara invented at his Lower Queen Anne counter in 1976. Sugar, soy, char and shredded cabbage.
Where: Maneki, Ba Bar Capitol Hill
Price: $10 to $14 a plate
The thick, cream-based New England chowder that Larry Mellum reverse-engineered at his Pike Place Market counter in 2003. Eight national chowder cook-off wins and counting.
Where: Pike Place Chowder, Matt's in the Market, Ivar's Acres of Clams
Price: $12 to $18
The fish that defines Seattle's table from May through September: copper river king, sockeye from Bristol Bay, and the silver coho that close the season in October.
Where: Canlis, Westward, Matt's in the Market, Shaker + Spear
Price: $32 to $58 per fillet plate
The Puget Sound clam with a foot-long siphon that locals pronounce gooey-duck. Sliced sashimi-thin at Maneki and Sushi Kashiba; cracked into chowder at Pike Place.
Where: Sushi Kashiba, Maneki, Taylor Shellfish Oyster Bar Pioneer Square
Price: $18 to $32 a plate
The Pike Place Market mac, baked in a cast-iron skillet with Beecher's Flagship cheddar and Just Jack. Oprah named it one of her favourite things in 2008.
Where: Beecher's Handmade Cheese, Matt's in the Market
Price: $9 to $13
Half-shell flights of Kumamoto, Olympia, Shigoku and Pacific oysters from Hood Canal and Willapa Bay. Briny in winter, melon-sweet in summer, eaten standing up.
Where: The Walrus and the Carpenter, Taylor Shellfish Oyster Bar Pioneer Square, Taylor Shellfish Oyster Bar Melrose, Shaker + Spear
Price: $2.50 to $3.50 each on happy hour, $4 otherwise
The smoked-salmon-and-cream-cheese filled bun that Piroshky Piroshky has folded by hand on Pike Place since 1992. The line moves; the bun does not change.
Where: Piroshky Piroshky
Price: $5 to $8
The single-pan oven pancake that Manca's Cafe popularised in Seattle in the 1900s and Tilikum Place Cafe carries today. Eggs, flour, butter, oven, lemon and sugar.
Where: Tilikum Place Cafe, Portage Bay Cafe, Cafe Campagne
Price: $14 to $20
The Vietnamese beef noodle soup that the Pham family brought to Seattle in 1982. The Boat on South Jackson serves the city's defining bowl, with brisket, flank and tendon.
Where: The Boat, Ba Bar Capitol Hill
Price: $12 to $18
Seattle's defining shellfish: sweet, dense, snow-white meat from the cold Pacific. Eaten cracked at the table with drawn butter, or chilled in a cocktail at Pike Place.
History: Dungeness crab takes its name from the spit of land north of Sequim where Native peoples and later white settlers harvested it from the 1840s on. The Washington commercial fishery formalised in the 1890s and supplied Seattle's restaurants from the rebuilt Pike Place Market after the 1907 fire. Crab season runs winter through summer in the open ocean and December through March in Puget Sound, sex-restricted to males above a 6 1/4 inch carapace. The dish is canonical at Pike Place Chowder, where it goes into the chowder pot and on top, and at Westward, where it arrives cracked over a board of crushed ice. Crabbing is also a private rite: tribal allocations and state-licensed recreational pots run from Hood Canal up to the Skagit Bay.
Where to try it: Pike Place Chowder, Westward, Taylor Shellfish Oyster Bar Pioneer Square, Shaker + Spear, The Walrus and the Carpenter
Watch out for: Shellfish
The American version of grilled-then-glazed chicken on rice that Toshi Kasahara invented at his Lower Queen Anne counter in 1976. Sugar, soy, char and shredded cabbage.
History: On 2 March 1976 Toshihiro Kasahara opened a 30-seat shop at 372 Roy Street called Toshi's Teriyaki. His sauce broke with the Japanese ryori he had grown up around: he swapped mirin for granulated sugar, basted the marinade on yakitori-style chicken thighs over charcoal, and finished the plate with a scoop of rice and a pile of shredded iceberg. The Seattle Times credited the move with launching a city-wide format that now numbers more than 200 teriyaki shops, more than any other US city. Toshi sold the original room in 1980 and now runs Toshi's Teriyaki Grill in Mill Creek. The format spread fastest through the 1980s as Korean and Japanese-American operators opened cheap, fast counters from Lake City to Federal Way. The dish is the only American food invented in Seattle that the city eats without irony.
Where to try it: Maneki, Ba Bar Capitol Hill
Watch out for: Soy, Gluten
The thick, cream-based New England chowder that Larry Mellum reverse-engineered at his Pike Place Market counter in 2003. Eight national chowder cook-off wins and counting.
History: Pike Place Chowder is not a Seattle invention so much as a Seattle perfection. Larry Mellum opened the counter in Post Alley in 2003, then carried Pike Place Chowder's New England Clam Chowder to the Great Chowder Cook-Off in Newport, Rhode Island, where it won the people's pick in 2008. The kitchen has now collected eight national championships, including the seafood chowder with smoked salmon and the Manhattan-style with chorizo. The Pike Place Market location at 1530 Post Alley still trades on the cobblestoned chowder queue; the second shop opened at Pacific Place in 2008. The clam used is the local geoduck-adjacent Manila clam, and the bread bowl is a sourdough boule sliced lid-off at the counter. There is no Seattle chowder before this; the Manhattan style at Ivar's predates it by 64 years but never travelled the cook-off circuit.
Where to try it: Pike Place Chowder, Matt's in the Market, Ivar's Acres of Clams
Watch out for: Shellfish, Dairy, Gluten
The fish that defines Seattle's table from May through September: copper river king, sockeye from Bristol Bay, and the silver coho that close the season in October.
History: Salmon was the staple food of the Coast Salish for thousands of years before Seattle existed. The Duwamish, Suquamish and Muckleshoot ran weirs and traps on the rivers that drain into Puget Sound. The first cannery on the Columbia opened in 1866; by 1900 Washington was canning more salmon than any other state. The 1974 Boldt decision restored treaty fishing rights to 20 Washington tribes. The most prized run today is the copper river king, which arrives at Sea-Tac airport in mid May to a press cycle that has run uninterrupted since 1983. Local kitchens treat the first fish like a vintage release: Anthony's HomePort, Canlis and Westward all program around the arrival. The Pike Place fishmongers throw the fish for the cameras; that began at Pike Place Fish Market in 1986 when the staff started tossing salmon across the counter to speed orders.
Where to try it: Canlis, Westward, Matt's in the Market, Shaker + Spear
Watch out for: Fish
The Puget Sound clam with a foot-long siphon that locals pronounce gooey-duck. Sliced sashimi-thin at Maneki and Sushi Kashiba; cracked into chowder at Pike Place.
History: Geoduck is the world's largest burrowing clam, native to the tidal flats of Puget Sound, Hood Canal and British Columbia. The Coast Salish dug it at low tide for millennia. The first state commercial harvest opened in 1970, sold to Japan and Hong Kong where the siphon is prized for raw and hot-pot cookery; the Washington fishery is now worth $80 million a year, with strict quotas managed by the state and the tribes. The clam can live 165 years and weighs 1 to 3 kilograms. In Seattle, sushi bars like Maneki and Sushi Kashiba slice the siphon paper-thin for nigiri called mirugai. Pike Place fishmongers display them whole in ice tanks for the photo opportunity; the body meat goes into chowder and the siphon into sashimi.
Where to try it: Sushi Kashiba, Maneki, Taylor Shellfish Oyster Bar Pioneer Square
Watch out for: Shellfish
The Pike Place Market mac, baked in a cast-iron skillet with Beecher's Flagship cheddar and Just Jack. Oprah named it one of her favourite things in 2008.
History: Kurt Beecher Dammeier opened Beecher's Handmade Cheese at 1600 Pike Place in 2003, with the curds-and-press operation visible behind glass. The mac and cheese, code-named World's Best, debuted that year on the counter menu: penne tossed in a sauce of Beecher's Flagship cheddar, Just Jack and a touch of cream, then portioned and re-baked to order. In 2008 Oprah Winfrey put it on her annual Favourite Things list and the line outside the shop has not shortened since. The cheese itself is a Pacific Northwest cow's-milk cheddar, aged on premises and sold by the wedge to the same tourists who order the mac to-go. There is now a New York City outpost in Flatiron and a third location at Sea-Tac, but the Pike Place counter is the original.
Where to try it: Beecher's Handmade Cheese, Matt's in the Market
Watch out for: Dairy, Gluten
Half-shell flights of Kumamoto, Olympia, Shigoku and Pacific oysters from Hood Canal and Willapa Bay. Briny in winter, melon-sweet in summer, eaten standing up.
History: The Olympia is the only oyster native to Washington, harvested by Squaxin and Suquamish people for generations and prized for a coppery finish the size of a thumbnail. By 1900 over-fishing had collapsed the wild beds; growers introduced Pacific oysters from Japan in 1902 to rebuild the industry, then Kumamotos in the 1940s. Taylor Shellfish Farms, founded in 1890 on Samish Bay, now grows all four commercial species across leases from Hood Canal to Willapa Bay and runs three Seattle oyster bars at Melrose, Pioneer Square and Queen Anne. The Walrus and the Carpenter opened in Old Ballard in 2010 and codified the local format: a wood-and-marble bar, a chalkboard listing 12 to 16 oysters by farm, and a kitchen pulling lardo and rye toast against the brine. There is no better cheap thrill in the city than an oyster happy hour from 16:00 to 18:00.
Where to try it: The Walrus and the Carpenter, Taylor Shellfish Oyster Bar Pioneer Square, Taylor Shellfish Oyster Bar Melrose, Shaker + Spear
Watch out for: Shellfish
The smoked-salmon-and-cream-cheese filled bun that Piroshky Piroshky has folded by hand on Pike Place since 1992. The line moves; the bun does not change.
History: Vlad Tikhomirov opened Piroshky Piroshky in 1992 in a former bakery space at 1908 Pike Place. He and Olga Sagan, who took over the business in 2004, built the menu on Russian and Eastern European baked stuffed buns: cabbage with onion, beef and cheese, apple cinnamon roll, and the savoury salmon pate with cream cheese and dill that became the Pike Place signature. The bakery still hand-folds every piroshky on premises and the line down the alleyway is part of the building. Sagan kept the business open through the 2020 lockdown by selling frozen shipping packs of piroshky across the United States. The salmon piroshky is the bun every Pike Place itinerary should hit before the chowder.
Where to try it: Piroshky Piroshky
Watch out for: Fish, Dairy, Gluten, Egg
The single-pan oven pancake that Manca's Cafe popularised in Seattle in the 1900s and Tilikum Place Cafe carries today. Eggs, flour, butter, oven, lemon and sugar.
History: The Dutch baby was reportedly invented at Manca's Cafe in Seattle around 1920 by Victor Manca, who renamed the Bavarian Pfannkuchen on his menu in honour of his small daughter who could not pronounce Deutsch. Manca's closed in the 1950s but the recipe survived because Sunset magazine published it in 1942 and again in 1972, giving the dish national circulation. Tilikum Place Cafe in Belltown, opened by chef Ba Culbert in the late 2000s, anchored the dish back in Seattle's brunch repertoire: a cast-iron skillet pre-heats in the oven, melted clarified butter goes in, then a thin egg-flour-milk batter, then 15 minutes at 230 C until the edges shoot up the side of the pan. The classic version is finished with lemon, icing sugar and maple syrup; Culbert also runs savoury versions with caramelised onions and gruyere.
Where to try it: Tilikum Place Cafe, Portage Bay Cafe, Cafe Campagne
Watch out for: Dairy, Gluten, Egg
The Vietnamese beef noodle soup that the Pham family brought to Seattle in 1982. The Boat on South Jackson serves the city's defining bowl, with brisket, flank and tendon.
History: Pho arrived in Seattle in 1982 when Theresa and Augustine Pham opened Cat's Submarine on South Jackson Street, started selling Theresa's weekend pho to homesick Vietnamese customers, and switched the menu over to pho within four months. The shop renamed itself Pho Bac and is generally considered the first dedicated pho restaurant in the United States. The Phams' five children have since built a Seattle empire: Pho Bac Sup Shop, The Boat (which kept the original Jackson Street building) and Hello Em on 12th. Seattle now has more pho restaurants per capita than any US city outside California, almost all family-run. The classic order is tai-nam-gan: rare flank, well-done brisket and tendon, served with the standard plate of basil, sawtooth coriander, mung sprouts, lime and chillies on the side.
Where to try it: The Boat, Ba Bar Capitol Hill
Watch out for: Gluten, Soy
Peak food season in Seattle is year-round.
Local dining hours: lunch around 12:30, dinner from 19:30.
service is typically included; small extra is welcome but not expected.
If you only have one meal, eat Dungeness crab. It is the dish most associated with Seattle.