Busy Be's on the West Side

As a White Centric blog noted last week, West Seattle Junction breakfast stalwart Be's has opened a second location just south of the city limit on 16th, where the mysterious, infrequently-open Entourage nightclub used to be. Speaking from experience, while Be's food won't blow your mind, it's dirt cheap — and the dynamic mix of customers (Kiwanis Club basically commandeers the entire back room at the original location, so there's plenty of old — and we do mean old — school charm to be soaked up) and punchy waitstaff is well worth a trip. Plus, White Center doesn't really have any greasy spoons (the Salvadoran Bakery is too good to be considered a greasy spoon), so Be's fills another neighborhood niche in downtown White Center.

Topics: Bottomfeeder and Openings & Closings

Permalink | Comments (0)

Ed's Kort Haus Goes Inadvertently Green

Ed's Kort Haus on Phinney Ridge flies in wild game from all over the world for owner Ed Warrington's cooks to turn into burgers, including kangaroo. Now comes word from abroad that kangaroo burgers are potentially greener than our all-beef patties. I can tell you firsthand that the difference in taste is pretty negligible, although the kangaroo burger gives off an odor that's, uh, pretty foreign compared to what we're used to in the States.

Topics: Bottomfeeder

Permalink | Comments (0)

The greatest secret ingredient of all time

To say that I'm not much of a cook is to give me too much credit. I'm not really a cook at all. But when I do make any of the three things in my repertoire, I tend to rely one particular ingredient to provide that elusive element of "flavor." For awhile it was chicken stock—it makes everything so rich and chickeny! Did you know you can even add a dash of it to scrambled eggs? It's true. Then there was a brief Bacon Salt period, but now it's all about the kim chee base.

Kim chee base miraculously contains everything good about food: It's salty, it's sweet, it's spicy, it's garlicky, and it's tangy. True, there might be some MSG in there to aid its miraculous powers, but then again, shut up. From scrambled eggs to spaghetti sauce to ... uh, well, back to scrambled eggs again, there's no dish it doesn't improve. Though I will admit that this point does not go undisputed at my house.

Can you get it at Uwajimaya? I don't know, owing to my one-person boycott of Uwajimaya. The boycott is to protest the fact that I cannot walk from one end of Uwajimaya to the other. Because they always choose the narrowest, most busily trafficked spaces in their store to plop down pallets of rice and pyramids of Sapporo beer.

But you can get it at a store right across from Old Village in Shoreline. This place is called something very catchy like "Asian Market" or "Asian Food Mart." The people who run it are almost comically rude. "Hello," I'll say brightly, as I bound to the counter with my arms full of kim chee base, and they will say nothing, not even a grunt. They won't look at me. If they didn't take my money, I would assume I'd become invisible. It's all worth it for my Sunday morning kim chee scrambled eggs. Just ask anyone in my house.

Topics: Bottomfeeder

Permalink | Comments (2)

Pomade v. Brylcreem, And Why That Has Anything To Do With Food

In my most recent Bottomfeeder column, a critical analysis of the U-Village Burgermaster, I noted that my late grandfather was "a pomade fan." He was actually more of a Brylcreem fan, as my mother informed me upon my return from vacation last night. Pomade is very similar to Brylcreem, so this may not merit a correction in print. But I owe it to my grandfather's grooming legacy to set the record straight in cyberspace, at the very least.

Topics: Bottomfeeder

Permalink | Comments (0)

The Olympia Pizza With the Biggest Balls

There are lots of Olympia Pizzas in the Seattle area. There's one on Capitol Hill, one atop Queen Anne, one in Roosevelt, one in Wallingford (and I may be missing others), and now one on Delridge Way in West Seattle. Of this pack of Olympias, only the Delridge and Wallingford stores are affiliated with one another.

The Delridge store just opened, inspiring both enthusiasm and shock from residents of West Seattle's overlooked eastern burgs. Enthusiasm because these neighborhoods are relatively underserved, both in terms of dine-in and delivery options for pie-wolfing (Pagliacci, for instance, has opted to red-line homes along and around Delridge despite the fact that more northerly restaurants will deliver there). Shocked because the Delridge Olympia opened on the 5600 block of Delridge, or smack in the middle of what's probably the west side's hottest crime zone (White Center excluded; although the 5500-5900 blocks of Delridge might actually surpass the overstigmatized WC in terms of violent incidents). As for the food, it's very good, the salads piled high with cheese, and the pizza — cheese atop toppings — reminiscent of the Queen Anne Olympia's (which is a little strange, given that the two have nothing to do with one another). So let's hope for the best here: that this ballsy new restaurant serves as a catalyst for calmer days to come for that stretch of Delridge, a much-improved part of the west side that still could behave a little better.

Topics: Bottomfeeder and Openings & Closings

Permalink | Comments (4)

Stan's Drive-In, R.I.P.

The Rainier Ave. institution is all boarded up, says Bottomtipper Jim Schier. Stan's is where I had my last training meal meal (a double bacon cheeseburger) before the Wedgwood Broiler's 72-ounce sirloin challenge. Old-school drive-ins in Seattle are a dinosaur, man. Bummer. The Bottomfeeder curse continues.

Topics: Bottomfeeder

Permalink | Comments (2)

It's Official: Bottomfeeder is a Curse

Remember last week, when we wrote that garnering mention in Bottomfeeder might be a curse on your restaurant? Well, we wrote about this place. Then this happened.

Topics: Bottomfeeder

Permalink | Comments (1)

Luciano's Goes the Extra Mile (That Pag's Won't)

In our ongoing series on pizzerias not named Pagliacci who are willing to deliver hot pie to the rough and tumble portion of West Seattle known as Poverty Gulch (aka Delridge, aka "my neighborhood"), I give you Luciano's, whose Luciano's Special gets high marks for the quality of its onions. Incidentally, Luciano's West Seattle affiliate in the Admiral Junction (they've got a satellite location in Lake City) is about a mile further from my house than the Pagliacci outpost in the Alaska Junction that won't touch my street with a ten-foot Hyundai.

Topics: Bottomfeeder

Permalink | Comments (2)

Andy's Diner, R.I.P.

Since we spent yesterday living under a rock (i.e., home sick), we failed to notice until today that Andy's Diner has served its last boxcar special down in SoDo. This makes it the second Bottomfeeder tout to close its doors since the column debuted (the first was Flynn's). Don't call it a curse. Yet.

Topics: Bottomfeeder

Permalink | Comments (1)

Bakeman's Goes Under the Needle

In his recently-launched "Under the Needle" column on Seattle nostalgia, the P.I.'s Mike Lewis — an affable throwback of a journalist who puts his money where his pen is by bartending every Thursday night at the Streamline Tavern on Mercer Street — has a great piece on Bakeman's Cafeteria, a regular haunt of Bottomfeeder's. As Lewis deftly articulates, if you dare visit Bakeman's, quickness is king.

Topics: Bottomfeeder

Permalink | Comments (0)

Flynn's Cafe, R.I.P.

In the months since Bottomfeeder debuted in the pages of the Weekly, we've yet to experience the death of one of the hidden haunts we've profiled. But as we took the scenic route along Airport Way, bound for a Saturday afternoon screening of Superbad (Jonah Hill's good, but Michael Cera is heads and shoulders above any other comic actor in his age group), we witnessed the horror of the passing of Flynn's Cafe, which has been serving up huge sausage sandwiches before sunrise in SoDo for, like, forever. We'd known that the building Flynn's was housed in had been on the block for some time, so this doesn't come as a huge surprise. But still, the place had no real equal in terms of lazy, homespun charm and a matriarch — Barb — who made you feel as though you were eating in your grandmother's kitchen.

Topics: Bottomfeeder

Permalink | Comments (1)

Food Network to Feature Mike's Chili

The cast and crew of the Food Network's "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives" has been shooting all day at Mike's Chili Parlor, for a segment on the historic Ballard restaurant-tavern that is expected to air this Fall. Host Guy Fieri (pictured above with proprietor Mike Semandiris — he's the bald one — photo courtesy of 'Lil Scoop), he of the spiky Smashmouth hairdo and phraseology like "on like Donkey Kong," sweated under the lights alongside Semandiris, his sister, his mother, and his father — all of whom regularly pull shifts at the family biz.

Regulars were drinking before noon, press clips were laminated and affixed in an orderly manner on the wall near the front door, the staff wore black monogrammed shirts, the bar looked as though it had been power-washed, a muscle car was parked in a trailer out front, the Ballard Bridge went up and down repeatedly, and construction workers hammered away in the dusty gulch next to the deck, erecting Scott Clark's controversial retail megaproject. And I had a chili burger the size of a cantaloupe for $6. A beautiful day in the neighborhood, indeed.

Topics: Bottomfeeder

Permalink | Comments (0)