Tiffany Ran

​Rosticeria y Cocina el Paisano draws diners south of Seattle for authentic Mexican eats, but not that far south. Located in White Center, the family owned and operated restaurant and butchery borrows from one another. The tortillas are handmade every morning at the butchery, and used at the restaurant. The tamales, made in the restaurant's kitchen is sold at the neighboring butcher's shop for the jaw dropping price of $1. Both the shop and the rosticeria are owned by the Silvas, a husband and wife team, who began by serving friends and customers out of the shop before they were finally able to open the rosticeria two doors down.

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​Hattie's Hat has come full circle. No, it's not back to its emulating its first 90 years as a dingy hangout for chronically thirsty longshoremen fresh off the graveyard shift, girding for a fight. Rather, it's fallen well off downtown Ballard's fickle vanguard, and landed in a comfortable place reminiscent of its mid-'90s rebirth as a hipster-friendly dive with tasty, down-home food.

Still separated from the dining portion of the establishment by a "brawl wall," the scene during a recent weekday happy hour could have just as easily occurred during the peak of Pavement's popularity. A crew of construction workers lined the bar, placing coasters atop their beers during frequent smoke breaks (granted, in the '90s, they could have smoked at their stools). A couple tables of thirtysomethings ordered a round of whiskey shots backed by Olympia tallboys, and the bartender had to summon a manual when asked to mix a Negroni. While she executed the drink properly after boning up, a highfalutin cocktail bar Hattie's is not.

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Udupi's staff assembling the proper bite of panipuri

​Those who have left Indian restaurants bursting at the seams and wondering, "What do Indians have for just a snack?" will have their question answered at Udupi Café's Chaat Corner. The snacks served at the Chaat Corner have never seen the inside of a food truck, but is known as street food in the truest sense of the word, sold from carts or food stalls on every other street corner in the town of Udupi. Owned by the same owner and sharing the same kitchen as Udupi Café, a South Indian vegetarian restaurant, the Chaat Corner occupies the small bakery space next door, inside a sleepy corner of Overlake Square Mall in Bellevue.

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Cozell Wilson

A spiked pulled-pork sandwich in a spiked pulled-pork neighborhood.

​Ballard is in the midst of a barbecue boom, and the booming local barbecue chain RoRo is in on the action, having taken over the landmark Zesto's space earlier this week. But it's in Georgetown where RoRo feels most like itself.

Housed in a simple, two-story white building that previously contained a popular vegan restaurant, Squid & Ink, the Georgetown RoRo is close enough to Boeing Field for small planes to land on its flat roof should they time their descent a bit too early. A couple hours before RoRo opens at 10:30, a young lady in an old pickup cuts across RoRo's parking lot, smoking a cigarette and blasting Journey with the window rolled down in cold weather. In her tailpipe's wake, a bikini-clad barista serves hot, foamy drinks to bone rangers intent on gathering material for a mid-morn wank in the office can, while Seattle's most peculiarly located nursery, Julius Rosso's, sets to watering the day's first buds on the airstrip's north pole.

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Cozell Wilson

​SoDo Pizza, which just celebrated its 12th birthday, does not make phenomenal pie. But pizza doesn't have to be phenomenal; it just needs to taste awesome when you're drinking. And more than any other pizzeria in town, SoDo Pizza is focused on making sure its crust is the one you bite into when you're hunkered down at a neighborhood watering hole.

The interior of SoDo Pizza's headquarters amounts to a couple chairs and a takeout window next to an old green refrigerator filled with cans of pop. The entire operation is housed in a narrow, windowless trailer, but there are some picnic tables backed up against a neighboring brick building outside. A fence topped by razor wire separates the outdoor dining area from a pothole-laden parking lot, and factories and lumber suppliers comprise the rest of the neighborhood. In a sense, SoDo Pizza's location is as ingenious as it is unorthodox: It has no competition in an area rife with hungry laborers, discounting the one-in-a-million human who likes to consume splinters of wood for lunch.

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Okinawa's new digs near the viaduct

​For the vast majority of American eaters, the word "ramen" implies a pale brick of instant noodles wrapped in plastic, and packaged with a silver packet of salty beef, chicken, or shrimp bouillon. It is the bargain-priced, sodium-saturated food staple that has kept countless college students from starving. The Maruchan brand is so popular they still get away with selling an "Oriental Flavor" product.

For those accustomed to Cup Noodles and various other forms of instant ramen, the soup they dish up at Okinawa Teriyaki is a revelation. It is a thing of beauty served in an earthenware bowl, with a mound of grilled meat roughly the size of Mt. Fuji heaped atop the wavy, relatively thick noodles, and a garden's worth of fresh vegetables nestled beneath the cloudy, egg-infused broth.

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Don't be a fool! Stop in!

​For more than a dozen years sat a little doughnut shop on Rainier Avenue called King Donuts. But then a huge Safeway was built, taking down about 14 businesses in its wake, including the mom-and-pop doughnut shop. In 2001, King Donuts reopened in a much larger space formerly known as the old Hook, Line and Sinker restaurant and lounge. The new building, however, was a good 3,500 square-feet, much too large for a little doughnut counter. So what did the King Donuts family do? "The two businesses that my mom knew of that were also demolished when Safeway was built were a laundromat and a teriyaki shop," says daughter Channa Hay. "So, my family incorporated those two businesses into their doughnut shop."

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Lucinda Swain

​Toward the end of 2011, when the Turf's owner announced he would be changing the working-class downotwn restaurant's name to Ludi's, certain publications who hadn't devoted any ink (aside from the occasional crime recap) to the Turf in eons began eulogizing the place as though the whole of Seattle's underclass was about to be sent into the great hereafter (i.e., Tukwila) with a 21-gun salute.

In a piece titled "Good-Bye, Turf: the End of an Era," one melodramatic local scribe bemoaned the fate of the bar's patrons, wondering: "Where will all those people go now?"

They'll keep going to the Turf, in fact. While a handful of more expensive items have been added to the menu, the Turf of new is still very much the Turf of old. It's just called Ludi's now.

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​In The Lexicon of Real American Food, Jane and Michael Stern lament that no one has catalogued all the sandwiches in America made on tubular lengths of bread, and that there is no complete dictionary to explain their names. Sure there are po' boys, banh mi, Cuban sandwiches, hoagies, and subs. A lot of tubular sandwiches get their names because of what they resemble: Subs, for example, resemble submarines. So what the hell is a grinder? According to the Sterns, "The sandwich known as the grinder throughout southern New England is supposed to have gotten its name because one must grind one's teeth to eat it."

At Grinders in Shoreline, the sandwiches earn this name and reputation. Bread ranges from chewy Italian sandwich rolls to tough yet tender ciabatta, but all the grinders have one thing in common: They will give your jaw a workout. These things must weigh at least a pound, if not two. And packed with everything from salamis, spicy roasted peppers, and caramelized onions, to housemade meatballs and sausage, the jocular workout is worth the effort, as you bite into the juicy meat and flavorful sauces.

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Lucinda Swain

​It remains one of life's great injustices that not every American citizen gets to experience the exhilaration of having a load splattered on his or her face and/or in his or her mouth during his or her lifetime. Thankfully, there are a pair of fast-food chains--one with local roots, one obscenely global--with locations in Seattle which boast hot, white sauces that simulate the ejaculatory facial. Granted, neither Taco Del Mar nor McDonald's come close to the sweet stimulation of Beard Papa's, but touting the semenistic virtues of a cream puff is as obvious as saying Jimi Hendrix was a very good guitarist.

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