Seattle’s best new restaurants, bars and pop-ups of 2021

This year started at what felt like a low point, with a now regrettable “It couldn’t possibly be worse” attitude in the Seattle food industry. Indoor dining had yet to return from its November 2020 closure, but vaccination began and seemed to represent a coming solution.

A year later, with omicron on the horizon, the uncertainty in the industry remains, but in between, a few brave and creative people brought to life exciting, unique, and delicious restaurants, bars, and pop-ups.

COVID’s indelible impact on the restaurant industry shows in many depressing ways – closures, deaths and difficulties – but it did nothing to stifle the electricity and innovation of local chefs and restaurateurs.

Keep reading for the places that brought the best new energy into the Emerald City's culinary landscape in 2021.

Phocific Standard Time

At this horseshoe-shaped bar upstairs from the newest location of local mini-chain Pho Bac, sisters and owners Yenvy and Quynh Pham, together with bar manager Katherine Frazier, fluently float between cultures: Vietnamese, immigrant, American, and craft cocktail. Each dish comes with winks at the intersections of Vietnamese American culture, like the packets of Sky Flakes crackers that come with the crab dip. The cocktails taste good, but for those that grew up sipping their grandmother’s artichoke tea, they also taste of nostalgia.

Inside Passage

Over-the-top is just the right level for every night out when there have been so few for so long, and this bar-within-a-bar at Capitol Hill’s Rumba does “extra” with all of its heart – and without sacrificing flavor or technique in their complicated cocktails. A foam rubber sea creature named Kiki supervises service from the ceiling, watching as thoughtful takes on tropical cocktails for the cool climate – like the Amazombie (in Prime packaging) and the Mohai-Tai (in Rainier beer can) – float to tables.

Saint Bread

Taking over an old boathouse tucked behind the UW campus, this bakery and café brought back together a dream team of bakers and gave them the room to do what they do best. Owner Yasuako Saito brought over many from his London Plane team, including Michael Sanders of Plane Bread, whose sourdough represents the platonic ideal that everyone wished they could make at home last year, and Randi Rachlow for her powerful pastry prowess. The menu takes cues from all over, including Japanese cuisine and Scandinavian sweets, creating an eclectic assortment of dishes like teriyaki turnips over toasted farro and a fried egg sandwich with American cheese on melonpan that might just be the best on-the-go breakfast in the city.

Flavor Lao Bowl

Fragrant noodle soups are the fuel that keeps the city moving in the damp months, and variety of Lao flavors and fixings in the ones at this small Aurora storefront do an above-standard version. But the reason to duck in from the outside, sit down and sip a Thai iced tea really comes from the back of the menu where a small section labeled “Lao Foods” proffers delightfully funky Lao pork sausages stuffed with aromatics, resplendent with lemongrass, galangal, lime leaves, and fish sauce. The nam khao tod – billed as a crispy fried pork and rice salad – tastes like Rice Krispies eloped with an herb garden.

Hamdi

Hamdi’s Sunday Turkish cuisine pop-ups require a little adjustment from the standard street-food expectations. The slim kebabs, snuggled tightly in a blanket of homemade lavash, burst with meaty, spicy flavor balanced with sumac, tomatoes and onions. The mint oil crowning the yuvarlama sings in harmony with the tangy yogurt base of the chickpea and lamb neck stew. The prices match the quality, which more closely resembles what you might expect at the sit-down restaurant that owners Katrina Schult and Berk Güldal hope to open in the near future, but is worth every penny.

Masakan

Of Seattle’s three restaurants serving Malaysian food, only one is owned by someone from Malaysia (Kirkland’s Reunion Café), a fact that irks Safira Ezani, who runs this pop-up with her mom, Masitah Hamzah, and that the pair hope to one day rectify when they can open their own restaurant. Until then, they pop-up with their rich, brick-red rendang, flaky curry puffs, and gently sweet and light chiffon cake whenever they can, though they struggle with a unique challenge in the world of pop-ups: because they are Muslim, they prefer not to operate at breweries or bars.

Enseamada

The traditional ensaymada, a soft Filipino pastry bun slathered with butter and sprinkle with grated cheese, fits in the category of treats that are almost always nostalgic, occasionally mediocre, and, around here, rarely noteworthy. But this pop-up bakery upends that idea, turning up the volume on the size, color, and flavor of their brioche buns. Flavors like ube overload, salted egg, and halaya bring bold hues, and high-quality butter and cheese change up the taste, showing what’s possible when a classic sweet gets a fun new treatment.

Haru

The traditional French canelé takes much of its flavor from technique and texture: the outside crunches, just a shade shy of burning, as it insulates the inside so it can gel into a custardy texture but cook no further. But Eun Hye Lee takes her patisserie skills and crosses them with her taste for Korean culinary upbringing. She gilds the lily of her canelé by incorporating Korean-style pastry flavors like milk tea, dalgona and matcha raspberry, as well as taking them into savory territory with gouda version. Lee recently expanded the menu to include pain de genes, a rich almond paste cake, and her own creation: the fideleine, a mix between a madeleine and financier.

Situ Tacos in Jupiter Bar

After a year of popping up around town, this unique taqueria settled into the front bar at Belltown’s Jupiter Bar, giving Seattleites consistent access to the uniquely crunchy tacos of owner Lupe Flores’s Lebanese-Mexican childhood. The brown-butter hushwe-style meat and creamy garlic mashed potato fillings stand up to the hard fry of the folded and rolled tacos, the latter of which get even better when dipped in an order of hatch green chile queso blanco. This is bar food at its best, and thankfully in an at least semi-permanent home.