Dive into Seattle restaurant history starting with the city’s first cookhouse

How do you measure a year? In hot dogs, in brunch shifts, in sink clogs, in cups of coffee, in closings, in moves, in brew pubs, in diners. How do you measure the life span of a restaurant? Well, first you have to know when it opened.

The other day, a guest on the podcast Dear Elite Reviewer mentioned that, because her family wasn’t the original owners of their restaurant, they didn’t know when it opened. She seemed unbothered, but for a restaurant history nerd, a student of Seattle’s most delicious moments, curiosity ate away at me.

Ironically, given Dear Elite Reviewer’s exposure of Yelp’s deep flaws, the review website makes it easy to find opening dates for newer restaurants. For restaurants that opened after about 2008, Yelp’s incentives to lure reviewers to be the first to post helps pinpoint approximate opening dates – just short reviews from oldest to newest and check the oldest date. But the restaurant in question opened before the user-generated-content boom, so to figure out the answer to my mystery, I dug deeper into my favorite restaurant history resources.

Between the vast annals of the internet, the Seattle Room of the Seattle Public Library, and other local archives, reading about and researching the history of Seattle restaurants from home is easier than ever before. Thick with oyster chowders and details of the debut of Dutch babies, this thin slice of local history records what happened in the industry since Seattle’s first restaurant.

“Yesler’s Cookhouse, built in 1853 at the foot of Mill Street, was really the first restaurant in the little village of Seattle,” begins the book “Restaurants of Seattle 1853-1960.” Written by Mrs. Hattie Graham Horrocks, the publicly available PDF details restaurants as they opened and closed, describing them with varying levels of precision. Pulling from old menus, newspaper advertisements, and city directories for information, it shows off menus of 25-cent meals from 1882 and hotel dining rooms serving Olympia oyster stew for 50 cents in 1913.

The latter is around the same time as the earliest menu in the Seattle Public Library’s collection – one from Drake’s Restaurant in 1910, which offered fried salmon for 15 cents, just the same price as baked ox heart and dressing. But the collection, which has more than 600 menus from around the region digitized, doesn’t limit itself to long ago history – it traces Seattle’s modern restaurant legacy as well. The menu from the 1981 Les Copains opening boasts offerings from Bruce Naftaly, whom you’ll find today in the kitchen at Marmite.

Horrock’s guide fills in some of the gaps in the menu collection, describing the 1899 opening of Manca’s, where the name Dutch baby was – according to legend – first coined in reference to their puffed-up pancakes. But that entry, too, shows her flaws: she claims it went out of business in 1954, but the Archives West list of UW’s menu collection shows one from Manca’s in 1955, the same year to which MOHAI’s photo of it dates. (The great-grandson of Manca’s original owner reopened the restaurant briefly in Madison Park from 1991 to 1998.)

While familiar names pop up throughout Horrock’s book, mostly it is because places named themselves for the historic spots – the Diller, the Ben Paris, the Polar Bar. A current restaurant first pops up more than halfway through, with the arrival of Ray’s Boathouse in the 1930s, then the opening of Skipper’s and Ivar’s in the same decade.

She mentions Lun Ting’s opening in 1938 in the University District and The Hong Kong in 1945 – which closed in the 1980s, though the iconic sign remains, and the space is now occupied by Hong Kong Bistro – and Ruby Chow’s (Chow herself bartended at the Hong Kong previously), and a few other Chinese restaurants, including the dearly departed Moon Temple, which opened in 1949 and closed in 2015. The only Japanese restaurant to earn mention is Bush Garden. But the first mention of Chinese comes not for the food, but in an 1882 newspaper ad that specifies “No Chinese employed.” Though left out from the book, the International District’s Maneki opened in 1904 and still exists today, as does Tai Tung, which opened in 1935, which shows Horrock’s narrow view of restaurants. She also fails to mention Monet’s Seattle Restaurant and Coffee Saloon, which pops up on HistoryLink, and was opened in 1864 by an African American pioneer named Matthias Monet.

Just over a decade after Horrocks leaves off, A Gourmet's Notebook picks up. Available through the library, this newsletter (paper, of course, in this pre-Substack era) founded by David Brewster – who would later start the Seattle Weekly and Crosscut – gave anonymous reviews to local restaurants. It offers glimpses at the early story of local restaurants, like when the second location of Red Robin opened at Northgate – 1978, described as “a lot of show and a lot of come-on,” and declares “most of the burgers are not worth the price even though the ideas are imaginative,” or the opening of Catfish Corner, which recently reopened with the original owners’ grandson in charge (“very fine fast food”). It does a better job at coverage, with reviews of all types of restaurants, including one that pinpoints the opening of classic International District favorite Ho Ho Seafood Restaurant to the beginning of 1987, and another that lets us know about the only Afghan restaurant in Washington in 1988 (rated “very good”).

A Gourmet’s Notebook ends in 1991, leaving amateur researchers reliant on the local newspapers for any information between then and the dawn of food blogs and review websites, when the internet began recording every coming and going. Thankfully, that oldest and easiest of resources delivered: the Seattle Public Library also offers free access to the archives of the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer dating back to the 19^th century.

I found an early review of the restaurant whose owner didn’t know the opening date of, from fall of 2002. I sat back, satisfied at having dug up the knowledge, and reeling with the information and history I got to see roll by as I looked around. The library and the internet brim with fascinating information to dig into local restaurant history, if for no reason other than to marvel at how lucky we are to have the selection of spots we do today, confirming what Horrocks wrote in 1960 – that Seattle is one of the best restaurant cities in the country.