Why I made a Seattle restaurant love list, and you should too

When friends visit Seattle (remember friends? remember visiting?) and ask where they should eat, I offer them a list of the restaurants that best embody Seattle’s culinary scene, like Taylor Shellfish’s Oyster Bars and Archipelago. If a local friend asks for the best restaurants in the city, I might think up places that cook the most incredible food or would meet the moment for a special occasion, like Altura or JuneBaby. But over the last year, as the pandemic decimated the industry, I created a different list of restaurants I love: the ones I’d be most sad about if they closed.

Since the first effects of coronavirus hit Chinese restaurants in January of 2020, the restaurant industry received only crumbs of help from the government, and while more seems to be on the way, many restaurants remain on shaky financial ground. Diners making an effort to safely support restaurants through eating outdoors and takeout has helped many, but individuals cannot save the entire industry. What everyone can do is support their personal favorite restaurants – carefully and deliberately.

My restaurant love list, as I call it, doesn’t necessarily have the flashy places I’d send someone for date night, nor the kinds of oh-so-Seattle places I would send a visitor. Instead, the love list has the places where I watched in horror as one of my children ran in circles and fingerpainted with ketchup while the waitress shrugged it off and still offered to hold the crying infant in my arms – the Wedgwood Broiler. The love list includes spots where I traded in traditional ideas of romance for my personal one: sitting in the window nook of Café Munir, chatting about the extensive whiskey list and swiping bread through sizzling lamb hummus.

I aim to incorporate a business from my love list at least one a month – more, if I can. Everyone should make sure to get lunch from Red Bowls right now, but that goes double if you – like me – spent years working downtown with their #35 (Hae Dop Bap) serving as your only motivation to make it through the day, then pop in for one of those spicy bowls of raw fish on rice. Ditto for Nasai Teriyaki in the U-District, going even further back in my career. Under the rootbeer keg shaped roof of Chiang’s Gourmet, I once hosted the welcome dinner for my wedding and later introduced my three-day-old daughter to the owner. Now that same daughter – age five – pops in with me when we pick up those Shanghai-style noodles as often as we can fathom doing so. In my own childhood, I often spent my precious allowance on the curry beef hombow at Pike Place Market, and that served as enough motivation to drag the family down there and enjoy the calm of tourist-free weekends there more than once over the last year.

But the list isn’t only places full of memories: the spunky spirit and tender noodles of Kamonegi earn it a place, along with the knowledge that I’ll always get a good sake recommendation, and the beguilingly savory eggplant rolls and Instagram-friendly khachapuri from Skalka remind me that I never want the city to again be without great Georgian cuisine. I always need more cretzels from Coyle’s, dumplings from Fashion Dim Sum or Little Ting’s, and hot pot from No. 9 Alley.

I sometimes get distracted by the wealth of incredible food the pandemic has brought us – Nigerian food pop-ups, more than a dozen new places to buy pizza, and ever so many cakes – but making my love list helped me to make sure that at least once a month, I was hitting someplace I treasured.

Creating a list of the places you love, the ones that would devastate you if they closed, offers some focus for figuring out where to spend whatever dining dollars you have. It also means that, should the worst happen, you will have had at least one last meal in this place that is so special to you. In many cases it offers a chance to chat with owners, hear what their year has been like and if there’s something they need. Or maybe it’s just making sure they have one more customer during a tough time.

Each visit so far has, hopefully, been a boon to the restaurant, but definitely to my own spirits. It reminded me why I love the place, and how delightful it is to have a business that fills you with warmth, happiness, and good food. You can’t save the restaurant industry alone, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try like heck to save the places you love.