Things to do in Washington
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Pike Place Market
The fishy-smelling, tourist-thronged heart of downtown Seattle is Pike Place Market. It's good theater, though claustrophobically crowded. The Main and North Arcades are the most popular areas, with bellowing fishmongers, arts and crafts, and precarious stacks of gemlike fruits and vegetables.
Tiny shops of all descriptions fill the lower levels of the market. It is open all week, though individual shop/stall hours do vary. Try a weekday morning if you don't like crowds.
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5 Spot
In Upper Queen Anne, everyone’s favorite breakfast and hangover diner is the 5 Spot. Good strong coffee keeps the staff ultraperky. Try a local legend, like the red flannel hash ($9.50), or get crazy with the wild-salmon cakes. On weekends, go early to avoid the lines snaking out the door – or go for lunch or dinner; this is an excellent place for a quiet meal featuring good American cooking.
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74th Street Ale House
A sibling to the Hilltop Ale House in Queen Anne, this is the kind of place that, if you lived nearby, you’d find yourself in several times a week. It’s immediately comfortable, to the point that you feel like an instant regular – plus there are dozens of outstanding beers on tap, and the food is miles above usual pub standards. The goat cheese salad ($9) is rightly famous.
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Bizzarro
With a name like Bizzarro you’d never guess that this Wallingford hotbed is an excellent neighborhood Italian cafe. When you learn that it’s actually someone’s garage crammed with kitschy art and weird antiques, the name makes sense. Deliciously buttery pasta dishes, a good wine list and frequent live music add to the experience.
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Salumi
Sure, you’ll have to wait in line. This is Mario Batali’s dad’s place, after all. But the line to get a Salumi sandwich is like its own little community. People chat, compare notes, talk about sandwiches they’ve had and loved…it’s nice. When you finally get in the door of this long, skinny shopfront, you’re further teased by display cases of hanging meats and cheeses. Sandwiches come with any of a dozen types of cured meat and a handful of fresh cheese on a hunk of bread – you can’t go wrong. There’s only a couple of seats, so be prepared to picnic. On Tuesdays, family members hand-roll gnocchi in the window.
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Black Bottle
The huge crowd congregating outside the front door of this new Belltown restaurant is your first clue that something interesting is happening inside. The menu has a lot more clues: octopus carpaccio, lemon-caper-squid salad, saffron risotto cakes, eggplant-mozzarella flatbread. It’s a spartanly decorated but warm-looking space, with friendly service and a chic atmosphere. Reservations are accepted, and might be a good idea if you want to avoid a wait.
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Agua Verde Café
On the shores of Portage Bay at the southern base of University Avenue, Agua Verde Café is a little gem that overlooks the bay and serves fat tacos full of lemony cod, shellfish or portabella mushrooms, plus other Mexican favorites. There’s usually a wait for a table, but you can have a drink and wait on the deck, or order from the walkup window. You can rent kayaks in the same building, in case you want to work off your dinner.
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La Carta de Oaxaca
This lively place serves the cuisine of Oaxaca, particularly black mole sauce – try the mole negro Oaxaqueno, the house specialty. You can sample the same stuff on tamales or go for a combination of various small plates. Seating is mostly picnic-style, and there’s a full bar – handy considering there’s usually a wait for a table.
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Pink Door Ristorante
Beloved for its atmosphere at least as much as its food, the Pink Door is an old-school favorite – on a nice evening, stopping for dinner and drinks on the deck overlooking the market is hard to beat. The menu is traditional Italian, and the vegetarian lasagne comes highly recommended.
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Alki Bakery
This is a great place to grab a coffee and pastry, then sit down at a window seat to partake of the bakery’s free wi-fi connection while digging your beach-front view. Cinnamon rolls and cookies reign supreme, but you can also get takeout sandwiches and salads to eat on the beach.
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Spud Fish & Chips
The competition is fierce over which Alki institution has the best fish and chips, here or Sunfish. (Why not try both?) Spud gets the tourist vote, with its crisp, beachy interior, friendly staff and large portions of fried fish, clam strips and oysters.
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Ballard Fish Ladder
On the southern side of the Hiram M Chittenden Locks, the fish ladder was built in 1976 to allow salmon to fight their way to spawning grounds in the Cascade headwaters of the Sammamish River, which feeds Lake Washington. Visitors can watch the fish from underwater glass-sided tanks or from above (there are nets to keep salmon from over-leaping and stranding themselves on the pavement). Sea lions munch on the salmon while the fish attempt to negotiate the ladder. Just what to do about the sea lions has stymied environmentalists, anglers and the local Fish & Wildlife Department. The best time to visit is during spawning season, from mid-June to September.
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Experience Music Project
The Experience Music Project (EMP) is worth a look for the architecture alone. The shimmering, abstract building – designed by Frank Gehry – was inspired by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen’s passion for Jimi Hendrix’s music and was initially intended as a tribute to Hendrix alone. It now houses 80,000 music artifacts, including handwritten lyrics by Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and a Fender Stratocaster that Hendrix demolished. There’s also Janis Joplin’s pink feather boa, the world’s first steel guitar and Hendrix’s signed contract to play at Woodstock.
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Le Pichet
This tiny French café, bistro and wine bar is elegant and tasteful, and yet it’s casual enough to quickly become a favorite haunt. The menu features traditional French cuisine without the aorta-clogging heaviness that this often implies. Breakfast is simple and delicious, and small snack plates of olives, almonds or various rillettes (potted meats) are available all day. For a treat, order the roasted chicken with celery and potatoes ($34); it’s made only on request and takes an hour, but is worth the wait.
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Beth’s Café
The best – or at least biggest – hangover breakfast in the world is at Beth’s, and you can get it all day long. Key words: all-you-can-eat hash browns. You can’t smoke in here anymore, which, depending on your view, either ruins everything or makes it possible to enjoy Beth’s infamous 12-egg omelet while breathing. Feel free to contribute a piece of scribbled artwork to the wall, preferably one that’s strongly pro- or anti-pirate.
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Hing Hay Park
If you need a tranquil spot to rest while wandering the ID, Hing Hay Park lends a little green to the otherwise austere district. The traditional Chinese pavilion was a gift from the people of Taipei. On Saturdays in August you can catch a free outdoor movie here beginning at sunset, sponsored by the Seattle Chinatown-International District, which also runs the summer Night Market here; for a full schedule, go to www.cidbia.org.
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Ivar’s Acres of Clams
Ivar Haglund was a beloved local character famous for silly promotional slogans (‘Keep clam!’), but he sure knew how to fry up fish and chips. Ivar’s is a Seattle institution that started in 1938. Forgo the dining room for the outdoor lunch counter; the chaotic ordering system involves a lot of yelling, but it seems to work, and then you can enjoy your clam strips or fish and chips outdoors on the pier.
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Pacific Science Center
This interactive museum of science and industry once housed the science pavilion of the World’s Fair. Today, the center features virtual-reality exhibits, a tropical butterfly house, laser shows, holograms and other wonders of science, many with hands-on demonstrations. Also on the premises is the vaulted-screen Imax Theater, a laserium and a planetarium.
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Macrina
You might have to wait in line, especially if you want to sit at a table, but as soon as you bite into your breakfast roll or lemon lavender coffeecake, you won’t care. Macrina makes some of the city’s best artisan bread and decadent snacks.
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Skycity
Balanced on top of the Space Needle, this revolving restaurant makes a full turn every 47 minutes. The steep prices reflect both the setting (all tables have a full city view) and the fine dining incorporating fresh ecofriendly ingredients.
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Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley
Hidden in an unlikely spot behind a boring-looking office building is Seattle’s most sophisticated and prestigious jazz club. Dimitriou’s hosts the best of the locals and many national acts passing through.
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America's National Parks
15 days (ex Seattle)
by Intrepid
Soak up Seattle's edgy vibe, Enjoy spouting geysers and sulphuric springs in Yellowstone, Picnic in Grand Teton National Park, Jump in a Hummer and tour the Moa…Not LP reviewed
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Seattle Art Museum
The original Robert Venturi–designed building of limestone and ornamented terra-cotta (with Jonathan Borofsky’s enormous moving sculpture, Hammering Man, at its front door) contains 150,000 sq ft of space. Architect Brad Cloepfil’s design expanded the museum in 2007 into the adjoining Washington Mutual building, adding 118,000 sq ft, including a number of new spaces that are free to the public.
The sense of excitement is palpable from the museum’s entrance up to the main floors. Above the ticket counter hangs Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s Inopportune: Stage One – a series of white cars exploding with neon. Between the two museum entrances is the ‘art ladder,’ a…
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Green Lake Park
One of the most popular spots in the city for recreationalists and sunbathers, scenic Green Lake Park surrounds Green Lake, a small natural lake created by a glacier during the last ice age. In the early 1900s, city planners lowered the lake’s water level by 7ft, increasing the shoreline to preserve parkland around the lake. After the lowering, however, Ravenna Creek, which fed the lake, no longer flowed through. Green Lake became stagnant and filled with stinky green algae. Massive dredging efforts to keep Green Lake a lake (instead of a marshy wetland) continue. The lake is prone to algae blooms, which can cause an unpleasant condition called ‘swimmer’s itch’ to anyone …
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Lakeview Cemetery
One of Seattle’s oldest cemeteries and the final resting place of many early settlers, Lakeview Cemetery borders Volunteer Park to the north. Arthur Denny and his family, Doc and Catherine Maynard, Thomas Mercer and Henry Yesler are all interred here. This is also the gravesite of Princess Angeline, the daughter of Duwamish Chief Sealth, after whom Seattle was named. Most people, however, stop by to see the grave site of martial arts film legends Bruce Lee and Brandon Lee. Flowers from fans are usually scattered around Brandon’s red and Bruce’s black tombstones, which stand side by side in a tiny part of the cemetery. The graves are not so easy to find: enter the cemetery…
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