Sunday, October 21, 2007

The search for the perfect restaurant

Ever since the Studly Hubby and I moved to Seattle we have been searching for a few good restaurants. We are picky, so this is quite a task. We like to get consistently good food, reasonable prices, an accessible location (this is very limiting in Seattle, because traffic is so bad), and a mellow and pleasant atmosphere. In Minnesota we searched high and low and finally found two pizza places (Punch and Campus Pizza), a Mexican restaurant (el Norteno), an organic cafe (Birchwood), a BBQ joint (Famous Dave's), and a diner (Lake St Garage) that we just adored. That was quite a lot of choices, but we were there almost 6 yrs so we had a lot of time to find good restaurants. Even in our last year we were still discovering good ones, so it's definitely a process. We expected it to take a while in Seattle too, but we've been here over a year and haven't found anything we really like except a Mexican restaurant (Isla Bonita) way over on Bainbridge Island.

After my Studly Hubby started making big bucks over at Microsoft we doubled our efforts to find a good restaurant and started with all the ones in our neighborhood. Unfortunately most were too pricey, unimpressively bland, too crowded, or some awful combination of all of those. We found a pizza place (Wallingford Pizza House) and a Thai restaurant (May's) that are both really good but not quite perfect. We were starting to think the magic just wasn't going to happen when we finally hit the right place last night.

It's a Mexican restaurant, Guadalajara, only ten blocks away from us that we run past almost every day. They recently changed owners and previously had a bad reputation so the place was very quiet, but totally fantastic. Just the right combination. Plus they are really close. Now I just need to get the word out that they're good so they get enough business to stay open.

It's amazing what a huge step it is to just find the right restaurant.

4 comments:

Liz said...

I'm just amazed that you've already been in Seattle for a year! Crazy! :) Enjoy your new food findings! :)

Anonymous said...

It's always great to find a favorite joint.

Tink said...

Hoop and I are still looking for a few favorite dives. We have a lot of commercial rest. here. It seems they've devoured the business for all the Mom-N-Pop places we loved where we last lived. Which is really sad.

Newt said...

Ok, I haven't been to any of those places. We will be checking those out. Mexican we have found, chinese, pizza, and I just found a great little coffee shop. But I will check out all the ones you listed for the Twin Cities.

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