Joe Szilagyi

In no real or specific order, these are probably my favorite local Seattle institutions and places, since we’ve moved out here in 2005.

• Best new bookstore: Elliot Bay Book Company in Pioneer Square. All wood, all creaky floors, all nice helpful stuff. It’s scale is absurd, too, for an independent book store.
• Best used bookstore: Twice Sold Tales (the Capitol Hill one, not the one in the University District, but that one is good too). Inexpensive, great selection, and the place is lined with sleepy, bored, and surly cats.
• Best coffee shop: Seattle Coffee Works at the Market. Their stuff is just the best, sweetest coffee. Runner up: Espresso Vivace’s little sidewalk bar on Broadway.
• Best food shopping: Pike Place Market. Duh.
• Best grocery store: Safeway, hands down.
• Best park: I really like Volunteer Park, but I have to go with Alki Beach in West Seattle. Rocky expanse of water, bitterly cold and windy in the winter–it reminds me of home. And one of the best views of the downtown Seattle skyline. Nail in the coffin: when the sun sets over the Olympic Mountains to the west, around 10pm in the summertime, Alki is hands down the best place to watch it. On a clear day, the sun ignites the whole sky with what I’ve been told (who knows if it’s scientifically accurate?) remaining particulates from the Mount St. Helen’s eruption. It looks like the sky is on fire, and the mountains as if someone ripped a slice out of the sky into blackness. Gorgeous.
  

  View of the Space Needle from Alki Beach.

• Best museum: The Museum of Flight at Boeing Field. Fine arts? Modern art? Sculptures on the waterfront? Yeah, sure. But do you have a stealth fighter docked in your museum? I didn’t think so.
• Best movie theater: Cinerama on 4th Avenue. Fantastic sound system. Fantastic screen. Gigantic, enormous screen, bordering Imax levels. They show old films sometimes–Lawrence of Arabia is a regular there in the off seasons from the big blockbuster releases. Sit in the balcony, dead center, about 4-5 rows up for the magical sweet spot.
• Best comic book store: Golden Age Collectables. It’s a retail Disneyland for geeks and nerds in every way.
• Best way to get around: King County Metro bus service. To be honest, it’s almost like having Boston’s train lines just… everywhere. They even put a lot of their information out in the public, for people to make tools like One Bus Away. This is the reason I do not miss having a car any longer (for a city of our nature, size, and scale, a surprising amount of the population relies heavily on Metro).
• Best cheeseburger: Charlie’s on Broadway. Runner-up: a Dick’s Deluxe, any of their locations. Greasy, vile, perfect.
• Best breakfast: The Athenian Inn at the Market, for their wonderful Hangtown Fry. An omelette with oysters? Yes, please. Even better with liberal hot sauce usage and a Bloody Mary.
• Best place to see a show: The Triple Door, hands down, full stop. Runner up: The Showbox at the Market.
• Best pizza: Pagliacci; Grand Salami Primo. If only a) they delivered before 4pm; b) they weren’t so pricey…
• Best local beer: Pike Place Place Brewery, “Kilt Lifter Ale”.
  

  Nectar of the gods.

Wherein I eat four smallish bags of local crisps (chips, to us Americans) to see what is what. It seemed like a good idea for 20 seconds at the gas station by my hotel, when I wanted a bottle of soda.

At ten years old, delighted sight. At thirty-three, glee stupidity.

Doritos “Tangy Cheese”

Apparently, according to the bag, this is flavored with the well known traditional British cheese known as “Traditional cheese flavour,” whatever that is. The texture, shape and crunch are vintage American Doritos. I think they just mass-produce these chips by the trillions. The cheese flavor tastes… Latin. Kind of. And cheesy. And Doritos-y. I can’t really place what “Traditional cheese flavour” is, but it tastes like slightly exotic Doritos.

Traditional Britis--er, Americ--er, Mexican?

I’d go so far as to say they’re a bit better tasting than American “Nacho cheese” flavored classic Doritos. The cheese powder they use to infuse Doritos feels a bit… fluffier, than I’m used to.

The scent of the crisps is vintage Doritos: cheese, corn, nothing unique. That sums up just about every brand of Doritos ever made (except possibly that Buffalo sauce one) pretty nicely. Bland, inviting, wholesome, and the same everywhere, like a junk food home away from home.

Deformed Pac-Man

Scent: non existent, or barely cheesy at best. They look like weird hybrid Fritos/pork rinds. They feel like potato-based pork rinds. The mysterious “Traditional cheese flavour” makes another appearance, but with strong hints of onion flavoring. They are loud when you bite down. I mean, really, seriously loud for a chip or crisp. The first few have virtually no flavor, but then it begins to quickly build as your teeth, tongue, and taken over by puffed potato. They taste and feel incredibly rich, though.

I can’t see eating more than a couple handfuls without feeling sick.

Walkers “Worcester Sauce” crisps

The bag, upon opening, smells spectacular. The scent reminds me of hamburgers and steak with potatoes. It’s like a cook out in a little foil bag. Visually, they’re… crisps. Nothing special, there. The texture is odd; they seem to nearly crumble and explode as you bite down, but it’s not unpleasant. The taste: reminds me of a severely toned down salt and vinegar chip, almost, but with subtle Worcester flavors. It’s not a “strong” chip that tries to beat you in the face with flavor; it’s almost quietly flavorful. I think these would go great with a glass of cold beer. I was hoping for a much stronger Worcester flavor—I love the taste of Worcester sauce. They’re good, but a bit of a let down.

Like a face with a wart? Look close.

Emergency late game update: I wrote the above after eating about 5-6 of these crisps, and then discovered another 2-3 that all but screamed Worcester. It looks like the bag is uneven. The later crisps are much better.

So manly it seared my flesh on contact.

This is not an effeminate potato chip.

I was most looking forward to these, as I adore the smell and taste of paprika—I have to, I’m half Hungarian. They smell like barbeque flavor crisps. They look like what I suppose a good paprika crisp ought to look like, never having seen paprika crisps before. The texture is that thick, crunchy sort of ridged chip, rather than that weak girly kind of chip that feels stale half an hour after you open the bag.

Paprika, garlic, onion, and tomato are the flavors here. Oddly for this kind of junk food, I can actually taste them all. Even though my palate and breath have already been ruined by the preceding three types I’ve tried tonight, I can taste them all. This is my favorite chip of the bunch.

Conclusions

Don’t eat four wildly different types of little crisps bags, because it’s unholy and now I feel ill. This is my breath currently:

Did I ever tell you my favorite flavour was paprika?

Yeah, just watch it. “What the hell?” sums it up.

If this commercial had come out when I was a kid, I’d still be traumatized today.

I bought this today downtown: Sweet apple bubble tea, with no milk, and with dark tapioca and unnatural gummi-like apple ‘things’ in the bottom. Andi took a photo.

I find this drink disturbing. I’d never had bubble tea before. I knew exactly what I was getting to. The apple tea itself? Delicious. I’d drink it again. At the same time I’m drinking it from a straw with the width and girth of a candy bar, and these jelly-like little creatures are slurping up into my throat and brain stem with every taste. I worked on it for a long bus ride, and then had to ditch it halfway through. I don’t know how I feel about eating my tea, but I wonder if that’s weird because I love tapioca pudding.

I’m trying, but I can’t think of a single food or drink before that I didn’t like because of the experience of eating it, but not for it’s flavor.

Amazing:

A lampshade made of bacon.

Happy Halloween. Scared corn, from Serious Eats:

Can Sushi Cat defeat Spaghetti Cat?

Sushi:

Spaghetti:

If you don’t know what Spaghetti Cat is, spread the word. We saw it first on The Soup, which we’re addicted to:

Spaghetti Cat would not leave, however:

My favorite music venue in Seattle

Originally uploaded by joeszilagyi

I love going to shows here. The only thing that stinks a bit about it is that it’s a bit pricey, so we don’t go too often. The sound, the ambience, the food (from it’s restaurant, Wild Ginger)… It’s down on 3rd & Union.

Sent from my mobile phone.

We have a local grocery store chain here in Seattle, called Thriftway (I assume they’re local; I’ve never seen them elsewhere). Like all of these chains these days, they have a fairly decent lunch counter with pre-made sandwiches, and hot soups. We’ve both gotten to really like these little baguette sandwiches, with ham and brie cheese, that are pretty cheap. That’s all the sandwich is–usually honeyed ham, some brie, some bread. They’re amazingly tasty and filling. Well, yesterday I go to Thriftway to get us lunch. As I’m standing in the checkout line, the cashier and I both sort of caught a whiff of… something. Was it a rotten scent? We couldn’t quite place it, and it seemed to disperse.

Literally, at the same time, we noticed it. We looked around, couldn’t spot it, and went on with our business when it faded. In the parking lot, putting the bags of groceries in the trunk, I smelled it again, and looked around, but couldn’t place it. I figured some animal had died somewhere nearby. Perhaps on the roof of the store? I shrugged and drove home. When I got back inside, and set out our lunch on the coffee table, to try to catch up on our growing Tivo archive while we ate, I smelled it again.

“Honey, do you smell that?” I asked Andi.

“Did you step in something? Check your shoes,” she said, wrinkling her nose. My shoes were clean.

I looked around, at the door, at Mojo, our cat, who stared back at me in confusion. The smell then faded. I unwrapped the sandwich and took a small bite, and started working on my soup–I’m a weirdo, and usually eat a sandwich or cheeseburger last, always eating my side salad, French fries, soup, or whatever else is at hand first. The smell immediately hit us both again, and Andi unwrapped her sandwich–they were the source of the horrible stench. I figure it was the brie somehow, that went bad, but the sandwiches were date-stamped for the day I bought them. I don’t think I’ve ever had a stinky sandwich before. We pitched them both in the garbage.

The soup was good, though.

Why do I suspect I’ll be looking down from up on the Space Needle today? Also, I have a craving for Lockspot. It’s peanut butter and jelly Hefeveizen and fried fish time!

The Seattle Cheese Festival is this weekend. God help my colon, but I’m going this year.

After seeing the play, we did wander to Beth’s last night…

Beth’s is fun.

Much coffee was drank (by me anyway).

I braved a fearsome six egg omelette with bacon and swiss cheese. I think I managed to eat about 5/6.

The chicken spawn won this round.

What should I eat?

…but I have a stomach full of nice sausage, rice, and beans. And saga continues here on ’s LJ. She’s like a volcano, every 48 hours she has to spew some shit in the air.

The whole office STINKS of bacon. Smells like someone just cooked ten pounds of it outside our window. Now I want some…