Three Girls and Jacks, Pike’s Market, Seattle
D and I often decide to have progressive dinners especially when we are traveling. We don’t often have a meal that lasts all day long as we did recently on our last full day in Seattle. In spite of being almost directly next door to the world’s original Starbucks, we stopped for a photo and seeing that there was no place available to sit, we found a croissant and coffee spot when we could map out our strategy of covering off Pike Market most efficiently.
After taking in the original fish tossing counter, browsing the beautiful crafts, photographing artisan produce and tasting the offered slices of pears and apples, we met at the lunch counter in the back of the 3 Sisters Bakery.
Knowing that this was THE place to taste a meatloaf sandwich, we forgot our own pledge to only eat seafood all that day. The sandwich though was worth the deviation with its homemade brown bread, soft textured and savoury meatloaf, mayo, Dijon and meatloaf sauce (ketchup, brown sugar and Tabasco).
When a respectable time arrived for D’s first beer of the day, he guided me towards The Pike Brewing Company where he chose a whit beer worthy of attention.
A couple of hours later we plunked down at the back counter of another Pike’s icon-Jack’s Fish Spot boasting the world’s most fabulous, famous, freshest and ….. Sitting next to us was a student from Vancouver and next to him another one from Calgary. One was originally from Beijing and the other from South Korea. They tried to find a common Asian language between them but ended up conversing in English. They had both ordered Jack’s fish chowder in a hollowed out loaf of bread. They took pictures of eating the unknown phenomena. We enjoyed the enjoyed the same silky chowder in a paper cup topped with oyster crackers. The bacon, potato, onion and plentiful seafood chowder was picture worthy indeed.
Next up was a shared order of scallops so delicately fried that the flesh had just begun to transform from translucent to opaque. With a squeeze of lemon and a horseradishy cocktail sauce, they were one of the eating highlights of this quick jaunt. I won’t even mention that they were nestled upon the most delectable fries.
I purposely did not want to go into details on the fries even though they were worthy of extensive narration because later that afternoon D had researched our spot for an early dinner. You see, food isn’t our only motivation when selecting a dining spot. J1 tasked D with tasting the largest variety of beer possible which suited D just fine as J’s beer passion is also becoming D’s.
Irony was not lost upon us here. We kept track of the score of the Winnipeg Jets game being played in Calgary, the day before we would see them in person in Vancouver at Brouwer’s, a Belgian brew house in Seattle where we ordered….wait for it ….poutine! Professed to have Seattle’s best Belgian pommes frites, we couldn’t resist (but should have). Not because the Belgian take, with beer cheese sauce, Belgian quad demi and fresh cheese curds and Berkshire pork belly wasn’t delicious in itself. but because we could have saved some of money and ordered the happy hour order for $3 instead of the $15 that we spent and still had room to go out for another shared seafood dinner, which we had to forgo.
Kath’s quote: “Scallops are expensive, so they should be treated with some class. But then, I suppose that every creature that gives his life for our table should be treated with class.”-Jeff Smith
Live simply, laugh often, love deeply.