I am Somer Canon: Shiftless lay-about, blog enthusiast, and more importantly, food lover. This blog will share my favorite recipes, cooking techniques, adventures in eating, and just about any subject pertaining to cooking and eating.
Last week, I had a HUGE hankering for chicken wings. I didn’t want to go to a chain restaurant or order from a pizza place (they always have the soggiest and most disgusting wings). So my husband did the only thing that makes sense: He got on Twitter and asked where was the best place in Reading to get a good serving of wings. The replies poured in and the vote was unanimous among that repliers; Jimmie Kramer’s Peanut Bar. I seemed to recall having seen this place on an episode of some “Best Of” show on the Travel Channel and was excited to learn that this place is five minutes from my house.
I didn’t take my camera and thus, have no pictures. I could kick myself…seriously. I’m going to be a new regular of this place. I. Am. In. Love.
The place is tiny. It’s got old floors. There are peanut shells littering the floor (their claim to fame is that they were the first to serve peanuts on the house and let their patrons throw the shells on the floor). The lighting was low, the bartender was CUTE (hey, it helped with the ambiance) there was a great beer list, it’s family friendly, and the food is fantastic.
We started with a dozen wings each as an appetizer. After jonesing for wings for more than a week, I was more than satisfied. They were delicious. As a rule for me, I like for my wings to be spicy enough for my nose to be running, but not so hot that I’m crying for my mommy. These wings were just right.
The way that they were served was genius, GENIUS I tell you. They were served in a bowl and there was a puddle of hot-sauce-goo at the bottom. They were swimming in their hot sauce. They were cooked to perfection. Crispy, not soggy and not overcooked either. Even when swimming in their hot-sauce-goo they maintained a crispness. I’m going back for more very soon!
As a main course, I had the N.Y Jewish Corned Beef on Rye sandwich. Just right. Just right. Again, I’ll be having that again after I’ve run through the rest of the menu.
The staff was super nice and attentive, the atmosphere was comfortable even though they were quite busy. The prices were a little high, yes, but I won’t begrudge them that. It was worth it. I liked this place so much, that when I go back, I’ll take my camera and give them ANOTHER post on here. I told you…IN LOVE.
I’m happy to see that my new city will offer me many strata of eating trials. I look forward to exploring further.
In 12 days I leave the West coast to return to my beloved East coast. I’ve lived here for 3 1/2 years. I can’t say that I’m sad to be leaving. I’m going home. Things that I’ve seen and experienced here have not all been the enlightening and culturally diverse things that I expected when I first moved out here. As a newcomer, it’s hard to find that charming, small-time, artistic subculture that one expects to find out here on the West coast. There’s a lot of corporate glam, a lot of money, and a lot of need to be trendy. These things I am not.
Eventually, though, we found those small places. Those charming places owned by local joe’s who greet you as you walk in the door and wave to you as you leave. Those charming places with menus sitting on the narrow but loving shoulders of only one or two people. Those charming places that serve warmth and that one-of-a-kind spirit that makes them a million times more special than any pretentious restaurant that has the audacity to charge astronomical amounts of money for cocktails and even more for their cream-soaked mediocre food.
Today, I took my husband out to lunch and we visited a couple of our favorite places. We went to the Santorini Greek Grill in downtown Kirkland (very close to the waterfront of Lake Washington). This place is a teeny tiny little joint that stops you in the street as you walk by with the seductive scents of Greek meats. Lamb for lunch? Oh sure, why not!
The gyros, salads, Souvlaki, baklava, falafel, and service are all TERRIFIC. I love this place. The food is served up lightening fast and on real plates to boot! Usually is itty bitty places like this, you get plastic forks and paper plates or baskets. It helps to eat off of a plate with a metal fork.
In a small funky place like this, I was worried that the decor was going to be really kitschy and scary like off of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Luckily, it’s not like that at all. All over the neutrally painted walls, framed photographs of different regions of Greece hang in a very cool and very West coast manner. It’s lovely.
The one piece of kitsch was this hilarious tidbit right by the entrance/exit.
This restaurant is even featured in Zagat. That means nothing to me, it’s just amusing that Zagat and I agree for once.
After our Greek lunch, we went a couple of doors down to the Seattle area’s best coffee shop. No, it’s not Starbucks. Out here, I’ve found that there are two very opinionated groups where Starbucks is concerned: those who are proud of it and those who hate it for being a corporate crap shoot. Now, I get Starbucks every once in a while simply because they are literally on every block in this area. But if I had my choice, I would go to Cafe Ladro. This place is what a Seattle coffee shop should be. Small. Friendly barista who doesn’t have a painted on fake smile. Fair prices. And in their goddamned iced chai lattes, there is more latte than ice…unlike how Starbucks serves them….assholes.
Sorry about that outburst. But Cafe Ladro is a superior coffee shop. It’s a small place, it’s mellow instead of that fake rushed sense that you get when in a Starbucks. It’s a cool and industrial look that is oddly more soothing than that manufactured and fake look that Starbucks is trying to sell. The coffee is BETTER. The pastries are BETTER. All of the drinks are BETTER.
Look at that understated logo. It’s perfection.
The station was very simple. In fact, I had a nice little conversation with the barista about the movie Zoolander as she filled our order. Nice lady.
Some other East Side places that I loved while here:
I realize that we’ve barely chipped the iceberg and I have regrets about that, but our time here is up and I look forward to getting to know a new city. But if you ever make your way out to this area, check these places out and have some great food without worrying about an offensively huge bill.
I meant to make braised lamb shanks for dinner tonight. I meant to blog about a dessert on here tonight. Alas, circumstances changed and my agenda has changed. We decided to go grab some fish n’ chips for dinner at a local place called Ivar’s. People around here talk about it like it’s the best place ever to get batter fried seafood and chowder. Since we love batter fried seafood and chowder, we decided that a gloomy and cold day like today would be a great time to try this place.
I’m taking a chance by posting this. It’s quite possible that a local will stomp my big toe after reading this.
This place was disappointing all around. We didn’t go to the original Ivar’s on Seattle’s waterfront, we went to a little fish shack in downtown Bothell, a suburb of Seattle. Actually, I’m giggling right now because I’m at their website and by the looks of it, it seems that the company would have you believe that it is a sit-down and elegant seafood restaurant. Umm, no. It’s not. We ate chowder from paper bowls, and ate our fried food from baskets lined with wax paper. Our drinks came in paper cups just like what you would expect from a fast food chain. That in and of itself would never bother me, but this place failed in the food department.
Their fries were ok. They tasted like a million other French fries I have eaten. Their regular fish was not so good. The breading was coarse and bland. The clam strips, the shrimp, were all covered in the same breading. I’ve had better come from my freezer.
The chowders were gross. I have nothing at all nice to say about those chowders. The Manhattan Clam Chowder (the red one) tasted like it came from a can. It had that cheap bouillon cube taste to it that was overwhelming and gross. Clam Chowder, I understand can be tricky, but if you plaster your restaurants and webpage with gloats of awards your restaurant has won, own up and put quality ingredients in your food. There’s just no excuse for cheap tasting soup.
The New England Clam Chowder (the white cream-based one) was weird. It was better than the Manhattan, but it was still not very good. The main taste in this soup was bacon. I want to taste the sweet briney taste of clams and I’m eating bacon-cream soup. That’s not right. This place is famous for it’s chowder and I hated it.
They also provided little plastic tubs of tartar sauce and ketchup with our meals; little pre-sealed Ivar’s condiments. The problem with these is that the tubs were only filled maybe 1/3 to 1/2 full. That’s a lot of plastic waste coming from a native restaurant of a city that considers itself progressive in environmental consciousness. And no, there was no recycling offered. Between my toddler and I, we used 3 tubs of ketchup and 1 tub of tartar sauce (I was sharing with my son and couldn’t use malt vinegar like I wanted)….that’s a lot of plastic going to a landfill and that was just us. I’m disappointed.
There were ants crawling around on the table top. That, to me, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I expect ants when I am eating on the ground in a park, but not in a restaurant.
The prices were a little high considering what we were eating. We were actually sitting in a booth in the back of a restaurant and the door to the kitchen was open and I could look right in. It was a bunch of deep fryers and freezers. It actually kind of reminded me of the kitchen in the back of the Krusty Krab on the show Spongebob Squarepants (I’ve got a toddler, people. Nickelodeon is very familiar to me!). Also, the “combo dinners” didn’t come with drinks. That’s ridiculous! And the drinks ended up being quite pricey! I am just so annoyed with this place. I could have gotten better tasting deep fried fish at a cheaper price from Captain D’s or Long John Silvers (that’s the comment that’s going to get me killed).
Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve had Fish N’ Chips made by a person from the UK. Those people KNOW how to batter and fry cod, ladies and gentlemen. I just really didn’t like this place, and that disappoints me because up until tonight I have absolutely loved all of the tiny food joints Seattle has to offer. Sorry, Ivar’s and Seattlites. It was NOT good.
Since we are leaving the Seattle area for the Philadelphia area in August, my husband and I have been trying to see the little food gems that Seattle has to offer before we go. I’ve already written about Momoya Sushi, L&L Hawaiian Barbecue, and Dick’s Burgers. These places, as you can tell, could all be considered “holes in the wall.” These aren’t 5 star restaurants that are likely to draw powerful men in business suits. These places are all humble and unpretentious. I like that. Here in Seattle, as in any other major metropolitan area, there are many high end restaurants that cost zillions of dollars for a crouton. I go to these places when I am forced to and I will admit that it is nice to have a fancy evening out maybe once a year, but I really prefer the low-brow kind of cuisine.
The place that we visited this weekend was Beth’s Cafe. Perhaps you have heard of this place from the Travel Channel. This place is most famous for it’s 12-egg omelettes. My husband and I saw it on television and joked that we should find this place….then we sort of forgot about it and went on with our lives. Well last summer we took a family trip to a nearby zoo and right across the street from the zoo was Beth’s Cafe. I pointed this out to my husband who quickly got excited about it and proclaimed that we would go the very next weekend. Fast forward to more than a year later and we still hadn’t gone. I was planning a nice Father’s Day for my husband and decided that now would be a great time to finally go the Beth’s and get the low-down on the hizzy….err something like that.
Of course we ordered a 12-egg omelette! I was certain that we wouldn’t eat it all and my husband (who loves the fact that I regularly eat waaaay more than him in a sitting) was certain that we (me) would eat it all. But let’s hold off on the food for a moment and talk about the place itself. Parking is in the back next to a run-down old building with a door that scared the heck out of me. It looked like a rat the size of a gorilla was going to jump out and punch me at any moment! The inside of the cafe is old and probably hasn’t changed since it was opened in 1954. The walls were dingy and had little splatters of food on them, the floor was worn and slightly muddy, and the booths have definitely seen better days. There are crayon drawings covering all of the walls. All patrons are provided with a small stack of regular white paper and a cup of crayons and are encouraged to doodle so that the cafe will always have new “art” all over the walls. It was funky and neat. It was a cool distraction to look around at all of the drawings. Since this place is open 24/7, I can imagine that more than one over-partied person has stumbled in there for a stack of pancakes and left behind a unique drawing.
The wait staff couldn’t have been more attentive or friendly. It was refreshing, really, to find such nice people. They were genuinely nice. When you go to small places like this as opposed to those big chain restaurants, you are more likely to run into genuine personalities waiting on you rather than the plastered on fake smiles of the teenaged wait staff at Applebee’s.
Never once did either my husband or I see the bottoms of our coffee cups, and for my husband that says a LOT. He’s a web developer; he’s practically immune to caffeine. When we were seated, we were immediately greeted with ice water and coffee. Almost as soon as we put our menus down, a happy face was there to take our order. When we stopped eating, a happy face was there to ask if we were done and to compliment us on how cute our son is (always a plus). I really enjoyed the wait staff at Beth’s.
Now for the food. We went on a Friday morning, but remember that it’s summer vacation for public schools and colleges and universities so this place was actually quite busy. When we ordered our 12-egg omelette, we expected that it would be a long wait before we got our food. We were wrong! The waitress brought us our food in no more than 5 minutes. That’s crazy! What was even crazier was the fact that this omelette was served to us on a huge pizza pan. It’s THAT big.
Underneath that huge stuffed omelette (stuffed with sausage, onions, green peppers and cheddar cheese) was at least a lb. of hash browns, and you can obviously see the toast. I wondered if a dish like this were pure novelty or if it was actually going to taste good. It was DELICIOUS. It was perfectly cooked. It was a joy eating this monster. The hash browns were also delicious even though the main flavor was of BUTTER. These things were soaked in butter…but in a good way.
Alas, we were unable to clean our pizza pan. We did pretty well though, huh?
Even with his enthusiastic help, we still didn’t eat the whole thing. I was partly disappointed, but we were mostly stuffed to the gills. That’s a lot or protein and carbs!
After the total experience: the food, the service and the atmosphere I would have to say that I would recommend this place to anybody. Yeah it’s a little dingy looking, but that lends to the personality of the place. Yeah the building is old and the parking lot is a little scary, but the people there are so cool. I absolutely loved it and would like to go again before we leave here.
I’m so glad that nobody ventured on here to call me a gross pig for my first set of confessions! It’s nice to know that the lure of sugary/salty goodness attracts more than just myself. But…..well…..tonight’s confession just might gross quite a few of you out. I’m going to talk about a genre of food that is generally considered disgusting. I might get my Foodie Club card taken away for admitting this, but what the hell. I LOVE FAST FOOD! Now grab your antacids and prepare to be over-greased.
-McDonald’s: The Big Mac is a great little sandwich. I have a hard time really calling it a hamburger because I generally prefer that my hamburgers contain more meat than bread (and “secret” sauce), and the Big Mac has only two pathetic smooshed patties. Ask me if I care. Go ahead. Ask. NO I DON’T CARE! I love that thing! And I LOVE their French fries! When I was in high school, I would eat basket upon basket upon basket of their French fries. I don’t really care for much else on their menu, but I am a hardcore Big Mac fan. Someone get me a t-shirt!
-Wendy’s: I like those little itty bitty burgers on their $0.99 value menu. Their fries stink, but those bitty burgers are great for a little snack. They used to have a Bacon Burger that I loved but they replaced it with something called the Baconator and I’ve gotta say….I just can’t bring myself to eat that thing. It looks way too gross. Oh, and I don’t like Frosties. LOVE their chili, however and I love their baked potatoes.
-KFC: Original Recipe only please. They have the best coleslaw in the world and their biscuits make me weep. If either of my grandmother’s cooked, I imagine that it would have tasted like this. In fact, my paternal grandmother seemed to always have buckets of KFC magically appearing on her table. Anytime anyone even considered going to her house, a bucket of chicken appeared.
-Taco Bell: Yes please. I love their Mexican Pizzas and their Quesadillas. And their Gorditas. And almost everything else on their menu. Except the Choco Taco. Blech.
-Dairy Queen (Brazier): It’s not the best out there, but something about it seems old-timey to me. Is that weird? My maternal grandmother used to take me there for chicken sandwiches and onion rings when I was little and eating those two things always remind me of her, and since I miss her so terribly it’s a nice way to remember her.
-Burger King: If there isn’t a McDonald’s or a Wendy’s around, I will go get a Whopper. I hate their fries and WILL NOT eat them. However, they used to have a burger that they would bring out every summer called the Rodeo Burger. It had barbecue sauce and onion rings on it and it was soooo good. And huge. Bring it back!
-Pizza: I like making homemade pizza, but I also love just ordering a greasy home delivery pizza. Why? Because I can get chicken wings with it. Extra cheese, pepperoni and red onion. Nothing else!
-Hot Dogs: I’m originally from West Virginia and I am told that the way that we eat our dogs is strange. Ketchup, mustard, chili, and onions. That’s weird? Really? Oh well, it’s delicious and it’s something that I miss terribly. The best hot dogs in WV come from a place called T&L Hot Dog. They also served fresh fries with cheese.
-Chinese Takeout: This is something that can be either really good or simply terrible. Really good is a rare find, but boy when you find it, is it ever a great indulgence! Cheese wontons, egg drop soup, egg rolls, spring rolls, noodles, chicken, beef, pork….YUM! I’ve been without a REALLY good Chinese takeout for 3 years now. Philadelphia, damn it, you’d better offer it up!
-Sub Sandwiches: I like both Quizno’s and Subway. They offer two different kinds of sandwiches for the most part. If I want a cold sandwich, I go to Subway. If I want a beef dip or toasted sub, I go to Quizno’s. Both are fine in my book.
-Arbie’s: I love their roast beef sandwiches. Smother them in some mayo and they’re golden. Also, CURLY FRIES! SQUEEE!
Wow, that’s a long list. I’m almost ashamed of myself! Almost. Overall, I’d just like to say that I really enjoy “slumming it” when it comes to the partaking of food. I cook better than what these places offer and I can emulate almost anything from these places, but sometimes that convenience is just too tempting! It’s something that’s maybe a once a week thing. I try to cook most of our meals but sometimes I just want a Big Mac or a Mexican Pizza. Am I really so very different from you, mister hoity-toity foodie? We all like to slum it!
Once again, I’m going to be shaking in my boots all night long wondering when the comments about me being a gross pig will come rolling in. Name-call all you want, you will not shake my foundation of fast food love! And yes, in case you’re wondering, I DID watch Super Size Me and didn’t eat McDonald’s for a month after. And that was the hardest month of my life up to that point.
I am Somer Canon: Shiftless lay-about, blog enthusiast, and more importantly, food lover. This blog will share my favorite recipes, cooking techniques, adventures in eating, and just about any subject pertaining to cooking and eating.
