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.
