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To
Market in Seattle!
(The iconic Pike Place Market sign, above, overlooks the harbor in downtown Seattle - Tim Thompson, Seattle Convention and Visitors Bureau) The crowd begins to gather for the famous fish toss -- the main act at the Pike Place Fish Market. First you choose a fish on a bed of ice. Then one of the fish mongers - a fellow in rubber overalls who's as much an actor as he is a seller of fish - calls out to his compatriot behind the counter, tossing him the fish to be cleaned and wrapped.
(Mike prepares to do the famous fish toss at the Pike Place Fish Market. It takes about a minute, but it's classic Pike Place! - George Medovoy photo) It all takes about a minute, but it's vintage Pike Place Market, the four-block landmark overlooking the waterfront between 1st and Western Avenues, where Tom Hanks and Rob Reiner, sitting at the counter in the Athenian Restaurant, shared a plate of clams in "Sleepless in Seattle."
(The sign at the Athenian, where Tom Hanks and Rob Reiner shared a plate of clams in "Sleepless in Seattle" - George Medovoy photo) What's wonderful about Pike Place Market is that it's the real thing, a market where ordinary Seattleites do their shopping and come to eat and drink. Of course, if you're a visitor from out of town yearning for a taste of the authentic, so much the better for the wondrous discoveries you'll make -- like De Laurenti's, an Italian specialty market that started out catering to immigrants who were looking for items from the old country. Here you can pretend to be from the old country yourself because the shelves are packed with products found only in a specialty store - like gourmet pastas and over 100 olive oils.
(Order from 400 world cheeses, and the fellow behind the counter will wrap it for you. Of course, tasting is encouraged! - George Medovoy photo) The guy behind the counter will sell you one of DeLaurenti's 400 cheeses from around the world and cut it for you to order because, after all, nothing is wrapped in plastic. I still remember a wonderful moment when I sampled a slice of sheep's milk cheese from the Pyrenees, so rich and flavorful! One of DeLaurenti's most popular meat items is Rosemarino Salami, a specialty conceived by Armondino Battali, a retired Boeing engineer who decided to go into the salami-making business.
(Sample the wide selection of olive oils at DeLaurenti's - George Medovoy photo) Available only at DeLaurenti's, the salami includes organic rosemary from Bainbridge Island (just a short ferry ride away), and cracked pepper. And if Battali's name sounds familiar to you, it's because his son, Mario Battali, is the Food Channel's Iron Chef! Of course, DeLaurenti's is only a fraction of what Pike Place Market offers. The market has fruit and vegetable stalls, flower vendors, hand-crafted beers, breads of every variety, arts and crafts, international restaurants, cafes and food bars, wind-up toys, and vintage clothing stalls.
(Among the many stalls at Pike Place are the fresh vegetables and fruits - George Medovoy photo) You can have a cup of coffee at the original hole-in-the-wall Starbuck's, or, downstairs from the fish market, imbibe a drink in the Alibi Room - a bar-restaurant filled with old movie scripts that you can read, thanks to owner Tom Skerritt, who played Commander Mike 'Viper' Metcalf in "Top Gun." Shoppers have been coming to Pike Place Market since 1907, when, prior to the market's birth, a Seattle woman was charged $1.00 for an onion. That event set off a firestorm of protest and led to a movement for a market where farmers could sell directly to the people without the interference of price-gauging middlemen. On the first weekend of the new market, 12 farmers showed up - and no less than 1,000 housewives picked their wares clean. Today, the market houses 200 permanent tenants. The historic objective of bringing consumers and producers together is proclaimed in giant letters on the side of the main building: "MEET THE PRODUCERS." Of course, the market has long been a magnet for immigrants seeking to carve out a niche for themselves: Japanese farmers who dominated it for years until they were sent away to internment camps in World War II; Scandinavians who specialized in dairy products; and Sephardic Jews from Turkey who ran many of the fish stands. Today's newest immigrant group, the Hmong, sell fresh-cut flowers.
(The Emerald City can be seen from this bird's-eye view atop the Space Needle - George Medovoy photo)
You can just dive into the market and wander around, but my recommendation for a first visit is to go on a guided tour because for the uninitiated, it can all be very disorienting. You see, Pike Place Market was not designed by an architect, but by Frank Goodwin, a gold miner who made his fortune in the Alaskan gold fields, bought up the land for the market -- and then sketched the layout, helter-skelter, on a paper napkin! So for an "insider's view," I booked a tour with Michael Rogers, a very knowledgeable fellow who operates "Taste Pike Place Market," which includes tasting stops. "When people say they've been to the Pike Place Market," Rogers notes, "what they usually mean is that they've walked down the main arcade with about 100,000 other people, watched the guys throwing fish, taken a picture in front of the first Starbuck's, and then they think they've been to the Pike Place Market."
(At the Pike Brewing Company, you can sample the beers, from light to dark - George Medovoy photo) Lucky me -- Rogers showed me the market from the inside out, beginning with a gusto-filled send-off at The Pike Brewing Company, the creation of Charles and Roseanne Finkle, who were in the forefront of the Northwest microbrewery movement. There's
enough about beer here to keep you occupied all day, including a beer museum with
beer facts dating back to 6,000 B.C. The
first was Pike Naughty Nellie, a golden, artisan ale named for the "madam"
who ran the LaSalle Hotel. The beer is described, rather tongue in cheek, as "light,
but with plenty of sex appeal." That
was followed by my favorite, Pike Kilt Lifter, a Scotch-style, ruby ale, medium-hopped
with a powerful, sweet malt character. When
it started to get close to lunch, we decided to have a bite at the Crumpet Shop,
a crowded little place with customers enjoying the British pastry immortalized
by Charles Dickens in "Hard Times."
(The Crumpet Shop is the only one of its kind in America - George Medovoy photo) The shop, the only one of its kind in America, serves a variety of crumpets, like the "Vermont" with maple butter…all the way to a "toasted with egg," which goes well with one of the shop's homemade soups. Remember to get there early, because when they sell out, they just close up and go home! From the Crumpet Shop, we walked to an even smaller place, Rei Hanscomb's La Buona Tavola, which translates from the Italian to "The Good Table." Hanscomb is originally from Monterey, California. The specialties here are truffle oils and porcini oil, the latter being an extra virgin olive oil infused with porcini mushroom oil, and both products make foods sing with flavor.
(At La Buona Tavola, you must sample the delicious truffle oil - George Medovoy photo) We sampled both white and black truffle oil in a small cup of potato-leak soup, starting off first with plain soup, and then with the added truffle oil. Well, what a difference only a drop or two could make, adding a heavenly-rich earthiness to the soup. Hanscomb,
whose sister-in-law married into an Italian truffle-hunting family, suggests white
truffle oil for foods like scrambled eggs, mashed potatoes, and even the melted
butter that goes on your popcorn! And she recommends a drop or two of the black
variety for tomato sauces, mushroom dishes, and root vegetables. You
can also buy other Italian specialty items in La Buona Tavola, including pates,
wines, aged balsamics, and tiny bottles of truffle salt, which, again, requires
a very small amount to season food. "I tell people all the time," she says, "we have tasted the good, the bad and the ugly, so that you don't have to." On the wine side, you can also do wine tasting at La Buona Tavola, and for $5 you can taste Italian micro-wines, all from single-family-owned estates, which grow their own grapes hand-harvested. From high-end truffles, we walked to the Daily Dozen Doughnut Company, no more than a tiny corner in the vast market and just inside from where Rachel the Pig, the market's official bronze mascot, holds forth. The donuts sold here are only the centers, no larger than ping pong balls, and are sold warm in a variety of ways. I ordered them sprinkled with cinnamon. Half the fun, besides eating them, is watching the last one being tossed into the air for a crash landing into your brown bag.
(These tasty fish from the Pure Food Fish Market will grace someone's table for dinner! - George Medovoy photo) On our tour with Rogers, we made our way through the crowds in the main arcade to see one of the icons of Pike Place called Pure Food Fish Market, owned by Sol Amon, who is the longest-tenured employee in the market - he's worked here over 52 years. Sol's father, one of a number of Sephardic Jews who emigrated to Seattle from southern Turkey, opened the shop in 1914. At the fish stand, we tried a delicious sample of wild king smoked salmon. "Before Amon came up with his recipe for smoked salmon," Rogers notes, "Native Americans for a couple of thousand years, and in any culture where you have a highly-seasonal, highly-perishable product, someone brings out a way to preserve it." Toward
the end of our visit to Pike Place Market, we stopped to enjoy a southern Italian-style
gelato at La Bottega Italiana. "They
put their heads together to try and figure out what Seattle was missing,"
Rogers says, "and luckily they thought of gelato." Pike Place Market has some wonderful restaurants worth trying, so one evening, as the wind started kicking up on Elliott Bay, I walked to Café Campagne and knew right away that I had found "the perfect place."
(What fun - frites in a bag! - Cafe Campagne photo) This
cozy, French-style bistro with a bar on Post Alley is a local favorite, and by
10 o'clock a crowd of regulars had filled the place. The main dish, trout with almonds, was prepared boneless and sautéed to perfection. It came with salt-roasted potatoes in a delicious lemon-and-brown-butter pan sauce.
(Cafe Campagne also has an extensive wine list - Cafe Campagne photo) Being a chocolate lover, I couldn't resist the marquise au chocolat for dessert, which was made with dark chocolate, of course, and served with a raspberry coulis. The intimate café, with waiters who chat with you about the food, is the perfect match for the market, with its infectious, shared familiarity. But with all such treasures, you have to be on guard lest the forces of "development" pull the rug out. Indeed, it almost happened in the 1960's, when Seattle started hearing derisive comments about the market being an "eyesore," and people wanted to tear it down for condos and parking. But lucky for Seattle, Victor Steinbrook, the architect of the Space Needle, stepped in and spearheaded Friends of the Market, a grassroots organization that got Pike Place Market designated as an historic landmark. So you have Steinbrook and his friends to thank the next time you watch the flying fish… and wonder why, back home, they don't entertain you where you shop. Have
a Massage After a day at the market, it's nice to "come home" to the Pan Pacific Seattle, a classy hotel with a very relaxing Japanese minimalist design.
(Couples can indulge themselves in a massage in the couples treatment room at the Pan Pacific Seattle - Vida Spa photo) The 160-room hotel is located in the heart of the Gateway District near Nordstrom's big flagship, original store, and only six blocks from the shores of Lake Union, where, if you're so inclined, you can take a seaplane ride above the city. You can catch the new Lake Union Trolley near the hotel and take it all the way to Nordstrom's. The hotel is also a short walk to the Seattle Center, home to the landmark Space Needle, which offers a breathtaking view of the city's expanse! I walked from the Pan Pacific to Pike Place Market - a pleasant jaunt you can do in about 15 minutes. The
Pan Pacific features a large fitness center and a 16,000-square-foot landscaped
plaza with a Starbuck's and a Whole Foods Market in case you want to take a snack
up to your room. Besides its 17 treatment rooms, the spa also features three couples' treatment rooms. Vida's treatments are based on the principles of Ayurveda, a 5,000-year-old system of holistic Indian medicine, which advocates a balance between body, mind and spirit. For example, Ayurvedic Massage incorporates warm sesame oil, which Vida says can mobilize the joints, while the Swedana Massage uses an aromatic cedar steam cabinet to cleanse and detoxify the system. All very nice after a day at the market! WHEN YOU GO… For
general information about Seattle, visit www.visitseattle.org,
or call (206) 461-5840.
(The Washington State Ferry makes its way across the water to Bainbridge Island - Tim Thompson, Seattle Convention and Visitors Bureau) Time permitting, take the Washington State Ferry for the 35-minute ride to Bainbridge Island on the Kitsap Peninsula. The island, known for its art community and Saturday farmers market, is also home to the small Bainbridge Island Vineyards and Winery.
(The Bloedel Reserve includes the lovely Bloedel estate, which is open to visitors - George Medovoy photo) Bainbridge Island also contains the Bloedel Reserve, which contains 150 acres of serene gardens, including rhododendrons, the state flower, and the Bloedel family's former stately residence with hundreds of volumes on gardening. Check out www.VisitKitsap.com for more information.
Pan Pacific Seattle has just introduced a series of thematic room packages for the balance of 2008, to accommodate everyone from those who want to get fully pampered to music enthusiasts and those on a romantic rendezvous. Valid through December 20, 2008, the rates listed below are based on availability and are the starting prices as seasonal fluctuations may apply. For reservations and additional information, visit panpacificwest.com or call 877-324-4856. Pampered Package: Starting at $399 Overnight accommodations; breakfast for two; parking; 3PM late check-out; spa treatment ($100 gift card); spa Amenity (dosha bag/gift)
Sounds of Seattle: Starting at $279 Overnight accommodations; two tickets to the Experience Music Project (EMP); Battle of the Bands/EMP CD; breakfast for two; parking
Bed & Breakfast: Starting at $269 Overnight accommodations; breakfast for two; Mimosas; parking
Similar to the amenities found only at the world’s most sophisticated properties, the world-class Pan Pacific Seattle features an innovative concept of “High-touch, High technology,” setting a fresh standard for excellence in the Pacific Northwest with personalized service and amenities. As Seattle’s new elite, urban destination, Pan Pacific Seattle features 160 high-style Hirsch Bedner-designed guest rooms; Hypnos Royalty warranted mattresses; flat screen TVs and flexible in-room working spaces; wireless broadband connectivity available throughout hotel; a modern library lounge offering cocktails and light snacks; full service fitness center; 5,405 square feet of Seattle’s most luxurious function space; and 24-hour private dining. Guests will enjoy views of the Space Needle, Lake Union or the city lights. Located at 2200 Westlake, the development is part of a 455,000-square-foot mixed-use project occupying a prime location just four blocks from Seattle’s Central Business District, within walking distance of Nordstrom’s flagship retail store and Pacific Place and minutes from scenic Lake Union.
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