Our Top 15 Best Seattle Dishes of 2018 (Part 2)
We’re blessed to have so many great restaurants in Seattle. We’ve been able to discover a lot of new restaurants, but revisit a lot of our favorites. In reviewing our favorite dishes of the year, we originally had a top 10, but had such a difficult time deciding that we expanded it to a top 15. Truthfully, we could have expanded it to 25, but what would be so special about that many dishes? So 15 seems like a good compromise. We tried to pick a variety of dishes in price range from simple sandwiches and tacos to filet mignon and base it purely on taste.
You can take a look at Our Top 15 Best Seattle Dishes of 2018 (Part 1) post for our top dishes of 2018 from #15 through #8.
Without further ado here are the top 7 Seattle dishes of 2018….
7. Revel – Short Rib Dumplings with pickled shallots, scallions.
Revel is probably our favorite restaurant in Seattle. They’ve temporarily moved to South Lake Union from their original space in Fremont, but will move back once their new digs are complete. As mentioned in our previous article, there are a couple of restaurants that could have multiple dishes on our top 15 list. Revel is one of them, but the dish we chose is the Short Rib Dumplings with pickled shallots and scallions. First off the dumplings are massive and the savory of the dumplings is complemented by the pickled sourness of the shallots to make a great combination. We love this with a side order of rice.
6. Chiang’s Gourmet – Fish Fillet w/ Spicy Hot Sauce on Soybean Cake
Chiang’s Gourmet is one of the most underrated restaurants in Seattle for various reasons. It’s a difficult location to get to since it’s right off an I5 offramp in NE Seattle. It’s a very unassuming building that used to be an A&W Root Beer Drive-In restaurant. Also, if you’re not careful you might order things off the “American” menu(one of four of their menus), which is a rookie mistake that you don’t want to make. Chiang’s Gourmet is probably best known for their house made noodles, but our favorite dish is the Fish Fillet with Spicy Sauce and Tofu. It may not look so appetizing from the photo below, but it’s damn tasty. It has generous portions of fish, but the main reason you get this dish is the sauce. It’s not overly spicy and ohh sooo.. flavorful. A hack we learned is to take the sauce home even if we eat all the fish. We then pour the sauce over rice at home and create a brand new dish. Two yummy dishes for the price of one!
5. La Conasupo – Carne Asada and Carnitas Tacos
I’m hesitant to even mention La Conasupo because I don’t want any more people to know about and get any more crowded than it already is. It’s located in the back of a small Mexican grocery store in Greenwood. Take a look at these bad boys in the pictures. Each dish pictured below is just two tacos! If you take this home and have some extra tortillas you can easily turn this into 4 or 5 tacos. These are definitely the best tacos when looking at bang for your buck due to the portion size, but these are also the best tasting tacos in Seattle. I defy anybody to name me a better taco in Seattle.
4. Kisaku – Salmon filled with Ikura with a quail egg on top.
The whole Omakase at Kisaku deserves to be on this list but this concoction of Salmon filled with Ikura with a Quail Egg is da bomb! We’re already huge fans of egg yoke. Add the saltiness of the Ikura and fatty cuts of salmon and we just had to have seconds of this dish. Whenever we go here, we always ask for this. It’s not on their menu, so we just have to describe it when ordering it. We believe Kisaku is the best sushi restaurant in Seattle. Yes, better than Shiro’s, Mashiko, Kappo Tamura, Nishino or Chiso.
3. Kokkaku – Ton Katsu, Lan Roc Pork Tenderloin
Excerpt about this dish from our Kokkaku review- The other entrée we got was the Pork Tenderloin Ton Katsu. Normally, traditional tonkatsu is a slender piece of pork and here they replace it with a thicker pork tenderloin. I always have issues keeping pork tenderloin moist whenever I attempt to make it at home, but this dish is a homerun. So damn tender and moist! They provide a mortar and pestle to ground up sesame seeds and then you can put the ground seeds on the tonkatsu and pour the sauce over it or combine the seeds with the sauce and use it for dipping, which is what we chose to do. We also ordered a bowl of rice to eat with the tonkatsu, but they also provide a huge mound of shredded cabbage with citrus
2. Junkichi Robata Izakaya– Yaki Gaki-grilled shucked oysters , chives w/homemade soy sauce
Excerpt about this dish from our Junkichi Robata Izakaya review-All the dishes were good, but the one dish I would order over and over again would be the Yaki-Gaki, the grilled oysters. The oysters are monster huge and normally my preference for oysters is raw, but the char from the grill along with the oyster juice left over in the shell is sooo good.
1. Cantinetta -Co Winner Dishes: Tomato Farfalle, rabbit sausage, basil and Tagliatelle,guanciale, farm egg, black pepper
This little Italian gem of restaurant in Wallingford could have had seriously 5 or 6 dishes in the top 15 dishes we had in 2018. The Lopez Island Clams with Nduja Sausage, Shallots, Vino Blanco, the Black Pepper Tagliatelle, Carbonara, Prosciutto, and the Flank Steak with Black Trumpet Mushrooms and Port Butter also could have made the top 15 but the best dishes of 2018 are….
Tomato Farfalle, rabbit sausage, basil– The main issue we had with this dish is that it was a small portion and it was gone and eaten in no time. We really don’t order farfalle that often and basil is not one of my favorite herbs, but I was really interested in the rabbit sausage, so we ordered this dish. So glad we did. Put it all together and it was perfect. No one ingredient overpowered the others and together worked so well. The minty-ness of the basil, the tomato farfalle pasta combined with the slightly gamey, but so savory sausages. Perfect.
Tagliatelle, guanciale, farm egg, black pepper– So simple, so good. It was like a spin on a carbonara. Again, with a raw egg yoke it already had an advantage to being named a best dish of the year. Combined with hand made Tagliatelle and quality cured meat from the jowl/cheek of pork and it got us wondering how something so simple could be so damn good. We broke the yoke, mixed it all up, devoured it and ordered it again.
After reviewing the 15 Best Seattle Dishes of 2018, we’re reminded how lucky we are to live in a city with such a variety of quality restaurants with a wide price range. We want to especially thank local friends and the servers at the various restaurants who suggested places we’d never heard of. The top 3 dishes were from restaurants that were suggested to us and we’d probably never have visited these restaurants were it not for these suggestions.
You can take a look at Our Top 15 Best Seattle Dishes of 2018 (Part 1) post for our top dishes of 2018 from #15 through #8.
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