If you come to Seattle's Pike Street Market, you must eat two things: 1) the clam chowder at the little stand in the picture and 2) the fresh doughnuts near the newsstand. The Market Grill is really tiny but they have clam chowder the way you always wished that it would be. Not gelatinous, fishy and flavorless. Not served in some crappy sourdough bread bowl to distract you from the fact that the clams still taste a little tinny. It's creamy, colorful and smooth, full of fresh herbs and perfect little potato cubes. I look forward to coming to here whenever I can make it to Seattle. It is also imperative that I go by the doughnut cart. It's run by some smelly, tattooed hipsters but you can ignore this because they have mastered the art of doughnut making. Perfect, sweet batter and the doughnuts are always hot, fresh and crispy. They give them to you by the dozen in a greasy paper bag and I always wish that I'd gotten more. In a perfect world I would have my own cart so that I could have these babies every morning for breakfast. I'm gonna keep that dream alive as long as I can (or as long as my cholesterol holds out).
And of course the most amazing seafood is here too. We chowed down on some grilled oysters and clams from Pike Street later that night. They are so pretty!
One of the things that Pike Street is famous for is that the workers throw the fish around the market. You may have heard of this. It's a gimmicky thing for tourists, but it's actually kind of cool so watch some strapping young man fling a 30 lbs fish over the heads of a gawking crowd. There has been a big controversy lately about the practice, and PETA is trying to shut it down. Their argument is that throwing around the carcass of an animal is disrespectful. Seriously? What about eating said animal? This seems a little ridiculous considering that said fish is soon going to be filleted, grilled and eaten, which registers a little higher up on my disrespect scale. It's already dead...I can't imagine that the fish minds at this point. So they did something even more ridiculous to protest the offensive practice. They all dressed up as fish and laid on the sidewalk half-naked. I kind of wonder if maybe they all just had some Burning Man costumes lying around that they were desperate to use again, so they hatched an elaborate scheme about the fish-throwing. At least that's what I would have done if I had a mermaid tail in my closet.
While I was wandering around the market with my folks, going to all my favorite vendors, we came upon another reason that I like this town so much: there in the middle of the thoroughfare was a pie eating contest, complete with adorable kids and adoring parents snapping photos. My cute-meter broke as I was watching it, that's how damn darling it was. This part of the country is so unashamedly podunk, even in the cities. I was just in Portland and had flashbacks to my Mid-Western childhood, with all its polite citizens and American Legion posts.
And there's nothing more Americana than cherry trees, with that George Washington story and all. I spend two lovely afternoons picking cherries in my dad's back yard and two even better morning eating cherry pie and drinking coffee. God bless the USA.
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