Thursday
Sep182008
Seattle Dining
Thursday, September 18, 2008 at 6:29PM
This is one of those things where I'm making a note more for my future Googling than for anyone else, but this information is not useless for other readers.
One thing about going to PAX is sorting out the food situation. The conference center itself has a lot of fast food options, but A ) none of them are very appealing and B ) they are all jam-packed with PAX attendees. (I heard the Subway in the convention center ran out of bread at one point during the weekend.) There's a Daily Grill across the street from the convention center which is just pricy enough to not be swamped, but still casual enough I feel OK about going there in jeans and a t-shirt; but that only covers one meal really. The convention center is downtown, so you know there are plenty of dining options nearby but you want to identify good choices and move efficiently, right?
Karin started using this site called Earthcomber.com to look for places to eat. If you go there in a regular browser it's sort of a weird site but it looks fine on an iPhone. There's a Yelp app for iPhone but A ) Yelp doesn't really work without a certain critical mass of reviews which Seattle didn't quite seem to have, and B ) it does searches centered on where you are which is usually great but sometimes you're at your hotel and searching for place for dinner and what you really want is next to the convention center.
Anyway, she found two fantastic places that I can recommend for downtown Seattle. The first is a place called The Oceanaire Seafood Room on 7th Avenue, and the second was The Islander on Union Street (down by the water). The Oceanaire was almost too nice for a t-shirt and it was certainly more expensive but it was great food. In particular they served a little tray of pickled veggies and some pickled herring that I quite liked. Karin didn't even want to try it so that was just more herring for me!
The Islander was a little more laid back. They had some nice tiki drinks and good polynesian-style dishes - I had a really good chicken coconut curry. The only downside to this place was we stuffed ourselves (had to get a Pu Pu Platter right?) and then had to walk like six blocks UPHILL back to our hotel.
Anyway, next year I'll probably want to go to both of these places again. And skip the mediocre breakfast we had the first day in the hotel restaurant. :-)
One thing about going to PAX is sorting out the food situation. The conference center itself has a lot of fast food options, but A ) none of them are very appealing and B ) they are all jam-packed with PAX attendees. (I heard the Subway in the convention center ran out of bread at one point during the weekend.) There's a Daily Grill across the street from the convention center which is just pricy enough to not be swamped, but still casual enough I feel OK about going there in jeans and a t-shirt; but that only covers one meal really. The convention center is downtown, so you know there are plenty of dining options nearby but you want to identify good choices and move efficiently, right?
Karin started using this site called Earthcomber.com to look for places to eat. If you go there in a regular browser it's sort of a weird site but it looks fine on an iPhone. There's a Yelp app for iPhone but A ) Yelp doesn't really work without a certain critical mass of reviews which Seattle didn't quite seem to have, and B ) it does searches centered on where you are which is usually great but sometimes you're at your hotel and searching for place for dinner and what you really want is next to the convention center.
Anyway, she found two fantastic places that I can recommend for downtown Seattle. The first is a place called The Oceanaire Seafood Room on 7th Avenue, and the second was The Islander on Union Street (down by the water). The Oceanaire was almost too nice for a t-shirt and it was certainly more expensive but it was great food. In particular they served a little tray of pickled veggies and some pickled herring that I quite liked. Karin didn't even want to try it so that was just more herring for me!
The Islander was a little more laid back. They had some nice tiki drinks and good polynesian-style dishes - I had a really good chicken coconut curry. The only downside to this place was we stuffed ourselves (had to get a Pu Pu Platter right?) and then had to walk like six blocks UPHILL back to our hotel.
Anyway, next year I'll probably want to go to both of these places again. And skip the mediocre breakfast we had the first day in the hotel restaurant. :-)
tagged Dining, Earthcomber, PAX, Restaurants, Seattle in Journal
Dining, Earthcomber, PAX, Restaurants, Seattle in Journal 
Reader Comments (2)
Actually, on Earthcomber you *can* change your location pretty easily: just go the main screen and hit “Set Location.”
Choices are:
Zip code
Address (whole thiing)
Any City
Previous Locations (that you’ve picked, like home, the hotel you always stay at, etc.)
So yeah, then you can “virtually” go somewhere and everything shown around you will be GPS’d around that point. Which is cool for checking out places you’re going to go to, to get the lay of the land, like you suggested.
(This is actually Tim reposting a comment made by jimbochicago that got lost in a DB crash. See http://www.hiddenjester.com/~tsanders/?p=641" rel="nofollow">my longer explanation. Sorry for any confusion.)
Yes, I’m sorry my post was a little unclear. Earthcomber was cool because it DID let us change location, whereas Yelp did NOT. So that’s exactly why we were using Earthcomber.
My comment about Earthcomber’s site being “sort of weird” was because when you go there it has a simulated iPhone interface and that led me to believe it was an iPhone application, which it is not. From a “regular” browser any of the main links at the top want you to login. So if you’re just trying to see what Earthcomber can offer you either need to use A ) A mobile browser to begin with, B ) the (to my mind odd and unusual) simulated iPhone, or C ) point your desktop browser at the mobile interface.
I’d personally recommend an interface that lets a first-time visitor see what Earthcomber is about in a normal browser sort of UI. When I click a link and I get a “you need to login” screen that’s pretty much a deal-breaker for me. If I can’t see if it’s the sort of site I want an account on then I generally don’t.