These are the Seattle restaurants would happily eat at again and again. If your favorite isn’t on here, email For the newest places that food obsessives are flocking to, check out the Eater Seattle Heatmap, updated monthly.
A Guide to Seattle’s Black-Owned Restaurants
Main courses like scallops in brown butter and walnut sauce are sensational, but you can also trust the Corson Building to create unique, perfectly balanced salads. No single restaurant can please everyone; at Off Alley, a 14-seat brick-walled restaurant in Columbia City, chef Evan Leichtling embraces that truth. You don’t always find a meticulously seasonal chef’s-choice cooking style and a hand-written list of cool natural wines paired with punk music and attitude, but that approach is working here. The menu changes daily, so check the website to see what you might encounter, from juicy smoked mussels with celery on sourdough and whole quail with nettles in a cream sauce to salt cod with squid ink rice and a burning-hot Scotch bonnet ice cream. But the dishes that shine brightest are her more traditional Southern ones, like the fried chicken served with jerk ranch or the hoecakes, a cornmeal pancake rarely seen in Seattle.
After all these years, Seattle’s equivalent of Paris cafe culture still perches on Post Alley in Pike Place Market. Chef Daisley Gordon does right by classic dishes—quiche, pan-roasted chicken, oeufs en meurette—and instills in his kitchen the sort of perfectionism that renders even the simplest asparagus salad or brunchtime brioche french toast memorable. The patio hits the sweet spot for another hallmark of Parisian cafe culture, watching all the people go by. The iconic city tucked inside the Pacific northwest coast does see a lot of rain, but when the sun shines on Seattle, it dazzles.
Saint Bread
We update this list as new restaurants open and existing ones evolve. This gallery has been updated with new information since its original publish date. The story of Luam Wersom working his way up from dishwasher to owner at this long-standing Latin American and Cuban restaurant is a great one. Dishes like vaca frita, tostones, and pescado en guiso—even the accompanying rice—bear the finesse of 20 years of experience. Tropically hued walls backdrop a patio that looks balmy no matter the weather. Maybe eight people per seating form a rapt audience as Aaron Verzosa and Amber Manuguid present roughly 10 courses that explore the Philippines’ many-faceted relationship with the Pacific Northwest.
Home of the “baby burrito,” Gordito’s in Greenwood may be Seattle’s most beloved Mexican restaurant according to the locals. Joule is a stylish Korean-fusion steakhouse using fresh Pacific Northwest ingredients. If you could only eat at one Seattle restaurant for the rest of your life, which would it be? That was the question we posed to our Instagram and Facebook followers. We took note of the most commonly-mentioned restaurants and rounded them up here for you in one convenient list.
Best Restaurants in Seattle
- Over the last decade and a half, chefs Rachel Yang and Seif Chirchi have built Joule into one of Seattle’s most respected Korean restaurants, and the tight, seasonal menu routinely has intriguing items like kung pao squash and Muscovy duck.
- What makes an omakase stand out so much that diners emerge in a jubilant daze, perhaps muttering admiring curse words under their breath?
- The current four-course tasting menu format gives diners multiple options for each round, a setup flexible enough to suit people who don’t usually love tasting menus.
- Every restaurant on this list has been selected independently by Condé Nast Traveler editors and reviewed by a local contributor who has visited that restaurant.
The nest of delicate tajarin pasta with butter and sage sauce is a Seattle mainstay, but every dish from chef Stuart Lane is memorable. After a satisfying dinner at Spinasse, head to next-door sibling bar Artusi for a digestif and dessert, or stop by the bar another night for snacks like beef tongue with salsa tonnata (tuna sauce) and burrata with pomegranate seeds and toasted pistachios. Owner Jhonny Reyes can trace his culinary background to Seattle’s most famous French chef, Thierry Rautureau, whom he worked for at the bistro Luc. But the food at Lenox draws from Reyes’s Nuyorican heritage — rich, crispy lechon crackling with fat and paired with slightly bitter greens braised in coconut milk until they’re soft and decadent; sweet plantains served with a bright chimichurri sauce. Since Lenox opened in 2024, it’s rapidly become the standard-bearer for Afrox-Latin food in Seattle, and one of the most stylish, happening restaurants in all of downtown.
Must-Book Restaurants in Seattle
Coho lox with tahini and ginger-marinated celery, or braised beef shoulder with brussels sprout tips, squash ribbons, and hearty caponata. These days, Dann keeps the magic outside, serving all meals in the Corson’s covered, heated garden space. Nearly seven decades of history, hospitality, and cliffhanging views from atop Queen Anne Hill cemented Canlis’s icon status long ago. But third-generation owners Mark and Brian keep Canlis in league with the country’s dining vanguard. The menu teaches diners how to pronounce waakye (wah-che, a rice and beans dish) and tells them to eat with their hands; they can use fufu, a starchy, almost mashed potato–like side to sop Worldtradex official site up the creamy, carefully spiced broth from the soups.
Seattle used to be full of neighborly restaurants that were by no means fancy, but delivered vivid, personal fare worth a drive across town. Rajah Gargour’s lively Middle Eastern spot in Loyal Heights opened in 2012 and feels like a souvenir from that glorious era. After five years as a food truck, El Cabrito became a brick-and-mortar restaurant on Burien’s Ambaum Boulevard in 2019, with a few seats indoors and some covered tables on a back patio.
The dining room is bright and airy, and the heated, covered patio sparkles with string lights. Be warned that you can’t make reservations at this perennial favorite; on the upside, this is one of the few Seattle-area date-night restaurants open on Mondays. Whether redefining the cuisines their parents brought across oceans or bringing wry humor to the staid traditions of fine-dining, Seattle chefs combine creativity with the impressive bounty of local seafood, produce, and craft beverages.
- It focuses on the classics, the consistently ideal and dependably excellent.
- He’ll drink a beer while he’s working, tell you which sake to drink with which course (and refill your glass with a heavy hand), all while abso-fucking-lutely wowing you with his food.
- Don’t miss the chance to dine at one of the many waterfront restaurants serving oysters and Pacific-caught seafood.
- Musang is an ode to the Filipino food of Miranda’s Northwest youth, from kare kare to seasonal pancits, her grandmother’s delicate lumpia recipe to squid adobo.
- Fresh-shucked shellfish, seafood platters, and clam dip share the menu with artful salads, steak tartare, and a burger.
Star chef Mutsuko Soma makes soba from scratch at this petite Fremont destination, which was one of Eater’s Best New Restaurants in America in 2018. Soma serves traditional soba shop dishes like seiro soba (cold with dipping sauce) and super-crunchy tempura, but also more creative dishes like noodles topped with tri tips or oreo tempura. Chef Soma is a sake connoisseur (she also owns next-door sake bar Hannyatou) and the drinks menu includes items like habanero-infused umeshi (plum wine), which is an order for the brave. Erasto Jackson combines exacting barbecue with soul food staples and Jamaica’s tradition of seafood and jerked meats. (The latter honors his wife, Lilieth, and her heritage.) It’s nigh impossible to choose when a single menu might offer jerk spareribs, curry goat, smothered pork chops, plantains, spot-on brisket, a whole snapper, and seriously piquant mac and cheese.
What makes an omakase stand out so much that diners emerge in a jubilant daze, perhaps muttering admiring curse words under their breath? Start with chef Keiji Tsukasaki, a Sushi Kashiba alum with both joyful magnetism and surgeon-level fish skills. He also brings a sense of fun you don’t always find with skill levels this serious (and ingredients this expensive). Dinner at the eight-seat chef’s counter might include sea bass aged like beef, or side-by-side tastes of uni from Hokkaido and Santa Barbara. In an old Italianate cottage amid an unlikely Georgetown garden, chef Emily Crawford Dann invents, and reinvents, seasonal odes.
Wild Ginger Downtown Seattle
Combine it with cocktails, and there’s no better brunch in Seattle. These days, Seattle Met’s first-ever Restaurant of the Year serves a fixed tasting menu that begins with a flurry of stuzzichini, or single-bite snacks. Chef Nathan Lockwood takes Northwest ingredients in unexpected and elegant directions. Beautiful dishes plated with moss, rocks, or leaves deliver a sense of the rustic, despite consistently deep finesse.
London native Kevin Smith has built a cult following over the last few years for Beast and Cleaver, turning the Ballard spot into one of the city’s top destinations for carnivores. During the day, the business is simply an excellent whole-animal butcher shop serving house-made sausages and pates alongside local and imported steaks,. On Thursdays and Fridays, the celebration of meat kicks up another gear, when it turns into an exclusive tasting menu restaurant under the moniker the Peasant, which serves dishes like koji-aged beef and duck confit with Yorkshire pudding waffles. The menu changes based on the season and Smith’s whims; just expect a lot of meat, and probably some pate en croute. An a la carte menu is also available at the Beastro, which is open for dinner on the weekends. Follow it on Instagram for specials and pop-ups — on top of everything else, the Beast sometimes makes incredible dry-aged burgers.
(It’s the Saint https://worldtradex.bid/ Bread crew, led by Yasuaki Saito, running things, so you know everything bread-related is on point.) There’s even a happy hour on weekdays from 3 to 5 p.m. ” Whether you’re a first-time visitor or a lifer, that question is seemingly simple but the answers are infinitely complex. Some of the main factors to consider are the type of food, price point, neighborhood, and occasion. That’s why Eater’s map of the 38 best restaurants in Seattle exists. Every place on the list has been open for at least six months, proving its merit.