I was in Seattle for work so on one night, we went out for a big team dinner at Grazie Ristorante. My office is in the burbs so we stuck to the Burbs. This place is right next to a Taco Bell. It was funny because that was the night the news about the Taco Bell meat broke out. This is a big italian joint, and they have a few restaurants in the Seattle suburbs. Here’s the calamari fritti with lemon garlic aioli and basil pesto aioli. Good stuff!
This is the roasted prosciutto with fresh mozzarella, roasted peppers, and grilled polenta. This was good but it was a bit skimpy on the prosciutto. It was mostly everything else, as you can see.
Here’s C’s tortellini gorgonzola. Not only is it filled with gorgonzola, it is also in a gorgonzola sauce with basil pesto and pine nuts. He also added chicken breast.
Here’s E’s filetto gorgonzola – beef tenderloin medallions pan-seared and finished with a balsamic gorgonzola cream sauce, frizzled onions, and served with garlic mashed potatoes. These garlic mashed potatoes were excellent! I made sure to help myself to some.
Here’s my crab and shrimp cannelloni. It is shrimp, crab, mushrooms, and ricotta wrapped in pasta, draped with béchamel, marinara, and dungeness crab. It looks like absolute slop, but it tasted just fine. We had a big table, and our server handled us pretty well. We were a rowdy bunch! We didn’t have to wait forever for our food to come out and there was plenty of food and libations to go around!

Seattlite blogger Lovely Lanvin gave me some recommendations for eats during my trip. One of her recommendations was for korean food, with a twist, at Revel. It’s in the Fremont area and it’s fairly new. It’s a pretty gorgeous restaurant. It’s one long rectangular room, with the open kitchen taking up most of one side. There’s a chef’s table along the entire length of the kitchen. The other side has some tables. The walls have several large pop-art paintings. I dig it.
I love sitting at the chef’s table because it’s dinner and a show. And it still boggles my mind how the whole thing works. I love to watch everyone. Revel also has adorable plates and flatware. It’s all minimalist. The entire chef’s table is just one giant raw butcher block. I love it. Can I have my kitchen look like this?
The menu is quite stark and small, which is the way I like it as I tend to get overwhelmed and indecisive when given too much choice. I started with one of their pancakes, the pork belly, kimchi, and bean sprout. This is definitely korean. It is a good sized pancake served with 4 different sauces. Aren’t they adorable? I liked the pancake, but I would have preferred that the pork belly was more evenly distributed throughout the pancake, and that the pancake would have been thinner. The middle, where it was the thickest, had all the pork belly and had too much not-cooked-all-the-way batter concentrated there. I prefer my korean pajeons to be a bit more crispy on the outside and well cooked on the inside. I think if they made it thinner in general with less batter or if they made the pancake bigger with the same batter, they’d get a better result. But the flavor was definitely good and the pork belly was delicious!
My other dish was a noodle dish with five spiced duck meat balls, lacinato kale, smoked chili, with medium thickness noodles. This was definitely tasty, but there was absolutely nothing korean about it. Zilch. Nada. So instead of this being korean with a twist, it was just plain twist. In fact, there was cilantro in this. And cilantro is not in any korean dish, ever. And if you asked korean people of my mom’s generation or older, they would probably not be able to stand cilantro, at all. To see it in this dish was odd. It’s ok though, because I like cilantro! This dish was tasty, nonetheless, until the the unthinkable happened. I suddenly bit into raw thin strips of ginger. How could this be? I’d eaten half the bowl already free of this raw evil, but then all of a sudden it became a raw ginger fest! So then I spent a lot of the rest of my time picking out or deftly avoiding the ginger pieces. This is not easy to do! But I made sure I did it. Oh well. Despite these little glitches, I enjoyed this place immensely. The service was good and I am absolutely in love with the feel of this place. The food was also good, despite how non-korean some of their dishes may be.

I was in Seattle for work, so they provided us boxed lunches during our training. The first day was from Gretchen’s Shoebox. It’s a cute name. It’s a jam packed box. This was a turkey sandwich with swiss. There wasn’t enough turkey and the sourdough bread was a bit on the tough side. It was hard to eat and rather boring. Also included were some Tim’s chips, a fruit salad, bottled water, and a cookie. I preferred everything aside from the sandwich.
The next morning, S brought in some donuts from Top Pot. It’s a local Seattle chain.
My goodness. I did not even try any of these because they look too darn hardcore for me. I actually prefer very simple donuts, like just plain cake or plain cinnamon. But everything in this box had a thick shellac of glaze or frosting or chocolate or cream and it just scared me. It probably would have given me a heart attack. So I skipped it, but it does look intense!
This day’s lunch was from the Firestation Deli. This boxed lunch was so much better! This sandwich was the california turkey: served on soft sourdough with turkey, home made ranch dressing, bacon, avocado, shredded lettuce, and tomato. I absolutely loved this sandwich. I devoured it! It also came with Tim’s chips, a cookie, bottled water, and apple slices, along with a germ x soft wipe, which I thought was a most excellent touch.