Okay, guys, the results are in: the best bites of the year. by Meg van Huygen Okay, guys, the results are in: The best bites of the year. I keep this list scrawled on the back of a raggedy old Grocery Outlet receipt in my wallet, which I transcribe into a Google doc in fits and starts, if and when I remember. After a year of unpaced gluttony, these are the winners. I do a 15 Best Restaurants guide in the summer, of course, but the Best Things I Ate is a little different. This is about the individual dishes: Sometimes it’s just a snack, or even a single perfect bite. I don’t care about the timeliness or fanfare with which it was served or who made it, and it doesn’t factor in any kind of unique concepts or hard-won popup-to-brick-’n’-mortar stories. It’s just about what was on the plate and how good it tasted. Obviously, this list is highly subjective–-think of it like a personal diary. If you’re so inspired, please tell me about all the most delicious things you ate all year in the comments, so that I and the rest of Seattle may also eat them! The city needs your help. Lechon with Coco Greens and Arroz Gandules  Lenox Caption I gushed about this dish at length in my 15 Best Restaurants guide, but I’ll do it a little more here, just to remind… anyone who needs reminding that they need to put Lenox on their to-do list, stat. I get teary when I think about this dish. The crisp-on-the-outside, tender-on-the-inside pork belly that offers up all its liquid fat at the first bite, the slick greens in fragrant yellow coconut-turmeric potlikker, the rich porky rice studded with pigeon peas, the Technicolor-pink pikliz on top. The emotions and the visual and physical pleasure that I derived from this meal right here, well, it’s kinda the whole point of being alive. You know? For what it’s worth, everything else I’ve had at Chef Jhonny Reyes’s Nuyorican/Afro-Cuban restaurant is just a mini-millimeter behind the stupendous level of the lechon. They’re all revelations. Go to Lenox and eat them right now. The Lamb Mabo Pizza (and the Twice-Cooked Satsumaimo)  Baka popup at Light Sleeper I was all set to write about Chef Christopher Ritter’s twice-cooked satsumaimo (white sweet potato) here, all loaded up with high-qual Pure Country pork belly slabs and crema and cheese and chives and housemade potato chips, which I suppose I am accidentally doing right now, whoops. Delirious-making. The way the skin of the sweet potato was all shiny with pork fat and cheese oil, and the dish’s immensely sharable qualities… this, friends, is an immaculate bar snack. I thought about it every day for at least a month after I ate it. That is, until mid-December, when I tried Ritter’s take on ma po tofu with ground lamb instead of pork—and on a personal pizza, sliced into quarters. I shared this with two friends, and it was all I could do not to snatch up the fourth slice from the plate, compulsively, like a cat with a jingly toy. Gimme that. We all sat there greedily eyeing the last slice before, somewhat pathetically, agreeing to divvy it up into thirds. I’d folded my (first, whole) slice in half, and upon first bite, the spicy, lamby oil ran right down the pizza funnel and into my mouth to whet one’s palate for the successive cheesy-lamb bread bite. This bite. The pleasure, the pure hedonism involved in eating this first bite was downright shy-making. Also, I don’t know what this guy puts in his crust, but it was at once crackly and buttery and charred and moist—thanks in part to their glorious wood-fed oven. I will be thinking about this pizza for a very long time, along with the twice-baked sweet potato that I was already thinking about all the time. Especially since Chef just moved back to Philadelphia, and we can’t have them anymore. BBL, pricing flights to Philly. Follow Christopher Ritter on IG at @thisisahotjam to see what brilliant food thing he does next. The Focaccia  Cafe Hitchcock Caption There’s a whole lotta beautiful bread happening in Seattle, but for me, there’s one that, ahem, rises above the others. The Cafe Hitchcock location in downtown Seattle bakes this luxurious, olive-oily, Roman-style focaccia daily, and you can buy it in sandwich form—which you should also do—but I will also sometimes get a big tablet of it to take home and just eat it with every damn thing. You can also order it as a side at the bar at the Oyster Cellar next door, served with housemade cultured butter. Do that, too. Lately, I’ve been taking my Hitch-caccia with tinned trout in curry sauce, the type you can get at Paris-Madrid Grocery or DeLaurenti or Doe Bay Wines. After I finish off all the tiny fillets, I swab the tin with the bread like it’s a kitchen sponge, trying to clean out every drop of sauce as utterly as possible. But I’ve eaten it with extra-rich Danish butter, with little discs of fried soppressata, with Karam’s Garlic Sauce, with leftover teriyaki short rib, with a baking dish full of the herby/chickeny gravy a roast hen had left behind, with slices of an impossibly ripe plum, in between bites from a garden-fresh heirloom tomato, and with absolutely nothing. It’s perfect. It’s all things to all people. Unless those people are gluten-free. The Flan de Vainilla The Harvest Vine via Paris-Madrid Grocery Caption FKA the Spanish Table, the Paris-Madrid Grocery hides down on Western Avenue, in the borderlands of the Pike Place Market, near the Hillclimb. Longtime Seattleites know it well, but they may not know that it was bought last spring by Carolin Messier—chef-owner of local culinary institution the Harvest Vine—and her husband, Tom Humphreys. What this means is that, along with all the exquisite Gallo-Iberian delicacies they carry, like dry black lentils and aged port and glazed French chestnuts and entire acorn-fed Iberico hams and colorful tins of Portuguese sardines… you can get little takeout tubs of the Harvest Vine flan de vainilla. These unassuming-looking deli takeout containers of Spanish custard are found in the cooler on the south side of the store, and each one tastes like it has about five farm-fresh egg yolks and an entire vanilla bean in it. Once, I took home a stack of five flans and handed them out to friends, and every single one demanded to know where I got it from because they’d never had a flan so incredible in all their lives. This is true. These luxurious flans cost $9 each, but be warned: I cannot manage to get in and out of Paris-Madrid Grocery for under about fifty bucks. Because they also sell paella rice and St. Nectaire cheese and tagine spice mix and Provencal almond cake and saucisse de Toulouse and jars of cornichons and Calvados-filled chocolates that’re shaped like little apples and… The Potato Chip Crispy Treat  Little Jaye Caption Like. This is what to love about food. This brand of ingenuity right here. Rice Krispies treats are super good, right? You’ve heard of them. Just chunks of puffed-out rice, covered in melted butter + liquid marshmallows! So what if you did it with some other kind of crispy thing that’s even better tasting than Rice Krispies?? And it was a little salty, and it had more fat in it, and… see, it’s easy to get overwhelmed when you realize how fucking smart this idea is. Little Jaye, which is the bakery outpost of West Seattle barbecue joint Lady Jaye, does gently wacky takes on biscuits, cookies, sweet and savory breads out in South Park—standouts include the miso–dark chocolate chip cookie and the cloudlike, overfilled shokupan doughnuts, especially the bourbon cream ones, holy shit. As well, there’s a whole department of crispy treats made out of things like Fruity Pebbles and Golden Grahams. They’re all lovely, but the potato chip crispy treat rules them all. Chef Charlie Garrison uses plain Ruffles, so the thick ridges help build the rock-solid architecture of the treat, plus the chips are nice and fatty, and the treats themselves are the size of a hotel bible. Stranger managing editor Megan Seling wrote a feature about these things last year, calling them “a decadent salty-sweet, crispy-crunchy marvel,” and the woman knows her desserts, so believe. The Inimitable Porchetta Sandwich Salumi Courtesy of Salumi Remember when Salumi was all the rage in, what, 1999? And the queue would trail down South Second Avenue, with all the besuited office workers hankering for a porchetta sando on their lunch breaks while the national news teams pestered them? (Remember offices? Remember wearing special clothes to go to them?) Well, I do… or I did. I lived here for that, and then Salumi moved around the corner, and I totally forgot about it. That was stupid, and I’m currently making up for lost time by stopping by for a porchetta whenever I’m in Pioneer Square. No longer owned by Mario Batali’s dad, Salumi is now at Jackson and Occidental and is run by biz partners Martinique Grigg and Clara Veniard. For sixteen bucks, they will sell you what seems like an imperial pound of luscious 16-hour-roasted pork on a big sturdy ciabatta roll, perfumed with fennel, imbued with Calabrian chili chimichurri, and strewn with roasted onions and pickled peppers, and it’s every bit as mind-bendingly delicious as it was in the nineties. If you really wanna go hard, you can add provolone to catapult the experience to an intercosmic level. This thing is a brick and can easily feed me for 24 hours, and I’m a big, tall dude. It’s also still a fabulous mess and will get all in your hair and under your cuticles, and even after you wash your hands, your pets will smell them and want to know why you didn’t save them any roast pork. What incredible luxury we Seattleites enjoy, to have Salumi at our disposal, and what a waste to not eat there on any day that we could be. Never forget. I won’t again. The Fried Mortadella Giardiniera Brioche Thing POP POP Pizza Popup Brian O’Connor (not the Bok a Bok Chicken guy—different guy) spent his career until now opening Michelin-starred restaurants in the Midwest. Now he’s trying his own hand at cheffery, experimenting via popups in Seattle as he puts together a restaurant concept for 2025. What’s this fancy person with his very fancy resume making for us? Pizza! O’Connor’s been missing the tavern-style pies of his homeland, and his intermittent POP POP Pizza parties happen every few months, serving lavash-thin, grid-sliced pizzas in slightly haute concepts. Like the Mushroom 3.0, with a shiitake duxelles base that’s absolutely paved with criminis and Basque Ossau-Iraty cheese. Or the Tarte Flambée, with a caramelized sweet onion-and-sour cream base, an aged alpine-style cheese by Uplands, and smoked bacon from Don & Joe’s Meats in Pike Place. These were both alarmingly good, and so delicate and crispy-lite. However deliciously destroyable O’Connor’s pizzas are, at the last POP POP Pizza event, there was this little two-bite snack that blew all the minds present. Brioche circles are toasted on a griddle with some good butter, then sliced mortadella is fried in the same. Provolone slices are sizzled up next, and they’re layered on the buttery brioche with the fried lunch meat. Onto the stacks are added giardiniera oil and mint–pistachio pesto, and a pinch of peppery-carrotty giardiniera is poised on top. Brooooo, these are so good. While we waited for the pizza to be ready, these little canapés were circulated around the party on a tray, and all guests kept a careful, rapacious eye on where the mortadella lady was at any given time. The pizza at POP POP, again, is extraordinary, but I would pay a lot of money to meet a whole tray of those mortadella toasts behind a closed door. Actually, I don’t care who sees me do it. The (VEGAN!!?!) Train to Busan Cake Paper Cake Shop I’m historically not a sweets person and will refuse a dessert menu about nineteen times out of twenty. As well, I have many prissy biases and prejudices about vegan food, especially desserts… because, uh, I’ve had a lot of bad vegan desserts. I want butter! No fake butter has ever deceived me. If there’s an opportunity for my food to include butter and it doesn’t, I’m mad. Well, all my principles and beliefs have fallen to pieces after tasting the Train to Busan slice at Paper Cake Shop—which is astoundingly, almost unbelievably vegan. Darling little Paper Cake Shop is owned by Chef Rachel Yang (Joule, Revel), but ptissière Gabby Park is at the wheel, specializing in fanciful layer cakes made from ingredients like black tea and mochi and sesame and mango. The totally plant-based Train to Busan cake may not be as pretty and pastel as the others, but damn, it’s such a dream: Sweet potato sponge cake is spread with cinnamon caramel filling and brown sugar buttercream, then accented by ssiatt, a Korean candy brittle made with seeds and nuts. It’s a killer combo of molassey-sweet and melt-in-your-mouth creamy, with an autumnal roundness from the nuts, the cinnamon, and the sweet potato cake to balance out the sugar. The butter quotient is just off the charts here, but how? If vegan?? In place of butter, Park uses Tourlami—made with cocoa butter, coconut oil, and sunflower lecithin—to achieve that satiety that (I thought) only butterfat can bring. Extremely convincing impersonation of a German buttercream. This cake made me want to get married just so I could have it at my wedding. Another thing I don’t believe in. This is a transformative dessert. I don’t know who I am anymore, and I’m so glad. The Beef Hand Pies Gold Coast Ghal Kitchen It was late-ish on a sopping Thursday, and my partner and I had been stuck for hours at a stodgy, neverending event on First Hill with lots of speeches and toasts. We were exhausted. We wanted a cocktail and a snack and an escape to somewhere cool to compensate for the hours of uncoolness we’d had suffered. Luckily, I knew a spot. We popped in at Gold Coast Ghal Kitchen in our formalwear, where chef-owner Tina Fahnbulleh had the hookup waiting. In her cozy West African bar-resto, we ordered a Kube (coconut, mezcal, lemon, simple) and a Kanyan (gin, pineapple, clove–ginger simple), as well as a pair of beef hand pies. With a super buttery shortcrust full of well-seasoned minced beef, onions, and green peppers, they’re about the size of an empanada, they come with a side of cilantro aioli for dippin’, and it’s hard not to inhale them. These things are so good, they made me want to write a list of my favorite meat pies in town just so I could put these at the top. A king among meat pies. “This is what we wanted,” my partner grinned after the first bite, a cocktail in his fist and pastry flakes on his suit lapel. “This is the thing we were talking about. We fixed the night.” On a later trip, upon ordering the hand pies, we noticed there was an extra half-pie on the plate. When Tina came around afterward, she commented, “I made an extra one so I could have half. They’re my favorite!” Me too, Tina. Every Single Dish, but Especially the Hummus Bil Lahm ou Snobar Cafe Munir Another long, miserable day (moving!) was absolutely fucking rescued by a summer evening spent at Cafe Munir and a table loaded with beautiful Lebanese mezzes. We were meeting family there and arrived hella late, crashing into our chairs broken and defeated—to be greeted with a bottle of red, alongside a heap of char-edged pitas and a few sumptuous, veggie-laden puddles to dip them into. We sent for six or seven more, and soon, the table was like that arcade game with the quarters and the little tractor, where each vivid new plate was precipitously jockeying for space without getting shoved into someone’s lap. A balm for the soul, just to behold them all. You could cry. But the coloratura among them was the hummus bil lahm ou snobar: a crater of whipped hummus that’s filled with sauteed minced lamb and fresh herbs, still lazily bubbling from the oven. Everyone gasped when it landed. You could still hear it fizz. We housed this thing like we were at a hot-dog eating contest at Coney Island, and we immediately discussed ordering another once it was gone. To be fair, all the dishes on the table worked together to heal us, but like a D&D cleric, it was the lamby hummus that instantly restored our powers. Whether ordered a la carte or as a team, the entire menu here has true curative properties. One thing’s for sure: Whenever possible, I will end a moving day at Cafe Munir for the rest of my life.