Here are my best Seattle-based dishes of 2025—and likely a partial list of my future best restaurants, too. by Meg van Huygen A best dish is not the same thing as a best restaurant. They’re different prompts, you know? A best di sh can be a fluke, the only dish you liked on the whole menu, but it lifted you out of a shitty dining experience. It can be the greatest thing on a menu full of total bangers. It can also be an introduction to a new restaurant—a reason to put a pin in it and come back for more recon. Often, the rest of the album is great, too, although not always. Sometimes it’s just an emotion or a vibe that makes a best dish. The people you're eating with, or the people who served it to you. The song that was playing. Maybe the dish wouldn’t be as nice if it weren’t pouring outside. Like any list of favorites, there’s no accounting for taste here, and everyone’s invited to make their own roster in the comments! But here are my best Seattle-based dishes of 2025—and likely a partial list of my future best restaurants, too. Ahi tuna tostada at La Marea This is easily one of the best things I’ve eaten not only this year but in my entire life. Future and past lives included.  After starting out making (excellent) spit-grilled tacos as Tacos Extranjeros, Liz Dones and Bo Tarantine revamped as La Marea, serving Mexican-style mariscos with a touch of Michelinney flair out of the back room at Fair Isle Brewing. This tostada is another deceptively simple dish: a crisp, flat tortilla spread with salsa macha—spicy oil loaded with fried Mexican chilis—then heaped with ruby-red ahi tuna and drizzled with umamescent XO sauce. The tostada’s absolutely piled with luminescent red ingots of ahi, cut sashimi-style and anointed by all the shiny sauces. Vivid as a Mormon Jell-O salad. It is so red.  The fish is immaculate by itself, but the sauces and textures and nubbly fried-out bits of chili elevate it to the point where you’re experiencing something like heartbreak with each bite. You will order this tostada thinking you’ll share it with your boyfriend, but you will soon discover he needs to order his own. You have become an ancient and untamed person, and your primordial greed will force you to slam the entire thing into your face before he can take any of it from you.  [Prahok IMAGE]  Prahok k’tiss and crudités at Sophon Each year, the James Beard Foundation hosts its Taste America series, a trade show for bar/restaurant owners in cities across the nation, where you meander around the booths and bite the bites and sip the sips. In Seattle’s version this year, the second the guests walked in the door, they were hit with a fermented cloud of prahok, a Cambodian salted fish paste. Shoulda known we’d see Sophon chef/owner Karuna Long’s smiling face at the end of it.  Prahok k’tiss is an unctuous, saucy dip that reminds me of sloppy joe meat, or maybe a very dense bolognese—with the notable addition of fermented fish. It’s pungent and funky, so it needs to ride on the slices of raw cucumber and Thai eggplant to travel to your mouth. Long makes his with coconut milk, spicy kroeung sauce, and superdeluxe ground pork from Pure Country Farms in Ephrata, and it was the best dish in the whole room, easy, right out of the gate. He also makes a meatless mushroom version at Sophon that's comparably outstanding. This dish stayed on my mind (and breath) all day, and I’ve ordered it whenever I’m at the shop since.  The Kereviz is mandatory ordering. (Courtesy Hamdi)   Kereviz at Hamdi Full disclosure: Hamdi is destination-level fine dining, so it’s weird to write about a specific dish when you’re probably there for a giant spendy spread, not a single side of creamed celery root. But when you do find yourself at Hamdi, this kereviz is mandatory ordering. It’s another dip: celery root that’s been puree-chunked into smoked ayran (Turkish-style yogurt) and garnished with figs, pine nuts, and anise hyssop. The move is to spoon it on some of their glorious charred sourdough, although you’d be forgiven for skipping the bread and spooning it directly into your throat. Sometimes chef Berk Güldal will change it up and add pomegranate molasses or green apple or puffed quinoa. The mouthfeel is like a coleslaw milkshake, but it’s savory and smoky, creamy and vegetal. Kereviz is essentially veg-at-the-bottom yogurt, made with the richest, finest yogurt imaginable, that’s been set on fire. There’s nothing else like it in town. These coffee-rubbed ribs are the GOAT. (Courtesy Ramie) Coffee-rubbed ribs with butternut squash puree at Ramie On one of the most obnoxiously sweltering days of the summer, with a buddy in tow, I stopped into Ramie with a belly full of wine and snacks from a Washington wine event at gorgeous fine-diner Surrell, full to bursting. We originally meant to find shelter from the miserable sun, but my friend didn’t nosh as much at Surrell, so he ordered some ribs off of Ramie’s happy hour menu. I managed exactly one bite of this dish before tapping out, but oh god. You get a big slab of pork ribs that have been marinated in Viet coffee then low-and-slow-roasted, so the bones slide out like Jenga blocks. The tannins in the coffee and the sugar in the glaze play beautifully with the fatty pork, and the char on the edge is like gold gilt, or maybe the sprinkles on a sundae. The portion’s generous, five or six ribs, so it’s great for sharing over Ramie’s extremely elite cocktails. It also comes with a dab of pulverized butternut squash that we both wanted more of—and indeed, I went back the next week to split an order with my dude. To be fair, every single thing on Ramie’s menus is stunning, but for me, this happy-hour porkslab is the GOAT. Pasta Brontese: one pasta to rule them all. (Courtesy Mezzanotte) Pasta Brontese at Mezzanotte Within the vast Marcus Lalario cinematic universe, Mezzanotte is most analogous to The Two Towers—compared to, say, Ciudad’s Return of the King (swift and action-packed) or Li’l Woody’s Fellowship of the Ring (classic and simple). In contrast, Mezzanotte’s program is thoughtful and heavy, with a lot to take in—although adding some housemade amari breaks helps!—and your meal will be long as hell, but you’ll come away with a new understanding of goodness, innovation, and perseverance.  At a NonnaKase popup—Mezzanotte’s Italian take on a Japanese omakase, or chef’s dinner—the thiccccc pasta Brontese taught our table a Middle-earthian lesson about strengthening friendship through shared adventure, after triumphing over greed. Named for the pistachio-producing village of Bronte, Sicily, it’s a tangle of fresh fettuccine in a velveteen cream sauce that’s punctuated by ground nuts, grated pecorino, savory pancetta, and a splash of white wine. Right away, we forgot ourselves, each competing to consume as much of the dish as we scientifically could, and we were all still digesting it the next day. A reminder that there’s some good (pasta) in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting (er, sitting for three hours) for.  [Canlis IMAGE] The bread course with all the marvelous little dips at Canlis I grew up four blocks up the hill from Canlis and didn’t eat there until I was middle-aged, after my boyfriend won a gift card at work. Why? You know why. But what I didn’t know until then is that dining at Canlis’s twinkly little bar requires no reservation, and it’s an order of magnitude cheaper than prix-fixing in the dining room. The bar fare’s quite different from the main event, too, and new exec chef James Huffman’s snacky, down-to-earth menu still packs the same hyperlocal farm-to-table pizzazz. All with the same iconic view of the lake and the Lebanese cedar.  This is where the bestie and I spent her birthday this year, and although we loved all the bar snax—as well as the truly world-class cocktails and mocktails—it was the introductory bread course that left us frustrated we couldn’t scoop out the exquisite dregs of rhubarb jam and cultured miso butter and verdant cheese dip (green garlic, spinach, sharp cheddar) with our fingers. This isn’t a Buffalo Wild Wings, ladies. Instead, we used the tawny, luminous, sea-salt-crusted boule of sourdough to do the job, and it was hard not to ask for another loaf to go. An exercise in self-control, in the most pleasurable way possible. [Lamb neck IMAGE] Lamb neck korma pie at Little Beast Swear to god, this was on my list before the New York Times published theirs last week! Everybody’s Seattle restaurant of the year seems to be Little Beast, though, and if you’re a meat-eater, it’s hard to argue. This year, chef/owner Kevin Smith expanded his Loyal Heights butcher shop into an old-timey pub on Ballard Avenue, focusing on English-style chops, savory pastries, and Sunday roast dinner. The menu is a carnival of indulgence, and the standout among them—I gotta agree with the NYT—is the lamb neck korma pie.  A brilliant take on British–Indian fusion, it’s braised lamb oxtail suspended in golden-blond korma gravy, then hidden inside a frilly hot-water crust. Just cutting into this thing is real theater, as the molten yellow sauce curlicues out from between the pie shards and across your plate, and that’s to say nothing of tasting it. You feel like you’re a DD character in some weird monster’s pelt who’s stumbled into an inn in a strange land after a long winter journey—it’s that kind of down-to-your-bones comfort food. Or, uh, maybe that’s just me. [Lao sausage IMAGE] Lao sausage on sticky rice at Vientiane Grocery I knew I’d been delinquent for never having been to Vientiane Grocery, a nondescript Hillman City minimart with a food counter inside. I’d had their Lao sausage at lovely Communion, but all the recent IG reels full of noodle pulls were tantalizing me hard. It just looked like a spot where you should bring a crew, what with so many spectacular things to order. In December, I finally organized a group of friends to meet me there… and then it was drizzly with a high of 40°F and almost everybody flaked. Just one pal showed up.  Fuck it. We’ll do it live. As prophesied, the chunky, succulent Lao sausage on sticky rice was the star of the show: rich and slightly sweet, flavored with lemongrass and shallots and chilis, bound with a little rice powder. A side of jeow bong—Laos’s earthy, smoky hot sauce—gave us a delicious little jolt with each bite. It was all eminently take-home-able too, as one should have guessed from the fact that it’s in a minimart. Who needs friends? You could have a porky, chunkulent sausage party all for yourself here, and you’d do just fine. This ricotta ice cream will haunt you. (Courtesy Local 104) Ricotta ice cream at the Local 104 Stick with me here. In the dark, woodsy bowels of residential Lake Forest Park, beneath the tall Doug firs, there’s an old minimart that’s been turned into a pizza-n-sando spot, with a sign that makes you think it might be a labor union. And inside that building is a cozy sleeper-hit dinner wonderland.  It feels rude to not mention the fabulous wood-fired pizzas at Local 104 here—perfectly leopard-spotted, straight out of Neapolitan central casting, and topped with jewels like sliced Iberico chorizo and medjool dates—or the killer beer selection or the fried chicken sandwich. But it was the housemade ricotta ice cream that made this place haunt my skull all year. Bordering on custard territory, it’s flecked with salty Moroccan-style preserved lemon and served alongside peaches or other stone fruit. Salty and sweet, creamy and sharp, and downright luxurious. The ice cream’s seasonal, per the summerfruit, but I recommend checking back often and eating whatever the fuck they have on the menu here, honestly. When co-owner Margaret Edwins—whom oldheads will remember from her flawless Capitol Hill bistro 611 Supreme, RIP—at the wheel, there are no wrong turns.  Encocado is perfect for getting coconutted on a rainy day. (Courtesy Bad Chancla) Encocado at Bad Chancla This one was a surprise—a whimsical snack that ended up making my whole day. On Olive and Denny, teeny tiny Bad Chancla is serving pan-Latin soups and sandwiches, and it was just blustery enough one day to pop in from the cold and try this flavorful, aromatic stew. It was exactly what I wanted in that moment. Encocado is the only Ecuadorian dish on the menu, says Guayaquil-born co-owner José Garzón, and they make it from Pacific cod that’s poached in coconut milk with sofrito and tons of cilantro, then poured over white rice. This is a coastal dish I’d never seen in Seattle, and now that the weather is doing the damn thing, it’s exactly what you want as well. The name of the dish, by the way, means “coconutted,” and I like this as a euphemism for ducking out of the pissing rain to hunch over a steamy bowl of fish stew. Peel that wet coat off and sit down. You’ve been coconutted. [Curry paneer Caesar IMAGE] Honorable mention: The curry paneer Caesar at Grann in Tacoma, which serves a fusion of Black soul, Indian, and Caribbean food. It’s not in the Seattle area exactly, but I could write a whole novella about this salad. Massaged kale is coated in tandoori spices and fresh paneer cheese that’s been blurred down into a pesto, then studded with lemon pickle and pistachios, and it’s now the gold standard that all the rest of my life’s salads must live up to. Get the pimento-cheese-filled pani puri while you’re there too. ...read more read less