Savor Seattle Food Tour

Aaahhh, Seattle.  The Emerald City.  It was great to be back!  For this year's annual trip, we decided to mix it up and do something new and different.  We found a web site that ranted and raved about the Savor Seattle food tours, so we booked ourselves on the Pikes Market food tour.  What better way to see Seattle than to taste and smell it?

I might get artsy-fartsy here, but I have to talk about my love for Pike Place Market.  I love love love love it.  When I set foot in the market, I turn into a big kid in a candy store, eyes twinkling with possibility.  The market is a magical menagerie of sights and sounds, but most of all......SMELLS.  For someone who has a bloodhound of a nose (like myself), the market is the most amazing place on earth.  Every five steps wields a new, tantalizing scent.  Fresh flowers, fried donuts, cinnamon, fresh baked bread, lavender, peppers, sharp cheeses, handmade chocolates, fresh fish, curry, soaps, leather, sausages, oils, roasted coffee beans..........  In spite of the crowds, it remains one of my favorite spots on this earth.   It's like Rae's version of what heaven must surely be like.

And so, we met the Savor Seattle tour at the Starbucks on 1st and Pike to begin our food tour.

 This tour cost $39.99 apiece, which included a two hour walking tour and samples at every stop.  We also got handy little earpieces so that we could hear our tour guide from up to 150 feet away.  Let me just say, this was a top notch tour. 


Nick, our tour guide was hilarious AND knowledgeable.  He told jokes, gave history lessons, and was very very punny.  I was surprised he didn't do a jig.  And he is obviously crazy fired-up about food.  Which helps any food tour guide, I think.  He carried a pink umbrella so that he would be easily identifiable at all times and so that if we got lost like little lambs, we could find him.

First stop:  Daily Dozen Donuts.  Delectable little fried, yeasty, sugary morsels.  YUMMM.

Next, a trip to the World Spice Market.  This place is a cook's dream.  They have walls of huge jars just full of fresh herbs and spices.  This place will launch a glorious assault on your olfactory senses.  They also make some incredible teas.


 We tried the cinnamon orange Market Spice tea.  It was SO good.  I bought my mom a box.
*Note:  I forgot mom is allergic to cinnamon; so instead of a lovely gift, I gave her swollen cinnamon tongue of death.













 Stop Number 3:

 Yay!  Pike Place Fish.  The place where the fishmongers throw the fishes.  If you love seafood, NOTHING is more rad than the rows and rows of fresh-caught seafood.  Crab, oysters, scallops (OH the scallops!), salmon, halibut, shrimp...... fan-freaking-tastic.  Also, if you happen to love the smell of fresh-caught, oceaney, salty fishiness, this is the place for you.  I think it's an acquired scent. 

 We sampled three kinds of smoked salmon-  Alderwood smoked, garlic & pepper smoked (my fave) and salmon jerky (Cody's fave).  I tried to get a close-up of all three, but by the time we got to the jerky, my whole body was vibrating with taste excitement, so I couldn't get a shot that wasn't blurry.  Bummer for you, cause that thing was good looking.

After the salmon explosion.  We headed for Frank's Quality Produce, where we had some juicy seedless grapes and some Washington grown apples.  This place really has the most amazingly beautiful produce you'll ever come across.  If I could have bought a bunch and taken it home to share with you all, I would have.  Actually, I probably wouldn't have because you can buy your own damn fruit.  Plus, fruit doesn't travel well.  Except for Cody.

I had to get some shots of the produce area because it was so beautiful.  I wish my camera had smell-o-vision because you should smell the smells that come out of those fresh fruit and flower stands!  Yum!

 Next up, my favorite of all the shops.  Pike Place Chowder.  Pike Place Chowder has been featured on multiple Food Network shows as having the best chowder in the country.  This is correct.  It isn't opinion- it's fact.  This is the best chowder you are ever going to eat.  This chowder doesn't just taste good.  It gets inside your head.  It sticks to you.  Something they put in the chowder makes it so that you cannot be satisfied until you have gone back and eaten more.  We finally had to go back to stop the chowder voice inside our heads from pestering us any longer.  The line was ridiculously long and no one minded waiting in it.  This place has several varieties of chowder, including traditional New England clam chowder, seafood bisque, Manhattan clam chowder, smoked salmon chowder, seared scallop chowder...... the list goes on.  They serve it in big cups or in enormous, yummy bread bowls.  I was beside myself trying to decide.  They also have huge french bread rolls piled with dungness crab salad or bay shrimp or smoked salmon.  Next time you go to Seattle, you MUST eat lunch there.  It's worth the wait.

Chukar Cherries was next.  We had ourselves an assortment of cherry delectables and some cherry-peach salsa.  Award for the "Best Of" goes to the Honey Chocolate covered pecans.  The chocolate had crispy little honey crystals in it. 

Beecher's Cheeses was another fantastic stop where we got to see the actual cheeses being made.  This place had the most fantastic house-made mac and cheese ever.  It was even better than MY homemade mac and cheese.  And that's saying something.  It's really expensive, but it has to be because anything wonderful is worth paying for. 




We went back later because Cody hadn't ever had a cheese curd and it was either remedy that ASAP or break up because, who hasn't had a freaking cheese curd?  What is he, a Martian?

Welcome to Piroshky Piroshky!  Have you ever had a piroshky?  Neither had we.  According to Nick the Tour Guide, these are like gourmet hot pockets.  How could they be bad?  Fresh, hot buns with a myriad of different delectable fillings?  So good.  I tried to think up a clever pun for this part of the post, but I couldn't think of anything that rhymed with piroshky, so I just did it straight.   If you think of anything, let me know. 

Around this part of the tour, despite Nick's best efforts to nonchalantly direct our attention toward a large bird atop a sign, we all got the chance to experience a naked old woman strolling down the sidewalk.  Actually, she wasn't naked.  She was wearing a hat, an unzipped coat and hiking boots.

After we finished our Piroshky Piroshkies, we strolled on down the street and enjoyed a little street music.

Right about this time we got a whiff of the first and only UNsavory scent of the whole tour.  I got the whiff about 30 seconds before everyone else because of my super-human nose powers.  A trash truck was driving slowly along the street and stopping in front of every trash can to empty it.  Wow.  I mean, wow.  This was one of the foulest odors I've witnessed to date.

 Nick tried to move us to a different place along the street, but the truck kept moving closer and closer to us.  Unfortunately this truck must have been picking up carcasses or rotted buffalo or sacks of mammoth shit all morning.  It smelled like sick.

 When the air finally cleared, we had our last delicious nom of the tour.  We went to Etta's.  Etta's is owned and operated by Tom Douglas.  If you are a normal person, you have no idea who this is.  If you are an Iron Chef geek, you know him as the only man to put the smack-down on revered Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto.  I love Morimoto and I saw the episode of Iron Chef where Tom Douglas beat him.   So I know that this man is clearly a culinary genius.  He owns multiple restaurants all over Seattle and is known best for his incredible coconut cream pie.  For this food tour, however, we tried his crab cakes with tomatillo sauce.  They were, of course, stellar.  Out of this world.

Sadly, this concluded our food tour.  It was real.  It was fun.  It was real fun.  Next time we go back to Seattle, we'll be doing another tour- perhaps the gourmet tour or the chocolate lover's tour.  If you're in Seattle, we recommend taking the food tour.  We also recommend asking for Nick the tour guide.  He's really punny.

 HOWEVER...... Cody and I decided we weren't ready to be done with the food tour.  We wanted more.  We had passed a whole slew of shops we wanted to stop at.  Plus, the food tour had lacked one critical item- BOOZE!  So we continued the fun by launching the Rae and Cody food tour. 

We went to Pike Place Bar & Grill for some delicious libations.  We ordered a sampler of local beers.  And what luck!  Cody liked three and I liked three.  These were some great beers and were SO refreshing after a morning of eating but not having a frosty cold beer to wash anything down with.

Aren't they magnificent?

















The porter was my favorite, I think.

We also got a fresh shrimp cocktail.  It had this great cocktail sauce that was too hot for me, but was just the thing for Cody.  It was LOADED with horseradish.

After resting up from our walking tour and energizing ourselves with some beers, we hit the Confectionary- a chocolate and cheesecake shop featured on the Savor Seattle Chocolate Lovers tour.  Nick had pointed it out, but we hadn't gone there because it wasn't part of the tour.  But he HAD mentioned that they sell Columbian sipping chocolate there.  Uh....yum!?!  I had to try it, so we went, even though Cody doesn't like chocolate.  And no, I don't know what's wrong with him.

They offer the sipping chocolate with or without chili pepper.  Cody put chili pepper on his and it was surprisingly spicy.  I would have thought the chili would be cut down by the sweetness.  This chocolate, however, was not very sweet.  It was provided in the form that they drink it in down in South America- very little sweetness and a lot of cocoa kick.  It's so rich that their smallest size is just a tiny little shot.  If you're a badass, you can order it in larger sizes.  But that would only be if you were a double chocolate lover.  Maybe even a TRIPLE chocolate lover.

Despite not being a chocolate lover, Cody squeezed every last drop out of his little paper cup and then licked it clean.  It was so sinfully tasty!








 We also got some truffles.  They had mini cheesecakes there, which Cody DOES love.  He's a cheesecake nut.  But he said he was too full.  Instead, we got some little truffles.  We were doing the truffle shuffle.

Does it get any better than this?  I do not think so.  This was the most fun we've had on a Seattle trip so far- just eating our way through the market.

Holy crap.  I can't believe you read all the way through this super long blog.  Don't you have stuff to do? Sheesh.......
*Thanks for reading!  Are you hungry now?  Well, invite me over to cook for you then.  I'll do it.