A Thai Treat

On the street that I work, like so many in Seattle, there are multiple Thai restaurants. I happen to prefer Samui over Jamjuree, but my boss and the controller disagree. So when we take the occaissonal lunch outside of the office, it is usually to Jamjuree, as was the case today.  It was the usual fare, nothing out of the ordinary, fairly Americanized Thai fare. What stood out to me was not the food, nor the service (which was actually a cut above, friendly, prompt and overly curteous).

Everything on the menu, in classic Asian lunch special fashion came with rice, except for the noodle meals, which made it difficult for me to order anything. It is, you see, Passover, the Jewish holiday during which I am forbidden to eat anything with wheat or grains, basically. No rice, no noodles. I ordered the Tom Yum noodle soup, a seafood soup (yes, I eat shrimp, yes, I see the irony), but with out the noodles. When it came, lo and behold, there were no noodles, which in and of itself was impressive.

As I began eating I noticed a ton of bean sprouts. You know, the kind that they give you too many of on bad phad thai. But instead of annoyingly being in the way of my noodles, here they were amazing. I looked over at J’s soup, as he had ordered the same thing, but with the noodles. Nope, no bean sprouts. The restaurant had kindly realized that my soup would be lacking without the noodles and replaced them with the nearest noodle like vegetable. My heart was warmed. So was my mouth, but that was more due to the amount of hot sauce I added.

Seahawks and Salsa: El Tajin on Broadway: (11/13/07)

All I asked for was decent food and a TV to watch the Seahawks play some Monday Night Football. By decent food I meant anything besides pub grub. Usually my go to method here is the ID, but after 45 minutes of driving around looking for parking (No diehard seattlite would pay for parking), I hightailed it to Broadway, where I found myself in the bar half of the brand new El Tajin Mexican restaurant.

I won’t declare Mexican food saved in Seattle, but let me tell you, this place is getting it on that track. This is not La Carta de Oaxaca high falutin’ small plates, this is some truck stop Mexican food, and I was impressed. The TV played the Seahawks game and the water never let my bottles of Sol get low, nor the BF’s draft Dos Equis. I was dissapointed they were out of the Chicharrones (mmmm…fried pork skin!), but I was happy to settle for the chilequiles. The menu covered every region of Mexico, with mole (Oaxaca), Huaraches (Vera Cruz), Tortas (DF), and Pepian (Southern, I’ve mostly had it in Guatemala). They had a lot of standard Mexmerican food, but they also had about all the traditional Mexican options one could want. And the balls to put fried pork skin on the menu.

Both my and my BF’s meals were reasonably good and big enough to feed a small army (I reccomend splitting one dish). I wouldn’t reccomend our individual meals, neccisarily (he had the combinacion tres valedores), but I do reccomend the restaurant as a whole. Why? The chips were clearly made in house, I know they used local tomatoes in the salsa because while the salsa tasted great, it also felt a bit like late fall tomatos. The food tasted like Mexico, even if it was portioned like America.

And the number one reason I want to shout the name “El Tajin” to the hills? Instead of coming with sour cream, as most Mexican restaurant meals do here in Seattle, they were served with true Mexican Queso Crema. Sigh….