When I think of truck stops, I think of fried bologna sandwiches, nicotine-addicted waitresses, puffy mesh hats, transient showering, and Doritos. The Georgetown Truck Stop has none of these things. Rather, it's like walking into a friend's really cramped apartment kitchen—when said friend is out of much of the shit she'd promised to prepare and has to make do with whatever's left in the fridge. In lesser hands, such a predicament would be, well, a predicament. But at the Georgetown Truck Stop, this forced improvisation proves to be the tiny (probably the state's tiniest) eatery's greatest strength.
Peter Mumford
Bigger than
a bread box.
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Georgetown Truck Stop 5327 Denver Ave. S., 763-3337. GEORGETOWN
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About that BLT: It's not really a BLT; it's a BSTA, short for bacon, spinach, tomato, and avocado. Sounds yummy—only the last of the avocados on hand the afternoon I first visited were rotten to the core. So I was forced to settle for co-proprietor Stephanie Speer's substitute offer of red peppers, which bummed me out, because I'm the sort of avocado addict who eats the mushy green orbs "on the cob," like apples. But however short the peppers fell of an avocado's promise, the fact that Speer piled what must have been a dozen strips of crispy bacon into the sandwich more than made up for it.
Having pre-funked for the BSTP with a too-hot cup of chicken and sausage gumbo that was brothier and healthier than your average version of that dish, my pie hole's interior was a little on the tender side heading into the bacon-fest, and I'll be damned if those skyscraper-stacked strips didn't feel like razor blades on the roof of my mouth. I left the table—there's only one, and it's cluttered with reading material—feeling like my mouth had just gone 12 rounds with Hit Man Hearns. I also felt like my mouth won that fight by unanimous decision, so tasty was the otherwise hazardous chow.
On my second visit, Speer and her partner, James Zetterberg, were again out of a bunch of stuff on the menu, but managed to stitch together enough of what was left to send a happy crew of Department of Transportation workers back to the office happy and full. I managed to nab the last puff pastry, a sublime concoction featuring beef, mushrooms, spinach, and horseradish-dill sauce. Everything's better with a little horseradish tucked in, I'll have you know.
It's worth noting that, during that first visit, a man named Bob walked in with a brown paper bag full of unusual green grapes he'd grown himself. Bigger and with a more pronounced peel than grapes we're accustomed to purchasing at the store, these grapes were a one-way ticket to flavor country, the post-bout whirlpool for my scorched mouth. Bob turned out to be Zetterberg's dad. Once again, welcome to your buddy's cramped apartment kitchen.
mseely@seattleweekly.com
