A Virgin's Voyage to Ivar's, Dick's, and Pagliacci

The list was growing long--my wife Laura and I huddled on the couch, tapping away at laptops, trying to find the shape and texture of an entire city's restaurant scene while still living out of luggage and boxes that were fast becoming furniture.

Peter Mumford

The Broadway Dick's is "a brightly lit landmark by which to steer through the dregs of the evening."

Peter Mumford

In the right situation, this burger is perfect.

Location Info

Map

Ivar's Acres of Clams

1001 Alaskan Way, Pier 54
Seattle, WA 98104

Category: Bars/Clubs

Region: Downtown

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Details

PRICE CHECK

Pagliacci 13-inch cheese: $13.99/Salumi Primo: $21.49

Ivar's Fish and chips (lunch): $12-$14/Clam chowder: $5-$6

Dick's Deluxe burger: $2.40/Fries: $1.40/Chocolate shake: $1.35

 

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"This looks good," she'd say, tilting her machine in my direction to show me some architectural plate stacked with butter lettuce and prawns, a white bowl of yellow curry, and a plate of beef shellacked in hoisin varnish and speckled with sesame seeds. I'd dutifully scribble down names and vague addresses on the legal pad I was filling, trying to connect one place to another nearby.

Choosing where to eat is never an easy thing. There are so many variables, so many possibilities. And doing it blind—in a new town, with nothing to go on but instinct and appetite—is like playing culinary Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded but one. Luck is rare, disaster a nearly sure thing.

Option paralysis—that's where we eventually found ourselves. Too many restaurants, not enough time, not enough resources, not enough data. "So what are we going to do, Jay? We need to eat somewhere..."

On Saturday afternoon, we got lost. Driving around looking for one thing, we instead found a dozen others—dead-end condo developments, streets full of cold neon, a college, and the Space Needle, completely by accident.

Laura was driving. I was navigating—which was why we were lost in the first place. And at a certain point, I got fed up with turning in endless, crooked circles, and decided I was hungry instead.

"Let's just park the car," I said. "I need to eat."

Pagliacci Pizza is what we found, the original location on University Way—a neighborhood staple since 1979 and the breeding ground for something like two dozen disparate locations operating today. I had a vague handle on its local-chain-makes-good back story, but I knew Pagliacci was beloved. What I didn't know was anything about the food, which was easily remedied by stepping through the doors and ordering a lot of it, all at once.

Pagliacci does slices, whole pies, pastas, calzones, and beers in the cooler behind the register. It's like a decently stocked house party on any campus in America, with decor in keeping with that theme—brightly painted walls, framed movie posters (all in Italian), tables covered with the detritus of whoever occupied them before you.

We ordered a Salumi Primo (their brand-new seasonal) and some pasta and beers, and took our little flag to a table in the back, where we sat and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Pagliacci had maybe six people in the dining room while we sat there. There were more employees on the floor than customers, and yet it seemed as though no one was getting fed. Ten minutes, 15—I can understand that. Twenty minutes starts to push the boundaries of how long any pizza should reasonably take without some terrible tragedy occurring around the ovens. Good thing we had beers. Without them, there would've been no anchor holding Laura and I at the table, and as our wait stretched beyond 25 minutes, we likely would've just got up, drifted away, and gone for tacos or Thai food instead.

Patience (and pale ale) won out, though, and eventually our pizza arrived—brought in a flurry of napkins, silver, plates, and apologies. A thin crust, golden and swollen at the bone, shaved fennel, sliced finocchiona salami from Salumi, cracked black pepper, mozzarella, fontina, and little blobs of cool ricotta set like tiny clouds against a cured-meat sky—it looked good and smelled of heat and char and the brine of pickled peppers.

I pulled a slice, folded it delicately, ate it in four huge bites, and had another. The crust held up admirably under the weight of the toppings, which were each strong enough in their own right to balance one another—the fennel cooling the bite of the salami, the peppers brightening the smoothness of the ricotta. It was a good pie. Not stunningly so, not an instant killer, but solid and worthy of my knocking off half the thing at a sitting, boxing the remainder, and eating the rest that night at home. It occupied that weird middle ground between godawful chain delivery and heavyweight sit-down artisan pies, which, not for nothing, is a sweet place to be for any pizza outfit: a comfortably centrist position which leaves you worlds better than the worst pies out there and able to steal customers from the best simply by dint of accessibility.

Too bad about that pasta, though: baked penne dressed in a tomato-and-cream sauce that tasted of neither, with five cheeses that combined all the savor of dry Parmesan out of a shaker and smelled, all together, like a foot. Dull, bland, soggy, and affectless, it was the kind of thing anyone might make when either too lazy or too drunk to core a tomato without hurting themselves.

The only fun we got out of it was searching through the oozing sauce for the "fresh" basil. Laura finally found one wilted little leaf and held it up proudly, as though she'd discovered buried treasure.