Speaking lascivious lattes, the Epicurious Epi-Log hips us to bikini baristas in the Pacific Northwest. At shops like Cowgirls Espresso in Washington state, the skimpy togs worn by the female staff members are meant to perk up male customers as much as the caffeine does. Not everyone's happy.... More

Photograph by the Seattle Cheese Festival For all you Seattleites and those from neighboring areas in the Pacific Northwest, the 2008 Seattle Cheese Festival starts tomorrow and runs through Sunday afternoon. Held outdoors every year at the wonderful Pike Place Market, the fourth annual Seattle Cheese Festival is open to the public, has a suggested admission of $1, and represents one of the largest gatherings of cheese aficionados in the country. On display (and available for sampling) are hundreds of cheeses from around the world, and for the more serious turophiles, there are seminars and panels, cooking demonstrations, a wine garden and a children’s scavenger hunt. (Seminars, panels, and the wine garden have additional admission fees.)... More

Robyn and Ed visited a mobile dessert truck earlier this week, but today our attention is drawn to Skillet, a vintage 1962 Airstream trailer that sets up shop in various Seattle neighborhoods and dishes up Kobe beef burgers with bacon jam, lemongrass braised pork sandwiches, and San Juan Islands hallibut tacos, among other awesome-sounding grub. Video of the rolling restaurant after the jump.... More

When I heard the Georgian Room, Seattle's fanciest hotel restaurant, would be holding an etiquette class for 8- to 13-year-olds, I had one question for instructor (and Georgian Room maitre d') Tony D'Agostino: are any kids going to come to the class on their own accord? Not likely, he admitted. "How many kids go, 'Mom, I want to go learn etiquette?'" D'Agostino said. "It's right up with the adult classes, though. You go around the table and ask, 'Why are you here?' The husbands go, 'My wife is bringing me.'" So how do you keep a captive and potentially unruly audience entertained? In a word, snacks. And not those cucumber sandwiches, either. The tiered tea trays will hold scones and... More

Even though I don't live in Seattle, I'm hooked on MSG150, a blog that aims to review every restaurant in Seattle's International District (Chinatown) with freakishly precise data (such as quality of chopsticks, length of waiting time for food, and fortunes received from post-meal fortune cookies), excessive photos, and humorous commentary. If all this information is too much for you, you can skim reviews just by looking at the number of chopsticks awarded to each restaurant from a scale of 1 ("dog food") to 5 ("great!"). The world needs more obsessively comprehensive food blogs like this one.... More

What is it about taco trucks? Does anybody not love them, aside from competing Mexican restaurant owners? Do four-year-olds love taco trucks? I decided to find out. I took my four-year-old daughter, Iris, to Tacos El Asadero this week, and I think it's fair to say Tacos El Asadero is now her favorite place in the entire world. More

Everyone knows you can torture your kids by substituting apple slices for fries in a Happy Meal, but what about the important part of the kid's meal: the toy? Burgerville is an unusual burger chain found only in Oregon and Southwest Washington. They use sustainably raised beef and Northwest fruit. The fish and chips is made with fresh Alaskan halibut. You can put Rogue Creamery's awesome Smokey Blue cheese on your burger or salad. Recently, my daughter, Iris, got the kid's meal at Burgerville (plain burger and fries), and the toy was a plastic cup, a small trowel, and a packet of zinnia seeds. Iris loved planting the zinnias on our balcony. The other seeds in the series are sunflowers,... More

Photograph from UCLAcyc on Flickr Philly's got cheesesteaks, New York's got pizza, Chicago's got hot dogs, and Seattle has ... teriyaki? According to a story in the Seattle Weekly, the grilled meat dish is fast becoming the ubiquitous dish in the Emerald City. Nothing seems to stop the exponential growth of teriyaki shops in Seattle and its surrounding environs, including market saturation. To wit, the Washington Restaurant Association recently generated a list of all the restaurants in its master database with "teriyaki" in the name, listed by date of entry. As of 1984, the database contained 19 (that is, restaurants still in business). That number doubled by 1987. In the mid-1990s, 20 to 40 teriyaki joints appear to have... More

In honor of the upcoming Chinese New Year (Sunday, February 18 ushers in the Year of the Pig), we talked to our food-loving friends around the country to find out where they'd send Serious Eaters for some great Chinese food. Inside, picks from Atlanta, Seattle, Miami, San Francisco, and more, along with the symbolism of some of the food eaten on the eve of the new lunar year. Year of the Pig—Serious Eaters, don't you love that?!? More

Seattle's got its latte artists at Caffe Vita, while the Londoners that jam Monmouth Coffee like their coffees understated. The coffees in Perth belong to another category altogether, thanks to "cappuccino Michelangelo" Simon Law. For other latte art, check out the pics at Google Images.... More