Dive into Seattle restaurant history starting with the city’s first cookhouse

How do you measure a year? In hot dogs, in brunch shifts, in clogged sinks, in coffee cups, in closings, in removals, in breweries, in dinners. How do you measure the lifespan of a restaurant? Well, first you need to know when it was opened.

The other day, a guest on the Dear Elite Reviewer podcast mentioned that her family did not know when it was opening because her family was not the original owner of their restaurant. She seemed unimpressed, but for a restaurant history nerd preoccupied with Seattle’s finest moments, curiosity gnawed at me.

Ironically, given the Dear Elite Reviewer’s exposure of Yelp’s deep flaws, the review website makes it easy to find opening times for newer restaurants. For restaurants that opened after about 2008, Yelp’s incentive helps entice reviewers to post the first posts to determine approximate opening dates – just short reviews from oldest to newest and oldest date. But the restaurant in question opened before the user-generated content boom. To find the answer to my riddle, I digged deeper into my favorite restaurant history resources.

Between the extensive annals of the Internet, the Seattle Room of the Seattle Public Library, and other local archives, reading and researching the history of Seattle restaurants from the comfort of your own home is easier than ever. Full of oyster soup and details about the debut of Dutch babies, this thin slice of local history chronicles what has happened in the industry since Seattle’s first restaurant.

“Yesler’s Cookhouse, built in 1853 at the foot of Mill Street, was really the first restaurant in the small village of Seattle,” begins the book “Restaurants of Seattle 1853-1960”. Written by Mrs. Hattie Graham Horrocks, the publicly available PDF describes the restaurants, how they were opened and closed, and describes them with varying degrees of accuracy. In search of information from old menus, newspaper advertisements, and city directories, it shows menus of 25 cent meals from 1882 and hotel restaurants that served Olympic oyster stew for 50 cents in 1913.

The latter is roughly the same time as the earliest menu in the Seattle Public Library collection – one from Drake’s Restaurant from 1910, which sold fried salmon for 15 cents, as much as baked oxheart and dressing. But the collection, which has digitized more than 600 menus from across the region, isn’t limited to long-gone history – it also traces Seattle’s modern restaurant legacy. The 1981 Les Copains opening menu features Bruce Naftaly offerings that you can find in Marmite’s kitchen today.

Horrock’s guide fills some of the gaps in the menu collection and details the opening of Manca’s in 1899, where, according to legend, the name Dutch Baby was first coined in relation to their puffed pancakes. But this entry also shows her flaws: she claims it was discontinued in 1954, but the Archives West list of the UW menu collection shows one by Manca from 1955, the same year MOHAI’s photo is taken. (The great-grandson of Manca’s original owner briefly opened the restaurant in Madison Park from 1991 to 1998.)

Colorful Seattle resident Ivar Haglund opened his first restaurant, Ivar’s Acres of Clams, on Seattle’s waterfront in 1946. (Courtesy photo of Ivar’s).

While well-known names appear in Horrock’s book, the main reason is that places are named after the historical places – the Diller, the Ben Paris, the Polar Bar. A current restaurant only emerges more than halfway through, with the arrival of Ray’s Boathouse in the 1930s and the opening of Skipper’s and Ivar’s in the same decade.

She mentions the 1938 opening of Lun Ting in the University District and The Hong Kong 1945 – which closed in the 1980s, although the iconic sign remains and the space is now occupied by the Hong Kong Bistro – and Ruby Chow’s (Chow himself was a bartender in Hong Kong) and a few other Chinese restaurants including the late Moon Temple, which opened in 1949 and closed in 2015. The only Japanese restaurant mentioned is Bush Garden. But the first mention of the Chinese is not because of the food, but in an 1882 newspaper ad that says “No Chinese are employed”. Though the International District Maneki was omitted from the book, it opened in 1904 and still exists today, as does Tai Tung, which opened in 1935 and shows Horrock’s narrow view of restaurants. Nor does she mention Monet’s Seattle Restaurant and Coffee Saloon, which shows up on HistoryLink and opened in 1864 by an African-American pioneer named Matthias Monet.

In this picture, Nariano Chachero, a Filipino dishwasher at Tai Tung Restaurant in Seattle’s vibrant and multicultural International District, takes a break from work on July 8, 1988 to get some fresh air. In the distance behind Mr. Chachero the clock tower of King Street Station is visible.

Jennifer Werner Jones / Courtesy MOHAI, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Photograph Collection

A little over a decade after Horrocks stopped, A Gourmet’s Notebook carries on. This library-available newsletter (pre-Substack paper, of course) founded by David Brewster – who later founded Seattle Weekly and Crosscut – gave anonymous reviews for local restaurants. It offers insights into the early history of local restaurants, such as the opening of Red Robin’s second location in Northgate – 1978, described as “a lot of show and a lot of come-on” and explains that “most burgers don’t” are worth the price, although the ideas are imaginative ”, or the opening of Catfish Corner, recently reopened under the direction of the grandson of the original owners (“ very fine fast food ”). It does a better job of reporting, with reviews of all types of restaurants including one that highlights the opening of the classic Ho Ho Seafood Restaurant in the International District early in 1987, and another that tells us about the only Afghan restaurant in Washington informed in 1988 (rating “very good”).

A Gourmet’s Notebook ends in 1991, so amateur researchers have to rely on the local newspapers for information between then and the beginnings of food blogs and review websites when the internet started recording every comings and goings. Fortunately, the oldest and easiest resource that has been delivered: The Seattle Public Library also provides free access to the 19th century Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer archives.

I found an early review of the restaurant whose owner did not know the opening date from the fall of 2002. I sat back, content to have dug up the knowledge, wavering with the information and history I could see as they passed by ? I looked around. The library and internet are bursting with fascinating information to immerse yourself in local restaurant history, if for no other reason than to be amazed how lucky we are to have and confirm the choice of restaurants we have today what Horrocks wrote in 1960 – that Seattle is one of the best restaurant cities in the country.