Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [261]
Although lunch is served every day, and it includes some excellent salads and soups as well as vegetarian plates and no-beef hamburgers, most fans of the 14 Carrot Café consider it a breakfast place. Omelets are big and beautiful, served with good hash browns and a choice of toast, English muffin, or streusel-topped coffee cake. The coffee cake itself is something to behold: a moist crumble-topped block, served with a sphere of butter as big as a Ping-Pong ball. Other notable breadstuffs include blueberry muffins and cinnamon rolls. The latter, described as “large and gooey” by our waiter, is a vast doughy spiral with clods of raisins and veins of dark brown sugar packed into its warm furrows. It, too, comes blobbed with a ball of melting butter.
If eggs aren’t your dish, how about hotcakes, sourdough or regular, with sliced bananas, apple slivers, or blueberries, with bacon on the side or cooked into the cakes? You can order hot oats with soy milk, dates, and cashews; homemade granola; sourdough French toast; or a grand version of French toast known as Tahitian toast, gilded with a thin layer of sesame butter.
Bakeman’s
122 Cherry St.
206–622–3375
Seattle, WA
L Mon–Fri | $
A working-class cafeteria with a menu that is pretty much limited to soup and sandwiches. Bakeman’s is open only for lunch, Monday through Friday. Its raison d’être in this book is the turkey sandwich on white or whole wheat. The bread is homemade, stacked up at one end of the cafeteria line. It is not spectacular bread. It is bread for sandwiches: tender slices that come to life when spread with mayo and/or mustard and/or cranberry and/or shredded lettuce, then heaped with turkey or—almost as wonderful—slabs of meat loaf.
If meat loaf is your dish, we recommend it on whole wheat with ketchup and shredded lettuce. The meat is tightly packed but tender, gently spiced, with a delicious aroma. As for turkey, get it any way you like, because this is superb, real, carved-from-the-bird turkey with homey flavor. The dark meat is lush; the white meat is moist and aromatic; and both varieties have an occasional piece of skin still attached, a nice reminder of just how real it is. The way we like it is, in the words of the countermen who hustle things along at breakneck pace, “white on white, M&M,” which means white meat turkey on white bread with mustard and mayonnaise. You can also get it dressed with shredded lettuce and an order of cranberry relish. Turkey sandwiches get no better than this!
Bakeman’s offers a couple of good soups each day, such as turkey noodle or beef vegetable plus a nice chili, or, on one memorable occasion, Chinese eggflower—an egg-drop variation. There are not-so-interesting Waldorf or potato salads and such, but dessert can be wonderful—carrot cake, cookies, or chocolate or lemon poppy-seed cake, sliced like bread.
Beth’s Café
7311 Aurora Ave. N
206–782–5588
Seattle, WA
Always open | $
Are you hungry? Really, really hungry? If so, eat at Beth’s. Order the twelve-egg omelet. Yes, that’s an even dozen, served not on a puny plate but on a pizza pan. If you’re only half-hungry, Beth’s offers six-egg omelets. Each comes with a heap of hash brown potatoes—all you can eat—and, if desired, bacon strips that have been cooked under a weight so they arrive flat and fragile. Biscuits-and-gravy is another of Beth’s monumental meals, but if you arrive with only a tiny appetite, the menu offers mini breakfasts that are merely a single egg with hash browns and your choice of bacon or sausage.
At lunch the flagship meal is a half-pound Mondo burger