Restaurants in Lakeland South

Recent studies have shown that love of spicy food is linked an adventurous personality. Well, this list is one for the risk takers, the adrenaline junkies, and the hotheads. For this type of person, the only thing that can make a good meal even better is the addition of just the right type of hot sauce. Every cuisine calls for its own style, from thin and watery with a shock of spice for Lebanese food, to rich and creamy to mellow out a high-octane pepper in Jamaican food. Here’s where to find Seattle’s treasure trove of hidden hot sauces, at high-end pizza joints and hole-in-the-wall African restaurants alike. Island Soul: Caribbean food is designed to make the eater sweat. Island Soul’s fervent use of peppers at the high-end of the Scoville scale is just in keeping with Jamaica’s culinary traditions. After all, in hot climates, sweating is the body’s natural air-conditioning. Most of the food is toned down just a bit, so that everybody can eat unafraid, but for those searching for five-star spice, just a touch of the house-made habanero hot sauce will take the goat stew or jerk chicken wings over the top. Delancey: Brandon Pettit’s pizzeria is often commended for its idyllic setting, exquisitely charred pies, and farm-to-table toppings. What flies under the radar is the chili-infused oil, silky-smooth and redolent of the fruitiness of peppers. The oil slides easily over the top of pizza—especially great with some of the vegetable heavy-toppings, such as kale—but really is at its best on the leftover pieces of crust at the end of the slice. Café Munir: The thin red sauce of puréed peppers and herbs floats on and off the menu, but those in the know will ask their server, as it’s almost always available. Prior to discovering the sauce, it was hard to imagine that there was a way to improve upon Munir’s perfectly grilled chicken skewers, served with a cooling garlic sauce. Then, with the addition of the hot sauce, it suddenly came even more alive, a fiery foil for the otherwise tame dish. Safari: Resplendent in orange, clearly homemade and fresh as can be, Jane Kagira’s hot sauce is a secret blend of five peppers, the hottest of which is habanero. She won’t tell much about the rest of the ingredients to her sauce, which goes equally well on the stir-fry accompanying a sunshine-yellow, curry-drenched tilapia; and the pan-fried goat, off which one picks the meat using chapati, a Kenyan (via Indian settlers) flatbread. What it doesn’t have, she will proudly tell anyone, is sugar or vinegar. The untempered spice is unusual, vibrant, and just a little bit overwhelming—in the way that spice-hunters love.

From Turkish manti to Korean mandoo, Polish pierogi to any number of Italian stuffed pastas, dumplings are basically just meat or vegetables plopped into a pocket of dough. But Seattle’s diverse restaurant scene offers plenty of opportunities to learn the difference between your xiao long bao and your bánh bột lọc chay. Dom Polski On Friday nights, Seattle’s Polish Home Association opens the basement of their Capitol Hill building to the public, inviting all comers to experience authentic Polish cuisine. Pickle soup and steak tartar are specialties, but the heart of the meal is the pierogies; a thick egg dough with a choice of filling: meat, saurkraut and mushroom, or potato and cheese. Don’t be fooled into thinking this is a light or vegetarian meal, though, as they arrive sautéed in bacon with sour cream to plop on top. Traditional Korean Beef Soup The menu has only a few items that are not variations of the namesake soup—simplicity is the name of the game here. But the mandoo are one of them, and are worth ordering. Watch for the tub of filling and giant ball of dough on a table in the back, where someone folds each dumpling, one by one, until a tray is full, lined up with what appear to be a Korean version of oversized tortellini. Din Tai Fung A Taiwanese chain with outlets around the world, Din Tai Fung has taken the art of xiao long bao, or soup dumplings, to the masses, including two outlets in Seattle. These are difficult to make, requiring exactly 18 folds, traditionally, of the delicate wrappers. With piping hot soup encased along with meat filling, they can be equally difficult to eat. To do so like an expert: gently pick up a dumpling, being careful not to rip the wrapper, and place it in a soup spoon, then bite a small hole in it, allowing steam to escape. Pour a little of the vinegar and ginger sauce into the hole, adding flavor and cooling the dumpling off, before proceeding very carefully to either take a bite or suck the soup out before eating it all. Turkuaz Turkey straddles the border between Europe and Asia, and it’s only appropriate that the dumplings that hail from there straddle the line between ravioli and Chinese jaozi. The spiced ground meat of an Asian potsticker is pressed into a ravioli-like wrapper, and sauced with garlic yogurt sauce and hot butter, then sprinkled with red pepper and mint. Anchovies and Olives With Italian stuffed pastas (ravioli, tortellini, etc.) being among the best known and most widely served in the U.S., it’s surprising how few restaurants bother to make them by hand. Anchovies and Olives knows better, stuffing their agnolotti (tiny ravioli) with butternut squash, sage, and walnuts, before sautéing in brown butter. Ba Bar A completely different texture of dumpling from the traditional wheat flour dough, the Hue dumpling (bánh bột lọc chay) at Ba Bar takes many diners by surprise. The tapioca starch and rice flour outside is stretchy and chewy, enclosing a dried mung bean paste. Without the spicy soy vinaigrette and caramelized shallots, they can come off as dry, but a proper saucing makes each one a soft, savory pillow of flavor.

Locals looking for a relaxing afternoon out, visitors looking for the best views, and wild food enthusiasts alike will find common ground in a day trip to Bainbridge Island. Looking back at the city as the ferry pulls away on its 35 minute journey, even a city snob will find it hard to resist an adventure begun by boat, taken by foot, and finished with blackberry-stained face slurping island-grown oysters at one of the best restaurants in the region. After hopping off the ferry on the island side, taking the first left onto the waterfront trail offers a pleasant walk into town. In summer, blackberries and salal berries grow wild along the path, ripe for snagging and snacking. The ten-minute walk into Winslow winds lazily along the waterfront, with a park on one side and Elliott Bay on the other. Along the way, in the marshy inlets and on the shoreline at Waterfront Park where the path ends, sea beans (also known as samphire or sea asparagus) spring up, and goose tongue greens are sprinkled about. Abundant in these areas, both types of sea greens pack a salty crunch that is unexpected from such tiny plants. After a healthy graze of the local flora, the natural first stop in town is Mora Iced Creamery. At the small shop, named by Food & Wine Magazine as one of the best ice cream spots in the country, townies, tourists, small children, and dessert-lovers of all strips line up for a scoop of the namesake blackberry ice cream or any of their huge variety of super-creamy, bold flavors. Continuing from there to one (or three—since the whole trip is by foot) of the tasting rooms for local wineries is the natural next step for a full gulp of the island. The eight wineries located on the island are part of the Puget Sound AVA (wine growing region). With a car, one could head out into the rest of the island and see the wineries themselves (and the vineyards, in some cases), but by foot the tasting rooms in town are the best bet for sampling the local reds and whites. To cap off the evening, a meal at Hitchcock Restaurant brings the idea of hyper-local food and island pride together with some amazing cooking. The name-your-price tasting menu winds up being an incredible value (often six or more courses for around $50). Included are hand-made pastas, island-grown produce, and house-made cured meat products. Even though the food isn’t strictly local, Food & Wine Magazine’s People’s Best Chef Brendan McGill brings an island pride—and excellent instinct for flavor—to every dish. The servers, too, love their island home—but they also are great about making sure any customer who needs to will make it out in time for the last ferries of the night. And at the end of the meal, an evening constitutional back to the ferry dock does a body good, but it is nice not to have to do it in a full-on sprint.