Seattle’s Pioneer Square has long been a destination for espresso bars, old bookstores and interesting shops. Now, tech companies have moved into the office buildings surrounding one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, bringing with them trendy new storefronts and a revitalized feeling to the area.
The funky Rain Shadow Meats Squared, a joint café and butcher shop, has carved out some cozy space in one of Pioneer Square’s older buildings. The shop offers housemade cured-meat sandwiches, roasted lamb and pork dishes, and rotating butcher specials, as well as homemade sodas and local beers and wine. Sit for a bite at the inviting lunch counter or, if you’re in the mood to go home and do some cooking yourself, a well-stocked butcher case is filled with fresh local meats and succulent sausages.
Nearby, celebrated chef Matthew Dillon’s Bar Sajor is all soaring ceilings and natural light filtering through the windows of a stately turn of the 20th century building. With some of the most talked about food in the city, there are grilled and roasted meats, fermented vegetables and indulgent cocktails. The James Beard Foundation award-winning chef uses the restaurant’s wood-fired oven to coax dishes into blistery richness. While plenty of regulars drop in for a quick lunch or an evening drink, it’s best to plan ahead with a reservation to make sure you get in.
Across the cobblestone street, Chef Dillon has collaborated with Marigold and Mint’s shopkeeper Katherine Anderson to open The London Plane, an airy mercantile, florist shop and wine bar with light lunch options. A cool Scandinavian interior yields a cheerful room filled with carefully-curated goods, each on display atop pristine white bookshelves, while long tables are perfect for lingering lunches and sipping wine. Flanking the front door, intriguing flowers point the way to a wine bar that anchors the room, while immense windows make the space glow with light.
E. Smith Mercantile, with its old-world look and handmade general store vibe, feels like a trendy shop in Brooklyn or Portland, Oregon. Artisan clothes, apothecary goods and home wares you won’t find elsewhere in the city are on offer here. In the back, there’s craft coffee, ready to add a caffeinated edge to your day, or cocktails to take the edge off after 4 p.m. Co-owner Jessie Poole, a former designer for Eddie Bauer, named the shop after her great-grandfather, who lived and thrived in an old mining town in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho in the 1930s.
And even though it’s hardly new, the famous Salumi, owned by Mario Batali’s sister Gina and her husband Brian D’Amato, draws lines every day well before it opens. Its beloved cured meats, from-scratch soups, pastas and big Italian sandwiches still get rave reviews, as fans crowd into the narrow, congenial space.
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Activities in Tacoma
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Tacoma Ghost Tours
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Wheelz Skate Arena provides a 24,000-square-foot circular playground for veteran and neophyte foot gliders. A three-hour solo session in the rink is complemented by a pair of rented skates and snacks from the nearby food court to provide edible energy or exciting obstacles for rival skaters. Between 12 and 15 students attend Saturday-morning group classes, renting skates and spending 15–20 minutes warming up, after which they receive 30 minutes of skating knowledge on fundamentals such as marching forward, starting and stopping, and fixing skates’ tiny engines when they overheat. Following the class, students can free skate from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., enough time to practice rolling presidential inaugurations.
2101 Mildred St W
Tacoma,
WA
US
Paradise Bowl is kind of ruining the curve for everybody, or at least for other bowling alleys. User-friendly Qubica machines keep track of the scores, freeing bowlers to wrack up turkeys during Wednesday night Quarter Mania—when every game costs $0.25—and Moonlight Bowling on Saturday nights, when players can bowl for bundles of cash. Every night of the week offers a different special for customers, and the lanes are filled with live music on the weekends. Sunday mornings are brightened by the Rent-a-Lane special, which garners bowlers an hour of unlimited games for $10 or two hours of unlimited games for $15, between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. After some of the facility underwent a summer’s worth of renovations, the archetypal snack shop and its heat lamps has been replaced with a 1950s-style café with breakfast choices and a full-on bar and grill that serves American classics and comfort food, such as prime rib and pizza, as guests play pool and watch sports on LCD TVs and an outsized 120-inch screen.
12505 Pacific Ave S
Tacoma,
WA
US
At 52,000 square feet, and with a capacity of 1,200 people, Pacific Sports and Events Center has more than enough room for your activities. Opened in March 2012, the massive facility houses a pair of indoor soccer fields, where youth- and adult-league games, practices, and training sessions unfold throughout the year. The fields are even versatile enough to be used for other sports, including lacrosse, football, and baseball.
Sports aside, the center also invites guests to utilize its space for other activities, such as birthday parties. Plus, one Friday per month is reserved as Kids' Night Out. On that night, children aged 6?14 can gather at the center with friends while parents use the free time to go to dinner or jump on their bed, even though the house is not a gym.
2645 S 80th St.
Tacoma,
WA
US
Incorporated in 1907 to oversee the city's fledgling parks, today the Metro Parks Tacoma organization enriches the lives of residents and visitors with its array of recreational facilities that includes community centers, dog parks, pools, and athletic fields. At Fort Nisqually Living History Museum, visitors step back in time to interact with Washington's denizens of yore, hearkening back to the day when trappers fetched a pretty penny for the 1979 Seattle SuperSonics' jerseys. For nearly a century, golfers have flocked to Meadow Park Golf Course's 27 holes to shoot for par or practice their drives, and the Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium touts a rich Asian forest sanctuary home to real Sumatran tigers.
3873 South 66th Street
Tacoma,
WA
US
Though the historical gems of a museum tend to be its artifacts, the vintage autos of the LeMay Family Collection at Marymount only tell half the story. The Marymount location opened in 1923 as a boys' military school, which became a center for English education in 1975 and eventually the home to the family's vintage automobiles.
Beginning with a few vehicles gathered by Harold and Nancy LeMay in the 1960s, the collection has grown into a one-time Guinness World Record holder of more than 1,900 vehicles. Many of these classics, which range from Model Ts to muscle cars, rest fully restored alongside toys, antiques, and farm equipment within the year-round museum.
325 152nd Street East
Tacoma,
WA
US
A walk through Hell's Gateway Haunted House can feel like a terrifying eternity. A new scare waits behind every door, in every pitch-black corner, and down every narrow hallway. The experience is like stepping right onto the set of a horror film, only without the prima-donna werewolf and his incessant demands for imported chocolates.
A central computer controls all the sounds, mechanical props, and special effects, but the scariest inhabitants are the human performers. These actors take on the roles of demons, crazed children, and other terrifying personas searching for new recruits; attendees can spend some time in the Zombie Jail and pose for a picture in the electric chair.
2302 Fawcett Ave.
Tacoma,
WA
US
