Ishtar Greek and Mediterranean Cuisine

If done right, brunch can be the best meal of the week. There’s no pressure, gallons of coffee, cocktails galore and scads of food you wouldn’t make for yourself. What’s not to like? Here are some of Seattle’s best weekend brunch options. Denizens of Ballard already head to Señor Moose for their reasonably authentic Mexican fare, but when brunch comes around, crowds form for the Colima-style huevos rancheros with black beans and large plates of chorizo and eggs. Thick masa cakes, filled with fried plantains, are also a hard to find local favorite. The cozy digs are painted in a vibrant southwestern palette and peppered with Mexican tchotchkes, and there’s always a “we’re glad you’re here” feeling as you walk in the door. At Brave Horse Tavern, South Lake Union locals know to order some bracing coffee or a Bloody Mary with pickled vegetables, then lay into the housemade Eggs Benedict, waffles, or a scrambled egg burrito. But really, it’s hard to go wrong with any of the late morning entrées on offer. The tavern itself is a historic building, with rugged walls that give it a western feel. There’s free shuffleboard and darts, and the Big Buck Hunter video game in the tack room benefits a local charity. Seattle teams show up on the big screen TVs, and it’s a major sports hangout on game days. Near Fremont you’ll find Joule, a great place to start waking up for the weekend, with soft blue wallpaper walls that are easy on the eyes and open-rafter ceilings that have an airy feel. The menu, loosely based on Korean and New American hybrid dishes, is full of upscale touches, which makes sense given the pedigree of owners Seif Chirchi and Rachel Yang, who met while working at Alain Ducasse at the Essex House in New York. Order a main dish, perhaps a sesame waffle or something with pork belly, then hit the brunch buffet for a bevy of side options. Expect changing themes at the buffet, such as Moroccan food, with the appropriate cheese, salads, chutneys and fresh pastries. For fancy, sometimes celebrity-studded, brunch in an opulent room with formal service and loads of cachet, try The Georgian. Located in the back of the 1924 Italian Renaissance- style Fairmont Olympic Hotel, The Georgian’s butter-yellow walls offer a contrast to the crystal chandelier and leafy palm plants spread throughout the room. The huge buffet has applewood bacon, quiche, berries, croissants, pastries and fresh juices, and hot items like eggs and waffles on the weekend. The standalone menu offers many options, and some opt to get their roughage the stylish way with an order of Scottish steel cut oats topped with whiskey maple syrup and Devonshire cream.

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.

A series of posters serves as wall decoration at Biang! in Edmonds. “The Eight Weirdies in Shanxi Province,” the title reads. The first poster, and perhaps most pertinent here in a Shanxi noodle shop, is captioned “noodle is in the shape of a waist belt.” Those are the biang biang noodles for which the restaurant is named, and they are the source of the background noise there, too: thump, thump, thump, as the onomatopoeic noodles biang, biang, biang against the countertop, stretching longer and wider each time they make contact with the surface. In China, the Shanxi province has earned a reputation for being a little strange, and these posters are a tongue in cheek allusion to that quirkiness--their version of “Keep Austin Weird.” “Hot pepper is a delicacy,” is one of the ‘weirdies’ posted on the wall. Traditionally it is about a dish entirely made up of fried peppers, but its influence is seen in the hot-oil-seared version of the biang biang noodles that is the specialty of the house. If these two-inch wide noodles drizzled in fragrant chili oil and sprinkled with yet another dose of chili pepper flakes are two weirdies in one, than maybe it’s time to get four times as weird, with one order for now and one for tomorrow’s lunch, when they’re just as good—if not better. Given that it was the first restaurant in the area serving Shanxi specialties, Biang! faced a tough road to recruit customers used to the Cantonese seafood houses and occasional Sichuan restaurants, whose dishes make up most of Seattle’s Chinese food lexicon. The job was made easier by the fact that Biang! itself is not very weird. Just a small, clean, and simply-but-pleasantly decorated restaurant situated in a strip mall on the side of Highway 99, a tad north of the Edmonds/Shoreline border. Aside from the noodles, the menu features other specialties of the province, including a lamb soup into which bread is torn up and soaked, called yang rou pao mo. The traditional sandwiches—spiced pork or beef—are served on soft bread that is somewhere in-between an English muffin and a pita bread, and Biang!’s menu smartly omits the true translation of the springy, spicy liang pi cold rice noodle appetizer: “cold skin noodles.” The new cuisine and occasional odd name shouldn’t frighten away squeamish eaters, though, as dumplings, broccoli, and simple tomato-and-egg versions of the noodles round out the menu. Despite the cuisine’s affinity for peppers, there are many mild options on the menu, and the servers are unflappingly friendly and helpful.