“Too few people understand a really good sandwich.” The legendary chef James Beard was not wrong when he wrote those words—we’ve certainly all eaten a lot of mediocre sandwiches.

House-cured salmon toast from Mr. West in downtown Seattle

As with many things in Seattle’s culinary scene, we can probably credit chef Renee Erickson for convincing us that $10 is not too much to spend on toast



As summer draws near, we anticipate many extreme culinary adventures, like attempting to balance plates of La Bodega’s epic paella in our hands while inhaling Chef Manu Alfau’s glorious empanadas.

Oh, thank you, Earl of Sandwich, the first man to put meat between slices of bread. And thank you, too, people of Hamburg, Germany, who, legend has it, made a steak of ground meat and called it a hamburger. That was 300 years ago, give or take.

Most of us don’t need the census numbers to know that the largest concentration of Jewish households in the state is on Mercer Island. The puzzler is why it took this long for a good Jewish deli to open there.

