SEAReview
Included In
When looking for a new apartment in Seattle, you have to consider four things: price, size, location, and quality. But you can really only have three of them, and you’ll have to compromise on the one that makes you want to cry the least. A swanky high-rise apartment in the heart of Capitol Hill with a Viking range and enough living room space to do the Electric Slide with six people will probably be out of your budget. Likewise, you could get the same apartment for a fraction of the cost, but in Mill Creek, and the next thing you know you’ll be in a kickass home that nobody wants to come visit, asking yourself, “how did I get here?,” because you’re living an existential crisis.
Restaurants are like this too sometimes, and it can be totally unfair to get stuck with a gorgeous location, high prices, and bad food—or great food, low prices, and wads of used gum stuck to your table.
Manolin, however, is the restaurant where you don’t have to compromise.
This is a high-ceilinged, exposed-beam-covered stunner of a space, with a huge u-shaped bar, lots of color, and an outdoor courtyard firepit patio. The food is even more impressive—regularly-rotating seafood and vegetable-centric small plates that look like art and taste like expensive vacations. There’s everything from rockfish ceviche (with avocado and a birds-nest of sweet potato twigs) to a steak that could double as a design school thesis installation studying geometrical negative space, and is one of the greatest incarnations of meat and potatoes we’ve ever eaten. The cocktails are outrageously good, and the prices are outrageously reasonable.
But the best part of Manolin might be their old-school grill. It looks like something you’d encounter in a medieval dungeon, complete with firewood smells and its own pulley system for raising and lowering like a glorious meat elevator. Watching the staff operate this thing (as well as seeing them prep the food at the bar itself) is part of the Manolin magic that we can’t get enough of.
That, and the pure versatility. You can do Manolin for a first date, group small plate-palooza, a weeknight dinner to spice up your relationship, or even a happy hour cocktail and snacks on the patio with your boss. Maybe just move in. Utilities are probably included.