REVIEW | Where to Eat an Unforgettable Roadside Meal in Rainier Valley
On the upper part of my left arm, I have a tattoo of a plastic stool.
A lot of people look confused when they see it. Why commemorate such a mundane item on your skin?
But for me, it's special because of what it represents: street food, specifically the style you'll find all over Asia.
These tiny stools that offer just inches of clearance off the ground have become synonymous with Vietnamese food. They provide a cheap and easy way to set up and take down an outdoor dining area in front of a restaurant or food cart.
The experience of eating street food is unknown to most Americans who haven't traveled outside the country. There's nothing quite like eating a meal roadside while watching vehicles and pedestrians pass by with the sounds of a bustling city enveloping you.
Rainier Restaurant is offering folks in the South End a little taste of this style of dining every weekend this summer. The front parking lot is scattered with small plastic tables and stools where people dine on a unique slimmed-down menu featuring snails, grilled oysters, and more. According to a server, the owner got the idea after a trip back to Vietnam that inspired her to bring a little bit of that culture to Seattle.
While the outside dining option is new, the restaurant has been around since 1995. In 2013, famed chef and author Anthony Bourdain visited the establishment, which to most foodies would anoint the restaurant as top tier. And although the establishment has changed hands in the past decade, the original chef is back in the kitchen making their famous fried catfish and offering Vietnamese dishes that are hard to find elsewhere in the city.
The restaurant is three stories tall, and on a recent warm Saturday evening, even though the full menu was only available inside where there were plenty of available tables, most people still chose to wait in line for a chance to dine in the parking lot.
The outdoor menu is simple: snails prepared a few different ways, fried fish balls and beef balls, grilled oysters, balut, bread, clam soup, and "corn shrimp." Everything is listed in Vietnamese with a rough translation next to it, so it took a little Googling for our non-Vietnamese-speaking group to figure out what exactly we wanted.
The highlight of the meal for me was the "corn shrimp." A mix of sautéed corn with dried baby shrimp, butter, and fish sauce, this dish took me by surprise. The umami from the shrimp drove the dish, and combined with a little fish sauce and the melted butter on the corn, it was divine.
We also tried the snails in a coconut broth and a butter chili sauce. Using the wooden skewers given to us, we plucked the snails from their shells, revealing how surprisingly meaty they were. They are denser than clams, but similarly, they had the familiar taste of the sea. For the smaller ones, we learned, you suck out the meat. Sea snails shall be a part of my greater diet after this encounter.
You can get oysters two ways, either covered in cheese or in a mixture of green onion and garlic. Neither one really did it for me, but I’m also not a huge oyster gal. My dining companions, however, readily approved of both.
A tip: Add a piece of bread or two to your order to soak up any leftover juices from the other dishes. Then, don’t forget to cool off with one of the iced teas. They’ve got a few different options, including a watermelon tea, pandan milk tea, and a lychee tea, which I went with. It was perfect for a warm evening.
And because I’ve never seen it on a menu in Seattle, I ordered balut — the infamous partially fertilized egg commonly found in Filipino cuisine. While I don’t believe in yucking anyone’s yum, the sight of the peeled egg did make me question my decision.
I asked one of the servers for advice on how I was supposed to eat this; a subsequent Google search informed me you do not peel the whole thing and instead you crack just the top of the egg and suck it down from there.
My rule of thumb is that I’ll try anything once; hence, this would be my once for balut. Turns out it was much more akin to a regular hard-boiled egg than I anticipated, just a little more meaty. The restaurant offers other hard-to-find dishes, like frog legs and eel, and occasionally alligator as well.
The best part of dining at Rainier Restaurant isn’t simply the outside set up. While the small stools and street food style is much appreciated, the true stand-out is the cultural authenticity. People at surrounding tables spoke Vietnamese. They have dishes that you don’t typically see in our city. Everything about the dining experience reflects the restaurant's roots and it's refreshing to have a restaurant like this in our community.
6400 Martin Luther King Jr. Way South, Seattle, WA 98118
Monday–Thursday, 11 a.m.–10 p.m.
Friday, 11 a.m.–11 p.m.
Saturday, 10 a.m.–11 p.m.
Sunday, 10 a.m.–10 p.m.
Grace (DD) Madigan is a Seattle-based journalist who formerly covered arts and culture for KNKX.
This article is published under a Seattle Human Services Department grant, “Resilience Amidst Hate,” in response to anti-Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander violence.
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