Consider the week's food news in Seattle starting with the rocky launch of UberEATS. Despite my own distinctly sour experience, chronicled earlier, I have confidence that the Uber will get this right within a short time. Friday's lunch order, the delicious porchetta sandwich from Meat+Bread, arrived in two minutes.
Seattle hipster/tech worker [snaps fingers] "Uber, bring me lunch!"
Uber: "Yeah, yeah"
Seattle hipster: "I want my lunch NOW, dammit"
Uber: "Yeah, yeah"
Seattle hipster: "Bwahhhhhhhh"
Uber: "Get over it."
Meantime, get this, the Noo Yawk Times weighs in, this very morning, with one of its patented "[name of community] is losing its soul" surveys, assigned out of the National Desk in the Big Apple, illustrated with a time-lapse of Amazonians buying lunch from food trucks. Spare me, please.
Also on the horizon: a new outpost of Big Mario's. Berthed next to the Caffè Vita on Lower Queen Anne, in the space that once housed Panos Kleftikos (815 5th Ave. N.), is a spanking new Big Mario's pizzeria, named for Mario Vellotti.
Not pure Neapolitan but a New York-New Haven variation called "apizza," with spicier toppings and sold by the slice. (The New Haven pronunciation is something like "a-BEETS" but what would they know about pizza at Yale?) The first Big Mario's opened three years ago on Capitol Hill, next to the Caffè Vita on the Pike-Pine corridor. Mario was running an Italian food-importing company in Georgetown and counted the Via Tribunali chain among his best customers. But Tribunali is authentic Neapolitan, with all the mystique of a wood-fired oven certified by an industry board of examiners, with more of a sit-down-for-dinner clientele.
Big Mario's, like Vellotti himself, is large, loud and brash; get your slices at the front counter (as they come out of the Baker's Pride ovens) and take a stool at the bar in back. The new spot is being put together by the same crew, Guild Seattle, that just launched the exquisitely detailed Ernest Loves Agnes on the eastern slope of Capitol Hill; they're hoping Big Mario will be ready for its closeup by the end of October.
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