(From our travel archives) Escaped from post-Katrina for a few days, ostensibly for business, but really for my sanity.
I finally found a place where the Chinese food in the US tastes Chinese, a little place north of the city called Doong Kong Lau Haaka Cuisine. The “Haaka” were one of the nomadic tribes of China, and as such, they picked up “a little of this, a little of that” in their cuisine.
But I especially enjoyed the regional dishes I hadn’t had since leaving China, like a variety of steamed dumplings, steamed fish with ginger and onion, and seafood hot pot.
The restaurant is located at 9710 Aurora Ave North, in Seattle, about 5 miles north of downtown. Open 7 days til 11PM.
One of my other criteria in selecting my dining places, as you know, is to look for the long established “diner”, and I was happy to visit two in the area.
One was the “Poodle Dog”, which has been open on US 99 (the old main north-south highway on the West Coast)…since 1933. Standard diner fare in a location that hasn’t seen a redecorator since the 50s, at least. The Poodle Dog is just off I-5 in Fife, Washington, about 25 miles south of downtown.
The other diner was even further south, “Galloping Gerties”, 35 miles south of downtown in South Tacoma (might actually be Lakewood) at the front gate of the military establishment, “Fort Lewis.”
Why venture so far afield? One reason: SOS. That staple of my father’s generation of GIs, Gertie’s serves it, and I’ve never seen it on a restaurant menu. For those of you not familiar with the term “SOS”, it is the polite version of what GIs called “S**T on a Shingle”, more commonly known as creamed chipped beef on toast.
Gertie’s is named after the famous Tacoma Narrows Bridge that quit being a bridge one day in 1940, when poor engineering caused it to start vibrating in a wind storm and fall into the Narrows.
The SOS was worth the trip. Well, maybe. The terribly bad Karaoke in Gertie’s really made the evening worthwhile.
Poodle Dog Review