If you follow a bold pace, you probably know I’m not a runner. But, I truly enjoy finding ways to help Monica with her running (mainly thru music). As Monica’s last post mentioned, I recently had surgery to give my brother a kidney (it all went very well, we are both recovering quickly), which afforded me a trip back to Seattle (my hometown). It was great to catch up with family and good friends. As you may know, Seattle is known for excellent coffee (Starbucks, Seattle’s Best…both founded here), awesome microbrewery beer (Redhook, Pyramid…my favs), and a great music scene (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Modest Mouse, Presidents of the United States of America, The Sonics, etc). It’s also a very eco-conscious and healthy/outdoorsy city. So it’s a perfect place to run with music (for Monica) or just enjoy the music, beer and/or coffee (for me).
On my last day there, one of my friends found (via Bing…she works for Microsoft) a great place to have breakfast together. Easy Street Records and Cafe is located in West Seattle. It turned out to be an awesome find.
fyi for tech geeks only…you might be interested to know that we probably would not have found Easy Street if we searched on Google. She typed in “Best breakfast places in Seattle”. The first search item in Bing brought her to a top 10 list in Yelp that listed “Easy Street Records and Cafe” as #6. If you typed the same thing into Google you will also find a Yelp listing, but it lists “downtown” restaurants. Not sure why Google would insert “downtown” into the Yelp search, but Easy Street doesn’t show up. And that would have been a real shame because this place (forgive me for this) ROCKED! It was enough to make me change my computer to Bing as the default browser.
At the West Seattle Easy Street (there is another East Street in downtown Seattle, but not w/ a cafe), the cafe is located right inside the record store. They have a great selection of reasonably priced new and used CDs as well as vinyl LPs. The vibe is very indie music oriented w/ lots of tattooed, pierced, colored-hair wait staff, but very friendly and fun. The food had names like “Beck Omelet”, “Gang of Four” (4 tacos for lunch), “New Wave O’s Rancheros” and even “Born to Run” (a “good to go” bfast sandwich). Of course, the music is always playing w/ interesting bands and it’s a casual diner-type place. The coffee is up to Seattle standards w/ some comments on Yelp staying that the baristas here are the “best kept secrets in the city”. We all tried different coffee drinks and I’d have to agree. Even the bathrooms made me smile. Only in Seattle at a place like this would you find reflective, eco-conscious, inspirational graffiti w/ lines like “Be Yourself–those who mind don’t matter, those who matter don’t mind” and “What r you doing? Why r u doing this? Is it a good thing? What’s it’s impact? What’s next?”. Easy Street Cafe bills itself on the web as “the best little record store, coffee bar, and diner in West Seattle”…I don’t know how many record store/cafe’s there are, but I’ll start the nomination process for the best little record store, coffee bar, and diner in the US!
After an amazing breakfast, my friends were finally able to pull me away from the used CDs (picked up White Music – XTC, Morrissey: Greatest Hits (Deluxe Version) – Morrissey, and Mermaid Avenue – Billy Bragg & Wilco for about $5 or $6 each) and across the street to a incredible farmers market.
Then we walked further and found The Beer Junction which we couldn’t walk by (OK…I couldn’t walk by). I love a good unfiltered micro-brew and have a hard time finding this type of beer in Philly/New Jersey area. So, we walked in and they pretty much had any beer you can name. My friends even found a “Anderson Valley” beer they decided I must have (who am I to argue?). It was a “Dark Porter” that was described as “Dark brown and medium bodied Dark chocolate aftertaste with a roasted coffee character”…it was very good!
We then walked to a cool art store, a great bakery named Bakery Nouveau (that my daughter would have loved and everyone on Yelp seems to agree), and a home decor store before calling it a morning…well, it was actually quite late in the afternoon by this point.
After such a good time in a cool neighborhood, I knew I’d have to bring Monica back to this place and I was sure I could find a good run as there are several amazing parks on the water nearby. Here’s what I found below…now, once again, I’m not a runner so, no, I didn’t run it…but I did ensure that Easy Street Records and Cafe is right in the middle of this route so I can be waiting for her when she finishes:)
Thanks to Map My Run (become a MapMyRun.com member here and get access to Free Running Cue Sheets and Printed Running Maps ) for below…
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Thanks for the tech geek insight.