Ocho

Last week Cindy and I tried a new restaurant in Ballard called Ocho (yes, this was the same night we bought our shoes- magic was in the air). And it was great. It's a tapas bar, which is not exactly new in this town, but it's closer to the real thing than anything else I've come across around here. My beef with Seattle tapas joints is that they're basically fancy restaurants with smaller plates. You wouldn't go to one of these places to get a drink and just hang out, because it's essentially a fancy restaurant. Ocho is different. It's small and low-key. Half of the place is taken up by a bar, with a few tables on the side. One look at the list of tapas (written on a chalkboard on the back wall) and you'll notice that most of them are around $4-$5. That's still higher than what you'd find in Spain, but lower than other places in Seattle. But what about the food? We had six plates between the two of us, and all but one were fantastic. They had the best garbanzo beans I've ever tasted (sort of a bean stew, with bacon and arugula), and I'm normally not that crazy about garbanzos. Oh, and get this- Cindy ordered a Coke...and it was 50 cents! When was the last time you saw Coke on a menu for that price? It's as if there were a rip in the fabric of the space-time-restaurant continuum. So I'm going to go ahead and give this place the Concords Are Better seal of approval. That's high praise, my friend.
This week's selection on Radio Concord is Sea Wolf, who we saw in concert recently: