Top shelf pizza at Pudge Bros

Pudge Brothers Pizza
269 Northeast 45th Street
Seattle, WA 98105-6147
(206) 545-9355

When the discerning pizza connoisseur hunts down the best pies, he smells the dough and samples the sauce. Toppings come and go–sausage, ham, pineapple, chicken cordon bleu–and they don’t mean a thing if the crust and sauce stink. Some places look nice and offer you everything but the kitchen sink on your pie, but don’t come through when it gets down to the ever-important sauce and crust.
Pudge Bros. doesn’t go crazy with extravagant combinations like some Seattle pizza spots either, though they do offer 18 specialty pies in vegetarian and meat combos. Nor do they have a large, fancy restaurant for eating in–there are just four small tables and a bar along the window to eat on. This place is almost all kitchen. But they do have a good crust and a tasty sauce worked out that make each pie a little slice of heaven.
The crust is light, fluffy, and not too thick, which might turn off the thick-crust lover, but the flavor is all there. One customer even said the crust was “legit.” The marinara, by the account of the reviewers, sold the whole thing. Sweet, slightly spicy, but not too much. Full tomato flavor with Italian spice keeping every bite interesting. With a sauce that good, they could put on any toppings.
As a true pizza joint should, Pudge’s also offers calzones, sausage and meatball sandwiches, breadsticks, cheesy bread, and even wings. For drinks, they keep it simple with soda and juice–no beer or vino.
Cost comes in fairly competitive, with their “monster” 18” pies starting at $17, and slices under $3. Despite the small restaurant area, their table service is surprisingly good, and deserving of tips.
Pudge Bros. Pizza represents what a real pizza place should be: focused on crust, sauce and service. Save the fancy combinations for someone else.

4.5 licks of the lips.
Photo by Sean Sherman of The Ebbtide

Taste of India delights taste buds

Hanging out on Roosevelt with an appetite for something different? Taste of India might just have what you need.
Right on the corner of Roosevelt and 56th, in an unsuspecting little building, this Indian joint serves it up with class. Start with being seated by the host–who is often the owner–to a table in one of three small dining rooms. Each dining room is somewhat unique; one with more natural light, one with more Indian tapestries adorning the walls, and all will fill up on an average lunch hour.
Along with the menus, guests will receive a complimentary hot appetizer with a delicious dipping sauce. The sauce, actually called a chutney, is a tantalizing combination of ground up fresh mint and cilantro next to a sweet sauce made from tamarind. Be sure to order the spinach nan–a fresh-made bread filled with spinach–as a follow-up appetizer and you’ll be happy to see it arrive with more chutney, and quite enough for a party of four.
The servers are friendly, and the service is quick. Even as a lunch hour picks up, guests can expect to be well-taken-care-of by the superb staff. Order the Chai tea (ancient Indian style, not Starbucks) and a server will keep it topped off without delay.
The menu contains a wide array of offerings, including, along with traditional Indian fare, Mediterranean and Tandoori cuisine. Tandoori is interesting as it is an ancient method of cooking using a clay oven called–you guessed it–a Tandoor, and the dishes are cooked slow to “perfection.” Each of the Indian dishes may be ordered with either vegetables, chicken, lamb, beef, fish, prawns, or tasty little rectangular blocks of cheese called Paneer. Try the Paneer, it’s totally scrumptious.
The dishes are traditional, and also very flavorful. Sometimes traditional food can be a little boring, but Taste of India brings enough pizazz to the food to make it interesting. Also interesting are the genuine dessert offerings. The Kulfi, an Indian-style ice cream, has a different texture than you would expect, and is quite good, but the cheesecake drizzled with mango sauce is really top-notch. Not your traditional Indian fare maybe, but what the heck? You might as well get your rocks off when you can.
The cost is fairly reasonable considering the quality of the food and service–$10-15 per plate for entrees–so students can still afford to bite into some choice Indian food without taking a second job.
Despite all this goodness, Taste of India fails to serve alcohol–not even beer or wine, so it can only get four out of five licks of the lips.
Still, next time you’re feeling the need for a new flavor that comes in a delightfully friendly package, step on a bus, get in your car, or ride your bike over to Taste of India at 5517 Roosevelt Way NE, Seattle, Wash. For more info, check out their Web site, www.tasteofindiaseattle.com

The Mecca serves it up proper, old-school style

Any trip to the Seattle Center neighborhood deserves a stop at The Mecca for breakfast, lunch or dinner. The good old-fashioned, all-American food and drink will surpass your expectations and the top-notch service will plunk you right into 1950s diner happiness.
Start with a cup of coffee in the morning, but don’t expect to stay all day on just a cup of joe. The “Sumatra Mandeheling” is good “For three cups or one hour of rental space. You know who you are. No pitching tents,” says the fun-to-read menu. However, you won’t want to just sip the Sumatra, because any of the large entrees will not only fill you up; they’ll surprise you with their skillful recipe and scrumptious flavor.
Although the food is grand, the cafe is split in half, and on the other side of the dividing wall from the small, black-and-white booths, the narrow bar is open every day. The happy hour of the 80-year-old bar offers the best deals of the neighborhood from 3-7 p.m., seven days a week. If a seat at the bar isn’t private enough, the semi-circular “Elvis booth,” as I call it because of the giant picture of the King hanging above it, is all the way at the back, and will set you as private as you could be in this tiny place.
Their shirts, that read “Alcoholics serving alcoholics since 1929,” are probably true for the most part, but you don’t have to be a drunkard to enjoy a timeless classic like The Mecca.
526 Queen Anne Ave N., Seattle, Wash. 98109

Don't move or I'll crash right into you...

It's not easy to work sometimes. The turbulent world holds me up in so many different ways that I can hardly find time to breathe, let alone get on top of the mountains of work that I have to do.
My current projects have seen little in the way of progress in the last week, or even the last two weeks. Being sick held me back, and then, after recovering, the world was full tilt with distractions. Valentine's Day brought a full weekend of non-work related activity, only to lead to a week that saw almost as little progress. Yes, the dogs of distraction, and the pimps of procrastination were working overtime on an easy target. By Wednesday, they had me winding my way to Aberdeen, WA to buy a fast motorcycle. While this is a great advance for the wildest forms of journalism, it does very little for actually helping me write. The picture is becoming clear: stop with the bikes, the valentines, the lawnmower racing, the facebooking, the iTunes music hunts, the online games, the twittering and the blogging (see what it's doing?) until something tangible is produced.
Good God! This is not the time to mill the hours away typing nonsense into the web box; it's time for some action. Two, maybe three more weeks and it will all be coming to a head. The hammer is definitely going to fall and I don't want to have my head under it when it does. Blend in, take cover, and see your way to the front, man. This is the hour of great import.

The city is in ruins, but the people are ruined

As the newspapers all print cover stories detailing dark, ominous rescue missions - some productive, others futile - and photos depict streets strewn with bodies, buildings collapsed, and sobbing mothers, it is indeed hard to focus on much else. The world around seems blurry, surreal, as millions suffer a great and tragic catastrophe.

Their world was already a bleak one; the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, a government known widely to be as corrupt as a king, and a land frequently blasted by hurricanes and tropical storms. Looking from that perspective, one might have thought that things couldn't get much worse. But they did, they damn well got worse by leaps and bounds. Theirs is a trouble that will last; it will last beyond the last dying gasp of a person trapped in rubble; beyond the panic of the looters and rabble rousers in the streets; it will last beyond the stench of decay that correspondents report to fill the air across the city. The U.S. will put our military in place and rebuild the ports, the streets, the homes and the capital building, but trouble will still hang acrid in the air.

How much aid will it take to replace the lives lost? Can a price be put to such a thing? The people, those left breathing anyway, have lost big, and a city rebuilt, even a government and infrastructure system repaired to a level beyond its previous dysfunction and all the food they can eat will not erase the memory of this disaster. Their friends, neighbors and family who were lost in the quake will not come back, but their cries for help shall not cease. No, those left behind shall be forced to endure with a kind heaviness over them; a feeling that they got lucky and now the cost is to remember. They will hear the screams long into each night before they sleep, and when they do find sleep, the sights of faces and bodies will trouble their dreams; they will smell the foulness of the air even in the midst of a field of tulips. Each reporter writing from Port Au Prince talks about the screams and cries of those who are still trapped but cannot be found, or quotes someone else who has heard the same. This will not stop for those in Haiti, for the people left behind.

No human should ever be forced to go through a thing like that. There is no wrong that requires such suffering. Pat Robertson seems to think a "pact with the devil" has caused the devastation, but even the most spiteful person I know would never buy into such madness. Pacts with the devil? Are you daft man? Mr. Robertson should hop a first-class flight to Haiti and lend a hand in the streets, maybe collecting bodies or some other painful task; he should really get his hands dirty and see, just see first-hand how it feels to be those people. To truly suffer the inhumane.

Research and such...

This week was the beginning of the new quarter and thus, the beginning of my honors research project. I immediately found myself in quite deep with the seemingly "light" load I took this quarter. The project for honors is one of two mostly independent research projects I'll be doing this quarter, along with American Foreign Policy and my job at the paper. Not that I'm afraid of a little work, but it could get messy.

A meeting this week gave me a clear direction for my project and I have undertaken the beginnings of my research. I picked up three books and a half dozen or so journal articles to get things moving. I also seem to have picked up a cold from somewhere and I sure hope I can battle through it because there is no time for laying up sick.

Why oppose Ref 71?

As our society investigates possible moon colonies, looks for water on Mars, and designs cars that run on corn oil, some people still can’t let go of irrational prejudice against other humans.

These prejudices have been more prevalent than ever as voters contemplated, and then approved Referendum 71, to allow domestic partnerships for same-sex couples and give them essentially the same rights as married couples.

While King county voters approved the bill almost 2 to 1, more rural eastern Washington stood predominantly opposed to it. As a presumably biased resident of King county myself, I can’t help but wonder about the thinking behind denying rights to people based on their sexual orientation.

The rights that were in question involve things like inheritances to spouses, attending to a partner’s affairs in the event of death or illness, or even just being allowed, by law, to be at their bedside in the hospital.

One of the largest campaigns against Ref. 71 is operated by a group called Protect Marriage Washington (PMW). In one campaign video, they talk about supporting “love” and “family,” and purport “facts” like “few homosexual relationships last longer than two years.” This “fact” in particular raised the hairs on my back and set off my journalist alarm that told me to dig deeper. When I followed their source back to the Family Research Council (FRC) website (a decidedly conservative, christian group based on my observations) however, I found some problems with their statistics.

Firstly, many gay rights activists defend against the argument that they have shorter relationships by pointing to current heterosexual marriage statistics. But before I even get to those, the FRC website handily discredits that defense by pointing to marriage statistics from 20-plus years ago. Using statistics based on marriages that began in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, they show that at least 70 percent of hetero marriages last 10 years or more. With information that old, this argument can hardly hold any weight. Current trends reported by the U.S. Census Bureau show that fewer couples are even getting married, which would suggest that statistics about longevity may be less accurate. And what does this have to do with giving same-sex couples the same rights as others? PMW says they’re “protecting the sanctity of marriage,” and even “the children.”

But the PMW campaign doesn’t stop there. In the same video, they go on to say that HIV/AIDS and suicide rates are higher among homosexuals. I have heard these kinds of statistics before, and my first thought is: wouldn’t a group that is historically marginalized, oppressed and ridiculed, for what to them amounts to their very nature, have a statistically higher suicide rate? So they have it a little rough, I get it, they don’t fit in, and in adolescence (the group that was surveyed to provide their stats contained only adolescents) they have a higher suicide rate. I would bet that other outcast groups have similarly high rates of suicide and depression. And once again I can’t seem to see how this would inhibit same-sex couples from enjoying the same rights as straight folk. In fact, I think this argument defeats itself; if gay people were treated equally by everyone, then perhaps these alarming statistics would fall dramatically.

Religious beliefs are also a big part of the argument against same-sex unions. Religious people point to the fact that homosexuals are deemed evil by some interpretations of the bible, or simply excluded from other interpretations. Articles on the PMW website, which, I should point out, have no authors listed (no doubt to avoid the same type of discrimination that same-sex couples face), report that same-sex unions pose a threat to religious liberties “for those who still believe that marriage...is between a man and a woman.” However, as the article drones on about traditional considerations and problems with child-rearing, they fail to pinpoint what these threats are. In one video of a politician (somehow unnamed throughout the video) I found, he said that rights are given by God, and any rights given by mankind are actually only privileges. Well, even if you don’t believe that same-sex couples are given the same rights as hetero folks, what’s wrong with giving them the privileges then?

Now, those who signed the petition that actually brought Ref. 71 to the ballot, since the bill allowing rights to same-sex couples was already signed into law on May 18 of this year, have asked the Supreme Court to prevent the release of their personal information “because of the ongoing threats, harassment, and intimidation supporters of traditional marriage are subject to.” Wait just a minute, this is exactly what those people have been doing to gay people for decades.

Most people I talk to about this feel like I do, that same-sex couples are no different than any other couple and why in the hell should they be denied the same rights? But 48 percent of Washington voters don’t feel that way, in fact, most of them probably feel that these people threaten them, their children and their good ol’ American way of life.

Despite all the misrepresented surveys, uneven statistics, or irrational religious arguments, I still can’t see any good reason to withhold these basic rights from those who choose a partner of the same sex. The fact is, they just aren’t that much different from you, me or anyone else.