It’s that time of year when Seattle’s gardens are in full bloom—or in my case, bloomed, spent and in desperate need of a good watering and dead foliage trimming. This was one of the lushest seasons I recall in recent memory, at least in the microcosm that is my Ballard backyard. Everything seemed to be…

Our city is in the midst of a multidisciplinary—dare we say postrecession—renaissance. The 50th anniversary of the Space Needle and the opening of Chihuly Garden and Glass have reinvigorated the city’s creative spark, getting many of the most jaded cynics excited again. The Pike Place Market remodel is complete, and it’s all gussied up in…

Come late spring, the yearning begins for the days when the sunlight lingers past 9 p.m., the air gets (a little) warmer and my family finally emerges from hibernation inside our cozy 1,400-square-foot home. These are the days when our back door is constantly open, our kids are running in and out, and we gain…

Sometimes in the process of producing an issue, our editors inadvertently create a “word of the issue”—a word (or words) that we are suddenly, unintentionally in love with, so much so that it pops up repeatedly throughout a story (if not the entire issue). This especially happens in stories with multiple writers, such as this…

Three things are very important when we produce our Best Restaurants issue: 1) The story must reflect how we dine out locally now, (oh, how fun it would have been to cover the 50s and 60s eras of wedge salads and fancy Jell-O desserts!); 2) it must include a mix of affordable and fine dining…

I knew when our youngest son got the birthday party invitation in January that it was time to bite the bullet. The party was in Bellevue, which meant crossing the bridge, and that meant finally getting one of those bridge-toll passes (or start paying through the nose for Container Store runs and trips to Woodinville…

Although technically it didn’t get its start here, the burger has become the ultimate American dish, and I love seeing how the iconic sandwich has evolved in different cities across the country. In L.A., you’ll invariably find an option served with a pile of avocado slices. In Wisconsin, land of plentiful beef and cheese, cheeseburgers…

In case you haven’t heard, pies are the new cupcakes. And with all the sweet shops dotting our landscape, most of them with tasty enough pies, picking the best one comes down to a couple of things for me: experience and proximity. Check and check, ever since Chris Porter (below) opened A La Mode Pies…

You might have noticed that we at Seattle mag like our “best of” lists. They’re part of our job as a city mag, but we also know you like them, too. (The “best of” issues are almost always the year’s top sellers.) But mainly, we like them because there’s a lot of good stuff to…

I look forward to the meetings we hold each summer to discuss our end-of-the-year issues, even though they keep us inside on some of the nicest days of the year. For our annual Most Influential People of the Year story, we hole up in our conference room with a diverse cross section of community leaders,…