The Hellenic Side of Seattle
Last night I got a chance to reflect on how Seattle's Greek community has helped my mental health over the decades.
Picking up takeout for the family is usually my excuse to have a beer at the restaurant bar and catch the end of a game. Last night that meant watching UW versus USC while enjoying a Bodhizafa at Taki's Mad Greek. It had been a while since my last visit. It takes good food to get me to drive multiple freeway exits, but Taki's has always been worth it. One of the family members who owns the place remembered me and my usual order, and warned me they were a bit short-staffed since most of the family was at the Greek Festival. I told him good food takes time anyway, so no rush. We talked football and watched the Huskies lose with traditional folk music as the soundtrack.
Back in the 1980s, Cheers was built on the idea that people need a place outside work and family where they belong. For me, Seattle's Greek restaurants have always been that place. As a kid, my family would walk to Voula's Offshore Cafe, where the matriarch who gave the diner its name kept her kids running the grill and the occasional rude customer in line, while still remembering all our names. Later, Fournos in the University District, run by two brothers, was the go-to happy hour or sunsetting as my future wife and her friends called it. At Fournos they had some of the most respectable cocktails and appreciated we wanted the traditional Greek foods they offered instead of the Pizzas that were the defaults for the UW students. I even found a Greek outpost in Kirkland, Acropolis. I wasn't a frequent visitor, but the owner would be pulling a frosted glass for my IPA before I'd finished ordering my takeout gyros.
To understand why that mattered, you have to understand Seattle. Acknowledging the Native peoples who were here first, the city was largely built by immigrants from Scandinavia and Asia. It seemed like everyone I knew growing up had a story about great-grandparents getting on a boat in Sweden or China and, after a lot of hard work and entrepreneurship, building a good life for their families. I'd go to a restaurant in Chinatown and find three generations running it, usually founded by a grandfather my dad remembered from his own childhood. In Ballard bakeries, you could hear Danish or Icelandic at the counter. Great cultural touchstones, but probably also the cultures that gave us the Seattle Freeze. The city's reputation as polite, stoic, and reserved was set by the sensibilities of those early immigrants.
None of those are my ethnic background, but I'm still the quintessential product of the Seattle culture they created.
If I'd grown up in a different part of town, maybe an Italian or Mexican community would have played this role. But where I grew up, near Saint Demetrios and its Greek Festival, the Greeks were the disrupters. As a kid at the Festival, I'd eat food with long, vowel-heavy names that intimidated me at first and that I loved the minute I tried them. I'd be surrounded by loud, unguarded conversations: people yelling with more enthusiasm than any St. Patrick's Day crowd at the time of John F. Kennedy that America was about to be ruled by a Greek once Michael Dukakis won in 1988, and people of every age dancing and hugging each other. Quite a bit more exciting than the most enthusiastic Norwegian Constitution Day.
I haven't been to the Festival in years, but I drove past it on the way home last night. The disco lights were going and it had an after-party feel. No, I didn't get out and start dancing the sirtaki. But I would have liked to.
