This week marks the arrival of two highly anticipated restaurants on Capitol Hill, the expanded Little Uncle (now with indoor seating and beer!) and Dino's Tomato Pie.
Little Uncle, which opened last Friday night, is the sit-down restaurant from chefs Wiley Frank and Poncharee Kounpungchart (better known as PK), who have been churning out fresh, traditional Thai street-food dishes from their Capitol Hill walk-up window since 2011. (That spot, formerly known as Little Uncle, has appropriately been renamed Little Uncle Take Out Window. It still exists, but will be closed for the next few weeks while the couple focuses on getting the new location up and running smoothly.)
At the bigger Little Uncle, which has indoor seating and a bar serving beer and cocktails, the menu is focused on noodles entrees such as phad thai, khao soi, and dom yum wun sen (bean thread noodles with roasted pork). There’s also a selection of dishes for sharing, including phad pak (greens sautéed with tofu skins and chilies), rice cakes stuffed with chives, and jungle curry with wild boar. You can take a look at the menu here.
Dino's Tomato Pie
From Brandon Pettit and Molly Wizenberg, owners of Ballard’s pathologically popular Delancey and Essex, Dino’s Tomato Pie is a tribute to the wood-paneled pizza taverns of Pettit’s New Jersey childhood, complete with red leather booths. It officially opens today at 4 p.m. Pizzas here are available as round pies or square Sicilians, baked in pans with a slightly thicker crust. The bar also has wine, eleven taps of beer, and, most important, negronis on tap.
Dino's is located on the same block of Olive Way that's also home to popular Malaysian restaurant Kedai Makan (which I reviewed this week), Monica Dimas's late night sandwich window Tortas Condesa, as well as the bars Hillside, Montana, and Revolver. It will probably be non-stop busy from the moment it opens.
Two other notable new restaurants recently opened in Ballard and Downtown.
Gracia
After several years cooking in New York City, Chester Gerl (formerly of Matt’s in the Market) has returned to Seattle and opened Gracia on Ballard Avenue. At Gracia, the masa that forms the base of for much of the restaurant's menu of tacos and other antojitos is made from heirloom corn that is ground in-house (a labor intensive process). Other traditional Central and Southern Mexican dishes include posole and birria.
Sansei
Sansei is the first mainland restaurant from chef and restaurateur DK Kodama, who owns multiple restaurants in Hawaii (including four other locations of Sansei). It's located in the new, luxury high-rise apartment building Premiere on Pine. The extensive menu, which includes plenty sushi and specialty rolls such as the Bagel Roll (smoked salmon and cream cheese), feels a little dated and fusion-y (there's a fair amount of truffle oil thrown about and a few generic "Asian"-flavored dishes—seriously, Asia is a big place and not all the countries are the same), but I'm intrigued by the scale of Kodama's operation, as well as the restaurant's daily fresh sheet of local seafood.
