Mae's Phinney Ridge Cafe

6412 Phinney Ave., Seattle, WA - (206) 782-1222

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Posted By Michael Stern on May 14, 2006 2:10 PM

We were not charmed by most of the food at Mae's Phinney Ridge Cafe, but the place itself is hard to resist. A multi-room cafe decorated everywhere with pictures, statues, blow-up dolls and every sort of nick-nack imaginable, all depicting cows (an ode to the proprietor's Wisconsin roots), Mae's is a popular breakfast-and-lunch destination for Seattleites with large appetites. It boasts that it has been a Seattle institution since the 1930s, and the spirit of fun it exudes is undeniable. Our friends Rebekah and David, who took us here on a weekday afternoon, when we had the place practically to ourselves, said that the wait to get a table for weekend breakfast can be close to an hour.

Our primary quibble with much of what we ate is that the homey spirit of the food was belied by an ersatz taste. The "hand rolled" cinnamon roll is an impressive monument of dough liberally blanketed with thick sugar glaze, but it was pretty dry; and it made us wonder where and when the dough actually was made. Similarly, milk shakes – a beautiful sight, arriving in tall silver beakers – did not taste like they had been mixed from scratch. We won't yammer on about the biscuits, hashbrowns, turkey in the hot turkey sandwich, and even the globes of butter that tasted more like buttery spread, none of which thrilled the tastebuds of anyone at our table. On the plus side, we will say that the house-smoked trout was beautiful and quite delicious, its luxurious meat lifting up in moist, full-flavored hunks. About the best thing on the table, we thought, was from the part of the menu headlined, "Meatless at Mae's": a tofu breakfast scramble of mushrooms, scallions, broccoli, and nuggets of tofu in a ginger-sake-soy marinade. The tofu, we have no doubt, was the real thing!

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