While in Seattle, Washington for PAX West, I met up with my friend Dani (who you may remember as the owner of Mina) and had dinner at 84 Yesler, a restaurant in the Pioneer Square neighborhood of downtown.
We wanted to try as many different dishes as possible, so we ordered a combination of their six-course tasting menu and a few items à la carte.
To start, we received an amuse-bouche with fig, goat cheese, and edible flower.
I’m usually not a big fan of goat cheese (or much cheese in general), but this goat cheese had a mild flavor that lacked the moldiness that cheeses usually have. The fig had a smooth flavor without having too much of a kick. The texture of the fig was a perfect balance between firmness and softness. This actually ended up being Dani’s favorite dish of the entire meal.
As our appetizer, Dani is a big fan of oysters, so we got a half dozen oysters, which came with a side of gin cocktail sauce, mignonette, and lemon.
The oysters tasted great—they were neither too strong nor too mild. The juices were also great, and their flavor contributed nicely to the overall flavor of the oysters. There was no grit or other unwanted textures from slurping straight out of the shell.
Next, our first dish of the tasting menu came out—tempura squash blossom with whipped goat cheese and garlic honey.
This was the one and only dish that I disliked from this restaurant. Even though the goat cheese from the amuse-bouche was fine, the goat cheese from this tempura was not fine and had the typical moldy smell and taste to it, which masked any other flavor of the tempura squash from coming through.
Our first à la carte small plate came out next, beef tartare with crispy shallots, egg yolk jam, crostini, parmesan, and capers.
I think this is the best beef tartare I’ve ever had. The beef was extremely rich in flavor, and all the toppings served a perfect purpose balanced between adding their own flavor while also enhancing the existing flavor of the beef tartare. These were also the mildest capers I’ve ever tried, which worked very well—their sourness was far more subtle than what you’d usually expect from capers, so they managed to add all the core flavor of capers without causing too much extra intensity.
I portioned out our brick of tartare and ate them one bite at time atop the bread. Even the crostini was prepared perfectly—I’m used to it being a bit too crispy and sometimes hurting the inside of my mouth, but this crostini was overall pretty soft while still retaining some of the crunch around the edges.
The second course of the tasting menu was grilled unagi, also known as saltwater eel, atop brioche and with ponzu and micro herbs.
This eel was very tender. At other restaurants, eel is usually served with too much eel sauce already on it, but this eel was only lightly sauced, so it let the true flavor of the eel shine through well. At first, I was confused about and questioned the choice of serving it on this kind of bread, but I was quickly proven wrong with my first bite when I realized how well the bread went along with the eel.
The third course of the tasting menu was kelp gnocchi with red pepper caviar sauce and fumet.
The gnocchi had a deep earthiness to it, and somehow managed to capture that flavor without any bitterness whatsoever. The sauce was indescribably delicious and was a great example of how a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. If you really focused in on the flavors, you could technically detect the individual ingredients, but overall, it was an entirely different experience.
The portion of the sauce was too much compared to the amount of gnocchi we were served, but that was no problem at all—Dani and I just drank the sauce like it was soup.
We also ordered a second pasta dish to go along with the tasting menu one—fine herbs pappardelle with lemon beurre blanc, Dungeness crab, and fine herb oil.
This was the most unique pasta I’ve ever seen. Each piece of pappardelle was extremely thick and long, and you could see that there were herbs placed and trapped directly inside the pappardelle in layers. This dish wasn’t otherworldly like the gnocchi, but it was still very delicious.
Fourth from the tasting menu was dry-aged salmon with toasted kombu dashi, zucchini, and pickled garlic scape.
I have never before seen salmon skin prepared this perfectly. Usually, when you cook salmon skin, it ends up somewhere on the gradient of rubbery and brittle, and the more you cook it, the more rubberiness it loses and the more brittle it becomes in a mutually exclusive way. This salmon skin somehow leapt off the standard gradient and captured both at the same time—it had the texture of fish skin, but it wasn’t dry or crumbly.
The zucchini was also notably nice. You can tell by the photo that it looks fairly burnt, but surprisingly, it was merely a bit charred. You’d expect that much black to yield a very bitter flavor, but this wasn’t bitter at all, and the burned portions added a very subtle charcoal grill-esque addition to the zucchini.
The tasting menu’s fifth course was short rib with baby patty pan, wild mushrooms, and truffle jus.
The short rib wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t anything special. This tasted like generic short rib that you’d find from any other restaurant.
To accompany the main course of the tasting menu, we also added on American wagyu ribeye with crispy polenta, parsnip, and pesto.
This ribeye was much better than the short rib. I could tell that it wasn’t exactly the utmost highest grade of wagyu, but the marbling was still great and it had the familiar, satisfying taste you expect from high-quality wagyu.
Dani and I each had a couple strips of this wagyu, then she got the rest packaged to-go so she could share it with her boyfriend and housemate back at home. Dani reheated it for them in the oven and reported back to me that they both enjoyed the food.
For the tasting menu’s dessert, we received sweet corn with white chocolate coconut ganache, candied jalapeño, and fresh blackberries.
This dish was magical. Popcorn often has some of the leftover residue in the center from the popped kernel, but somehow, all of this popcorn was completely soft all the way through. The sweetness of the caramel coating was subtle, which allowed the actual flavor of the caramel to shine through in a way I’ve never seen before. Every aspect of this dessert was incredible, and I made sure to get a small portion of each ingredient in every bite because of how well everything complemented everything else.
The sweet corn and blackberries was so good that it convinced Dani to order a second dessert à la carte. We decided on apple cake with honeycrisp sorbet, sweet apple brandy cream, and a candied apple slice.
This one wasn’t as miraculous as the previous dessert, but it was still delicious. They did a great job of balancing sweetness with sourness, as well as mixing together a good variety of textures so your mouth always has something interesting to experience.
To close the night, we received complementary chocolates along with our check.
Here are some photos I took of the restaurant before it got dark. We spent almost three hours eating at 84 Yesler because the food was so good and we kept on ordering more and more, so if you pay attention to the photos, you can tell that it was still bright outside and my photos were illuminated by natural sunlight at the beginning of our meal, but our desserts have a warm glow from the overhead lighting after nightfall.
| Six-course tasting menu | $ 160.00 |
| Oysters | $ 30.00 |
| Beef tartare | $ 29.00 |
| Fine herbs pappardelle | $ 40.00 |
| America wagyu ribeye | $ 80.00 |
| Apple cake | $ 15.00 |
| Automatic gratuity (20%) | $ 70.80 |
| Sales tax | $ 43.97 |
| Total | $ 468.77 |
The table on the right shows how much we paid.
84 Yesler has solidly landed itself as one of my top favorite restaurants that I’ve been to this year, alongside Yakiniku Shodai and Masamitsu.
Just because I’ve historically been so outspoken about this, I wanted to address this point first—I’m not a big fan of mandatory service charges, and if a restaurant wants to do that, I believe they should just increase the price of their menu items and then decline gratuity instead. However, in 84 Yesler’s defense, they made the 20% automatic gratuity very clear and apparent on both their website and their paper menus, so the way they executed on it was done in a very transparent and honest manner.
Back to the food. 84 Yesler’s style of cooking might not be for everyone, but for me, it feels like the chef custom-catered the cooking style to match my preferences perfectly. Nothing was too much of anything—not too salty, not too sweet, not too bitter, not too fatty. No single ingredient stood out or was noticeable, but working together, they created new flavor profiles that I had not tasted before at any other restaurants.
In other words, pretty much every ingredient they used was mild, but because each dish had a very well-calculated recipe to it, the mildness worked favorably. To create an analogy: if you have a very strong strawberry, very strong blueberry, and very strong raspberry, each berry’s flavor will stick out and it will taste like you are eating a strawberry, blueberry, and raspberry. However, 84 Yesler’s style is comparable to using a mild strawberry, mild blueberry, and mild raspberry so that you can’t distinctly taste each individual berry, but instead, it tastes like you are consuming a well-balanced medley of fresh fruit.
The ambiance of the restaurant was also very unique. Dani and I were seated at a small table in the corner right next to the window, and I think it was the best possible seat we could’ve gotten. It let us get some sunlight for a good portion of our meal, we were able to people-watch on Yesler Way, and we were in a secluded area so we weren’t surrounded by other patrons. The kitchen was open and viewable by diners, which allowed us to watch our food get prepared, but because we were towards the corner, we didn’t get affected by the heat of the kitchen, and the smells didn’t reach our table so it allowed us to purely enjoy our dishes as the chef intended without any other scents.
Speaking of purity, one thing I appreciated was the fact that the waitress fully swapped out our utensils and plates in between every single course. Not all restaurants do this, but I think this is a great indicator of how much the chef cares about the flavor profile of all the dishes. Having clean tableware for every dish means that no sauces or residue from previous dishes interfere with future dishes, and that level of attention to detail shows that 84 Yesler is actual fine dining.
On the note of fine dining, 84 Yesler doesn’t really present itself as fine dining. In fact, they actually seem pretty casual, and the way to recognize their level of fine dining is by experiencing the quality of the food and service. I hate when other restaurants pretend to be luxurious by aggressively doing exaggerated things often associated with luxury and then inflate their prices, but something just feels off. 84 Yesler is the exact opposite—they actively keep things subtle, but their indisputable classiness speaks for itself.
If you can’t tell by now, I highly recommend 84 Yesler. The pricepoint is definitely on the higher end, but if it’s something that is financially doable for you, I think the ratio of value you get per dollar from this restaurant is very high.