There are a lot of new restaurants opening in town — but most of them do not seem to be open for lunch. For this issue, we wanted to focus on new lunch options. The ones we found were a short bus ride away from downtown, on Capitol Hill.

This month we are focusing on places we have passed by, in many cases for years, often intending to try them out someday. Well, now is our time to do so. Set near the intersection of Cedar, Denny, 5th and the Monorail, it is hard to have not walked or driven by The 5 Point Café, 415 Cedar Street, 206.448.9991, , one of Seattle’s comparatively few 24 hour options. 

While there may not be a single most important meal of the day, lunch serves a critical role in maintaining one’s energy for the rest of the day (a point hard working lawyers seem to forget sometimes). But, when time permits, lunch or brunch can be the nicest meal of the day. We checked a few more options for lunch and brunch.

We have tried a few places that are new to us even if not newly opened. Here is some of what we recently sampled at home and on the road.
 

There were many sad farewells of established Seattle-area restaurants in 2025, but also many new openings to balance it out. This month, we checked out two new restaurants well worth trying and one well-established niche brewpub.

There has been a flurry of restaurant closings and openings in the past few months. Among the diverse new openings to check out, we discovered a couple of new options for Thai food in north Seattle.

If not for Seattle’s reputation for coffee, this place might have become equally renowned for its chocolate. With the holidays rapidly upon us, we thought it would be timely to check out some of the options for locally sourced chocolate. We have nothing against good national chains, like See’s, but there are more than enough local choices for your chocolate cravings and for stocking up on gifts for the holidays (or plan ahead for St. Valentine’s Day).

Whether by design or coincidence, this month we checked out a few local places with Japanese-inspired food (other than sushi — no offense to the wonderful world of sushi).

Comfort food comes in many forms. Defined in Wikipedia as “foods that provide emotional nutrition in the form of familiar tastes and a sense of security,” the concept of comfort food dates back at least to the seventeenth century.

There has been a lot of recent turnover in the Seattle area restaurant market, creating some new options where your old favorites may have been.