The boyfriend happens to work at a place that gives out $100 Tom Douglas gift cards to employees after working there for a year. Well, he hit the one year mark about a month back, just got his gift card, and this is the first place we chose to dine:
Serious Pie (www.tomdouglas.com/restaurants/serious-pie)
We all know Tom Douglas. He’s that bedraggled, totally Pacific-Northwest dude who owns a handsome handful of incredible restaurants (mostly clustered on a square block downtown) and boasts some pretty fantastic food. He could be a PEMCO profile. But before last weekend I have to admit that I had never been to a Tom Douglas restaurant. SHOCK AND AWE, I’m sure. But it’s the truth.
It was a hard decision between all those incredible-looking menus, but finally we settled on the laid back Serious Pie, Douglas’s pizza joint. Oh man was it good!
They don’t take reservations, and when we got there at 3:30 on a Saturday we had a 20-minute wait (I can’t imagine what the crowd looks like later in the evening). We filled the time by grabbing an “appetizer” at the Dahlia Bakery around the corner, and before we knew it we were seated. It’s a small, cozy place with a lot of wood and, of course, the pizza oven on display. The host and wait staff were incredibly friendly and personable, as well as knowledgeable.
And the staff kind of have to be knowledgeable — half of Serious Pie’s ingredients/pizza toppings are unrecognizably Italian to the average person. I will admit that I’m a little out of the ordinary — I grew up on prosciutto and other odd-sounding foreign foods to some — but even I didn’t know what everything on the menu was. I heard many-a-diner ask various wait staff what an ingredient was and every one of them was quick to answer and explain. Very nice — they definitely get knowledge points for that!
We started with the roasted pumpkin appetizer, expecting a steaming dish. Instead, we got something far tastier than expected. The slices of pumpkin were room temp/slightly cold (don’t worry, this is how it was supposed to be) and showed up sprinkled with various spices I’d never had on pumpkin and drizzled with honey. My gosh! Although nothing I would have expected, it was magnificent. Something I will surely try to replicate at home.
We then ordered a pizza to share with penn cove clams, house pancetta, lemon thyme. We noticed that many customers had ordered multiple pizzas, one for each person. While the pizzas are on the medium-small side, you can save a lot of money and still get full by splitting an appetizer and a pizza. Many, if not all, of the people we saw that ordered individual pizzas went home with leftovers. All of the pizzas sounded good, but we were damn satisfied with our clam pizza. It was incredible. Our waiter also helped me pick out the perfect wine based on the food we ordered as well, which I really appreciated.
Serious Pie had some delicious sounding desserts (like the cannoli with ricotta & huckleberry) but we were full and decided to pass.
The best part: we escaped a Tom Douglas restaurant full, with a beer and wine to drink, for under $40. Even with the pastries we got from Dahlia Bakery we still have $60 left on the card to try out another restaurant.
Where should we spend the rest of the gift card? Lola? Etta’s? Palace Kitchen? Dahlia Lounge? Love to hear which place you like best!
[...] don’t normally post events, but this one sounds like lots of fun and is related to my recent post about Tom Douglas’s Serious Pie. [...]
[...] Serious Pie is Tom Douglas’s pizza joint, and boy is it fantastic. The boyfriend & I check it out and are blown away. [...]
[...] receives a $100 Tom Douglas gift card each year they are there. He got his in early fall and we decided to eat at Serious Pie (with a stop at the Dahlia Bakery as well). However, we used less than half of the card there, and [...]