The beautiful former Chez Gaudy space—a 1927 brick building tucked away on Capitol Hill's Bellevue Avenue—got a renovation and a very worthy tenant with La Bête. The space feels a little old-fashioned, intimate and pretty, but not at all precious; the Northwest-ingredient-focused cuisine is made by Aleks Dimitrijevic (Bouley, Harvest Vine, and Licorous). Of note: the alchemical handmade pork rinds and the banana split—and in between, it's hard to go wrong. One way to decide: Everybody here looks, surreptitiously or openly, at what everybody else is getting, in the way that the non-food-obsessed check out other people's dates. And on Mondays, the menu roves to cuisines like Indian or Mexican, and the results are generally as good or better than the best in town. A lot of chefs eat at La Bête on their nights off.