Places like Monsoon have been doing elevated Vietnamese food for a quarter century - Tamarind Tree for 20 years. I dislike the narrative that just because one place isn’t having the success they hoped for that we have some systemic problem. There is plenty of upscale Asian dining in the Seattle area that is wildly successful and subsequently wildly successful (and will happily do plenty of damage to your wallet)

This is absolutely changing - see Ken Lin Thai in Fremont or Om Lang Bistro in Roosevelt. Dishes are approaching if not exceeding $20/plate, and seats are hard to find! But…serving the same old pot of soup on the same old glass topped furniture/faded dishware for the last 30 years doesn’t cut it. Ambiance is everything when it comes to dining out.

"The dish is $34 (plus a 22% service charge). You don’t even blink."

Are you kidding? I wouldn't pay half that for a plate of pasta. You're really grasping at straw(men) looking for racism where none exists.

@1 also Stateside, which is amazing and well worth the price. People who don't want to pay $20 for pho probably also don't want to pay $20 for a burger.

Anyone who thinks there isn't cheap, filling, Italian-based food needs to learn about this thing they call, "pizza."

You can pay $50 for a small pizza if you want. You can pay less than $20 for one so large, there's a song lyric based upon it. (Racism has nothing to do with it, although even Anglos eventually had to admit those garlic-eaters were onto something.) There's Italian-based restaurants at all levels because there's ethnic-themed restaurants at all levels. As commenters here have noted, those include some high-end Vietnamese places in Seattle.

Asian restaurants may suffer from imagined association with Chinese restaurants. Wherever you go in the world, there will be a Chinese restaurant, and the food will be exactly like the food from the Chinese restaurant wherever you live. (It's like McDonald's, but with rice, and without the corporate overhead.) That experience may initially inform a response to "Asian" food, but as the article notes, "Asian" means everything from at least as far as from Vietnam to the Philippines, and that's a lot of very different foods. Patrons will eventually come around, or enough of them will, anyway.

Nice in-depth reviews of some great restaurants, though. Thanks for the article!

For me it's not about racism, it's about affordability and value. I used to enjoy going out to eat almost every day, but on a fixed income and with inflation and seattle's unfriendly to business attitude I've had to cut back. If you are able to go outside of seattle there are lots of good eats at resonable prices (better yet, get out of King county). And no, I won't pay $20 for a plate of spagetti or a hamburger either!

All those times I ate at Monsoon must have been my imagination.

Seattle has priced itself out of the dining out market for me (not just asian). there will always be a (small) market for upscale food of any type, just not enough to support a large number of nich establishments. perhaps the era of the middle class being able to afford to dine out regularly is over?

Tell me you make a lot more than I do, enough to spend $20+ on a meal, without telling me…………

Seattle is increasingly becoming a theme park for "foodies" and other buyers of luxe goods. Not to sound like one of those Vanishing Seattle bores but there does seem to be more and more chasing the big spenders with high margin goods than offering value for people who aren't counting down the days til their options vest or their tenants pay off the mortgage on their rentals.

My wife and I were fortunate to discover Vivienne's Bistro II after a matinee at 5th Avenue. We admired the decor and also noticed that there were many Asian customers. (The setups come with interesting metal chop sticks.)

We had no idea about the cuisine but the service and decor were remarked on as outstanding. Preparing to leave, I asked our server whether the meal was Vietnamese and I was correct to learn that it is Chinese, but not what we have come to accept as a historical Chinese restaurant and menu. We were happy to learn better.

Was sushi ever cheap?

Have you been to Nobu?

@8, your claim about noping out from the Seattle dining scene taken with your moniker is not so convincing.

The Stranger should investigate further into Seattle cheap eats.

I think if you were to average out menus Mexican food is still far cheaper than Asian restaurants and no one is paying $34 plus 22% for pasta unless it has a high cost protein in it.

Hannah Wong.
Don’t tell me why I’m wrong, tell me what you like.

@3
Spot on.

I was saying to my wife just the other day that I wish going out to dinner was more expensive.

Sorry, but this is a load of idiot catchphrases strung together by someone who figured that if something sounded "SJW-ish" it had to be right, and they didn't need to spend any time actually fact-checking. So. For the record.

We've had fancy Asian food here for the better part of a century. I know 70-year-old guys who reminisce fondly about saving up to take their high school sweethearts out to a good fancy chinese place.
We have tons of fancy asian food now. It's everywhere. In fact, most our internationally respected restaurants are Asian places like Wild Ginger and Kashiba.
We have tons of expensive Vietnamese places. It takes about 30 seconds to go to google or tripadvisor and get a list of them. There's some very nice ones there. They just don't specialize in Pho, because...
Pho isn't supposed to be fancy! It's street food meant for laborers! If this author had taken 5 minutes off regurgitating tired cliches to click a wikipedia page, he'd have known that. Making pho fancy is taking the piss! It's the American cuisine equivalent of a $50 New York style hotdog, or that $700 "Gold Standard Burger" from DBG.

People here will pay good money for, say, a nice vietnamese roasted duck, but we actually know our Asian food well enough to tell the difference between the high end cuisine, and someone who's peeing on our leg and telling us it's raining, trying to make us buy "elevated" street food just because they slapped an ethnic label on it. Sorry, no. Not for my hotdogs, and not for my pho. Not for my shwarma either, while we're at it.

@18 - Bravo. Thank you for taking the time to express what I was too lazy to do. Agree with you 100%.

I guess Asian food no longer includes Japanese which in most places is incredibly expensive. And maybe if The Stranger's food critics weren't on expense accounts, they would realize that most of their readers can't afford to spend $60+ on a meal. Value and affordability are my watch words. I would rather eat out more often than less because that's how I get to spend time with friends and support more restaurants. But I can't do that paying the prices The Stranger suggests. So I don't go to high end Asian restuarants where streeet food is dressed up as haute cuisine and charged for accordingly. I can't afford to.

Anchovies and Salt is in RENTON, between that park and the Boeing Plant, at the end of a dead-end street next to the Hyatt. Seattle barely knows it exists.

Put that same menu in Fremont or Ballard or LQA or Capitol Hill, and it would be "celebrated" like a $30 bowl of pasta.

Two hours and I'll just have to eat again.

I don't remember the last time I paid less than $20 to eat a full meal out at a sit down restaurant of any kind in Seattle... even Mcdonalds is like $15.

Also, the entire point of pho is that it's a cheap filling meal. I also don't want to pay super high prices for teriyaki or burritos. I'll happily pay high prices for other asian food though. Wild Ginger has been charging 20+ for most of their entrees for as long as I can remember.. so your entire thesis here also makes zero sense.