Baseball is a lot of things, but mostly it’s a sport about eating and drinking. Seriously, try explaining baseball to someone unfamiliar with the sport without just sighing and saying, “I dunno, it’s kinda cool to watch and you can drink beer and throw peanut shells on the ground.” Baseball is also the only sport in which fans are compelled to sing about food at the approximate two-thirds mark of every game. It’s just the best!
And with the Mariners season starting on Monday (cue Homer Simpson “realizing he’s missing the chili cook-off dance” in anticipation), the team has announced a whole slew of new ways to eat and drink at Safeco Field.
This is ritual that must be undergone annually, like pitchers and catchers reporting or a calamity befalling Franklin Gutiérrez. All baseball teams roll out new offerings, and they tend to go in one of two directions: chef-driven cuisine or deep-fried monstrosities. Seattle, unsurprisingly, goes with the former, led by local guy who runs lots of restaurants Ethan Stowell. For an even less surprising example of the latter, look to Houston, where they unveiled a cone of fried chicken this year. Seriously. It’s a waffle cone, lined with mashed potatoes, and then filled with fried chicken. Sure, they blundered by covering the whole thing in honey mustard instead of gravy or syrup (or both, cue Homer Simpson drooling), but man, that’s some basebally baseball food.
In terms of new opportunities to gorge this year in Seattle, the changes are mostly to be found in the renovated Hit It Here Cafe. The cafe, for which one can buy a $50-ish ticket (depending on the game) that includes an $18 food voucher, sits above right field, giving Mariners fans the opportunity to kind of eat in a restaurant while kind of attending a baseball game. It’s kind of fun!
While a new gumbo-type offering was a big miss, the rest of the food they had to sample from the cafe (speciality burgers, flatbreads, and bread pudding) were all quite tasty and sufficiently upscale-basebally to satisfy. The flatbread in particular stood out as a big improvement over the perpetually disappointing Apizza stand in center field that somehow turns New Haven-style pizza (the best damn food on earth) into a gloppy mess.
Other changes include really good bacon-wrapped hot dogs that will be available at Edgar’s Cantina, which itself now has more locations throughout the park. This is good news; Edgar’s has good tacos and evokes good memories of Edgar Martinez’s better-than-good swings. There’s also a new Crab Shack that has a crab sandwich that comes on garlic bread that tastes like the pizza parlor garlic bread of our collective youth. Also there will be more local beers everywhere, and more vegetarian offerings in a couple places.
All that said, nothing on display beat the best way to eat at Safeco Field: Bring in your own grub. While outside drinks are forbidden (and your intrepid writer has always followed this rule, cue Homer Simpson’s eyes darting back and forth), outside food is expressly allowed. And while the offerings at Safeco are really good for ballpark food, the value just isn’t there. That really good new bacon-wrapped hot dog? Cost $9.50. The nachos at Edgar’s? Cost $11.50. The crab sandwich? Cost $16. Those are new Cap Hill prices!
So while I’ll definitely be indulging in new beers at the stadium (and not at all sneaking anything in ever), I’ll still be more often than not stopping for a bahn mi on the way down to the stadium (I’m partial to Seattle Deli on 12th Avenue South) and then picking up a bag of peanuts from the vendors outside.
Now to do the chili dance in my living room until Monday…