This weekend, I am staying in Alki for work -Pet sitting at a gorgeous place overlooking the sound with a lovely view of the water and Mount Ranier in one!
Now, it is not like Alki is actually all that far from where I live in Seattle, but cities are so dense it feels like there is a LOT between here and there. This is my first time ever living in an actual city so it continues to astound me just how much is packed into every square foot of available space!
Most of my pet sitting jobs are in the West Seattle/ Alki area so anytime I am over here I use it as an excuse to try out new food places on this side of town!
Of course, this weekend was also a very big weekend for the nerd side of my world as it was the climax of the Race to World First on the Dimensius raid in World of Warcraft. What that means is that teams of the best WoW players in the world are competing to be the first ones to defeat the BBEG (big, bad, evil guy for my non gaming folk) in the newest raid (a challenging series of big bosses, 8 in this case) added to the game last Tuesday, on mythic difficulty. This time around it was Team Liquid in the US, and Team Echo in the EU that had been pretty neck and neck for the whole race! Team Method (also EU) brought up a very respectable third place.
The battle had been taking place all week and the top raiding teams were all on Dimensius by Friday, with both Liquid and Echo getting him down to about 50% health with ease. From there though, the mechanics of the fight started to wear on the players and it was wipe after wipe for each team, whittling down the health a little more each time. The two top teams kept leapfrogging back and forth for who had made it further into the fight.
Saturday is when it really started to pick up though and it was clear to all watching that the boss would fall that day, but who would take the win?
I decided to try out a little Hawaiian bakery that morning, keeping one eye on Twitch streaming on my phone the entire time. Patrick’s Bakery is a small little breakfast diner with traditional Hawaiian plates. Small, but it was pretty busy for the time I was there. I got the Loco Moco breakfast- a grilled beef patty served over rice, drowned in gravy and finished with two eggs on top, over easy for me. I didn’t even know it came drowned in gravy so I was absolutely delighted when it came out looking like a bowl of soup! I am a big fan of gravy!
I typically try to be lower carb when sticking to a regular diet, but I also tend to not let that prevent me from trying new exciting foods, so for my taste, there was definitely too much rice in this dish, but it was very filling and absolutely delicious! A good savory, eggy breakfast is always a hit for me!
As it was a bakery, I did have to get some sort of sweet baked good and decided on a pineapple scone. I know I must have had scones before at some point (I did live in England for a few years as a child) but I either don’t remember them at all, or this scone was nothing like what the British scones are. The pineapple flavor was nice and it has a nice sweet coating or some sort of sugary glaze. My problem was that the dough itself was that dense dry dough one would use for the biscuits in biscuits and gravy. Biscuits that are definitely more savory than sweet. Biscuits that I never like. So it wasn’t really to my taste.
Back to the weekend’s excitement! Both teams had steadily dropped that final health lower and by afternoon both Liquid and Echo were sitting at a mere 5% left on the final health bar! I Was completely enamored with this race. For the first time in my life, I think I understand how it feels to be a sports fan! I have always hated sports and thought the craziness over sportball games was just kind of ridiculous. But here I was, sitting with two screens up so I could watch both Twitch streams at once, analyzing every pull of the boss and being more invested in a competition (that I am not involved in) than I have probably ever been. The only real difference between me and a football fan in that moment was that I play WoW and am actively working towards mythic raiding this season, so I will be doing this exact fight (but after the devs have nerfed it a bit and higher level gear is available in the game). I learned a lot from watching the mechanics played over and over again but it was also a thrilling experience in itself! One team gets it down to less than 10%. A few pulls later the other team does too. Then they get down to 5.8%. 5.5%! Each new “best pull” dropping that final health bar a little more and once both teams were regularly getting less than 10% it was only a matter of time. Any pull could be that pull.
But it was getting late for Echo over in the EU. They knew they couldn’t go to sleep because it was too close. Liquid would get it overnight. So they stayed up, and kept pulling. It was near 2am for Echo when they made the pull that looked like it would end it all. The team was working in perfect harmony and the boss’s health was dropping. It passed the 10% mark, then 5%! I watched as it kept creeping down and I thought “THIS IS IT!!” and at a tiny 0.3% they fell! …and Dimensius lived. I couldn’t believe it. At this point Liquid was still hanging out around the 5% mark as their best pull. Echo didn’t give up though, getting that close of course lit a fire under them and they kept on going. A few more pulls, a few more wipes. Then a beautiful setup and the team was at it again. All players alive going into the final phase and everyone hitting the mechanics perfectly. Again the bar fell and AGAIN they wiped at 0.28%!
I was screaming. TWICE, they got to less than 1% on the boss and just didn’t get another hit in time to kill him!
Liquid still hadn’t made any further progress but they took a short break to regroup as Echo pulled again, and again, trying to grab that victory that they had basically tasted.
With Echo in the lead at .28% Liquid came back from their break, had a perfect pull, kept all their players alive through the phase 3 mechanics and stole that victory kill right out of the jaws of Echo.
At 5:18pm on August 23rd, 390 pulls, Team Liquid kills Dimensius and takes the trifecta of world firsts for the War Within expansion pack. It was an absolutely insane race.
To be so close, and then have it snatched away by one good pull. I can only imagine the emotions going through team Echo in that moment. They certainly have nothing to be ashamed about though. Both teams were monsters in this battle and it was an exciting roller coaster of a race! So much so that I have spent way more of this blog writing about this e-sports event than I have writing about the food from this weekend!
I just can’t believe how close it was and how exciting I found it! In 20+ years of playing World of Warcraft I have never watched a Race to World First event, and I feel like now, I will probably never miss one going forward.
That night, I had a hard time sleeping after the excitement of the race, but I was scheduled to go back home the next day and I needed to try out another restaurant I had scoped out on google maps in the morning!
Salvadorian Bakery and Restaurant had caught my attention, mostly for the Tres Leches they showed on their menu, but I was interested to see what Salvadorian breakfast plates I might find as well and I set out on this foodie adventure Sunday morning.
My brain was not braining very well that morning and I struggled to get my order out, despite the server speaking perfectly clear English and probably wondering if I had a stroke recently or something. All of the other patrons were speaking Spanish, and while I have been learning Spanish for like three years now, I have not done so in a way that has led to me being actually conversational with it- yet. Worse than that though, I couldn’t even remember the word for the drink I wanted, that I have ordered a million times and is probably my favorite Spanish drink! I remembered seeing it on the menu, couldn’t find it, couldn’t remember what it was called, ended up telling the server, in desperation, “the rice, vanilla, cinnamon thing!”
Horchata.
Horchata is what I was trying to get.
For my breakfast, I ordered platanos fritos- a dish of fried plantains with refried beans and eggs. Simple, but tasty, filling, and a great energy source for the day. Once again, I know I have had plantains in the past, I am half Puerto Rican and I know we must have had them at some point visiting Puerto Rico, but I didn’t really have any memory of them and always just kind of thought of them as starch bananas. Upon trying these though, they were much more sweet potatoes! Could easily sub plantains in place of sweet potatoes in many recipes and they would work just fine. Sweet and savory and not really like bananas at all! Potatonanas. The rest, I would say, was pretty standard. Refried beans are usually a miss for me regardless, though these had a bit of sweetness to them that put them a notch above most. The tortillas were a little dense and starchy for my liking but that’s another I just don’t really eat often anyways. The plantains were the real winner of the dish, especially all mixed in with gooey egg yolk and salsa! I would certainly take a plantain and egg dish again!
But again, this is a bakery! Let’s get into the sweet stuff! And what a winner this sweet stuff was!
I got a slide of chocolate Tres Leches and the only word that really describes it is divine!
While so many of the things I had eaten lately seemed quite dense, this cake was very light and fluffy. The cake itself was airy, and the whipped cream icing was like a cloud of sweetness. The subtle rum flavor complimented the creamy chocolate nicely. The best part was that it was satisfyingly sweet, but not overly sweet as that is a common problem for me with cakes. I love a nice rich chocolate cake but it is usually so sweet I can only eat a few bites at once before it makes me feel sick. This Tres Leches was just the right amount of gentle sweetness that I was actually able to eat the whole thing in one sitting! It didn’t leave me feeling unwell, but also didn’t leave me craving more either, another great accomplishment!
For this weekend’s adventures, I would say Patrick’s Bakery has the win for a breakfast meal. But Salvadorian Bakery and Restaurant definitely takes it for the dessert!
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