It’s easy to plan a trip around breakfast, lunch and dinner, then fill the time between them with a little sightseeing. This is called having priorities. In Tacoma, there’s now a book to help give those priorities some background.
Peggy Cleveland’s Unique Eats and Eateries of Tacoma: The People and Stories Behind the Food takes a look at the people who make the city worth eating your way through. Published by Reedy Press, it follows the connections among restaurant owners, chefs, farmers and other local food makers. Think of it as a reason to get curious about who’s feeding you.
Book cover: Reedy Press
According to the publisher, the book explores a food scene that stretches from longtime drive-ins and steakhouses to newer ventures helped along by community crowdfunding. There’s room for Pacific Northwest seafood, locally grown ingredients and the many culinary traditions that show up around Tacoma, including Vietnamese pho, Filipino lumpia and Argentinian wood-fired steaks. Your dinner plans may require some narrowing down.
That people-first approach is a good fit for a city visit. A menu can tell you what’s in a dish. The story behind a restaurant gives you something else to look for when you get there: the history someone chose to preserve, the idea they took a chance on, or the neighborhood that helped them get the doors open.
It also gives you a perfectly reasonable excuse to wander beyond your usual order. If you’re visiting Tacoma, let a story that catches your attention become the starting point for an afternoon. Pick a place, see what’s nearby, and leave enough time to sit down and enjoy the meal. If you live here, try the same thing in a neighborhood you usually drive through. Familiarity has a way of turning “we should go there” into a five-year planning process.
Cleveland is a travel writer and supporter of small local businesses, and her focus here is on the people doing the work. Reedy Press lists the 192-page paperback at $27. You can find the book through the publisher and start assembling your next outing with our Tacoma and Pierce County restaurant guide.
Check the restaurant’s current hours before heading out. Then bring an appetite, a little curiosity, and someone willing to split a second order. For research purposes, obviously.
