The Best New Restaurants in the Seattle Area, January 2026
New bakeries, pizza, and a “curry lab” with delicious experiments
The Eater Seattle Heatmap aims to answer the question “Where should I eat right now?” for people trying to keep up with the city’s constantly changing dining landscape. It focuses on newer restaurants — typically opened or revamped significantly within the last six months or so — that are reshaping Seattle’s food scene for the better.
In January 2026, we addedCloudy Cafe, a new bakery and brunch spot taking over the old Watson’s Counter space in Ballard, andCurry Lab Sapporo, which just opened in Ravenna. As a reminder, if you go to a restaurant that has recently opened, be patient — the staff might not be firing on all cylinders yet, and there may be hiccups in the service or menu items that sell out.
Know of a spot that should be on our radar? Send us a tip by emailingseattle@eater.com.
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The Best New Restaurants in the Seattle Area, January 2026
New bakeries, pizza, and a “curry lab” with delicious experiments
The Eater Seattle Heatmap aims to answer the question “Where should I eat right now?” for people trying to keep up with the city’s constantly changing dining landscape. It focuses on newer restaurants — typically opened or revamped significantly within the last six months or so — that are reshaping Seattle’s food scene for the better.
In January 2026, we addedCloudy Cafe, a new bakery and brunch spot taking over the old Watson’s Counter space in Ballard, andCurry Lab Sapporo, which just opened in Ravenna. As a reminder, if you go to a restaurant that has recently opened, be patient — the staff might not be firing on all cylinders yet, and there may be hiccups in the service or menu items that sell out.
Know of a spot that should be on our radar? Send us a tip by emailingseattle@eater.com.
Fortuna
This sandwich counter opened in September to long lines and routine sellouts. What makes it a smash hit? Could it be the fresh schiacciata bread, which like focaccia’s slightly crispier cousin? Is it the classic Italian combos, like fatty prosciutto with creamy stracciatella cheese or mortadella and pistachio? In any case the ‘wiches here aren’t revelations so much as affirmations of a simple truth: Stick a meat, a cheese, and a vegetable between two slices of crispy-chewy bread and you have a lunch worth waiting in line for. (Plus, they’ll come around with chunks of schiacciata while you wait.)
Gao Lhao Bangkok Noodle Shop
Gao Lhao brings Bangkok’s iconic Chinatown scene to Green Lake, offering a colorful and lively location for craft cocktails and Thai-Chinese street food. The homemade crispy chive cakes pop with grassy flavor, making them a recommended starter. Bigger dishes like Kurobuta boat noodles (with pork blood in the broth) and the bha mee hang bowls boast generous portions of meat and egg noodles. Save stomach space for a dessert called sangkhaya bai toey, a warm toast that is more like a roll. It’s filled with a big slice of butter and a great implement for sopping up the pandan custard and grated coconut it comes with.–Jay Friedman
Curry Lab Sapporo
This is a new place from the owners ofYoroshiku that specializes in Hokkaido-style “soup curry.” For those who didn’t pay attention in Japanese curry class, this is a thin, broth-y sort of curry that here gets poured over chicken, tofu, brisket, or pork katsu. The menu is small, the vibe is casual (you order from a kiosk), and the location is a little obscure, on a little commercial strip of Northeast 65th Street. But the flavors packed into the curry are impressive — it’s umami, it’s rich, it’s deep, it has notes of cumin and many other things. Also check out Curry Lab’s take on vindaloo, which has notes of sweetness and is luxuriously fatty from beef brisket.
Cloudy Cafe
It’s not surprising this Indonesian-influenced bakery and cafe fromlongtime baker-about-town Dionne Himmelfarb is a hit right out of the gate. Still, the pastry game here is impressive. Recent specials that have wowed us include the apple crumble bar, with layers of a warming apple-cinnamon mixture, then cream, then a sweet crumble. The must-try item, though, is a double-chocolate croissant that pairs rich, delicate layers of pastry with an even richer chocolate interior. It’s a croissant that can, and should, be eaten for dessert. There’s a weekend brunch too, but Cloudy Cafe shines as an any-day-of-the-week coffee and pastry stop.
Happy Crab
This waterfront restaurant next to Ray’s Boathouse is abig swing from Lily Wu, the owner of the popular Xi’an Noodles chain. It’s a massive space with stunning panoramic views of the Sound, outdoor tables amid flowers, and even a white piano in the center of the dining room (Wu says she’s considering hosting open mics). The food is a departure from Xi’an Noodles’ biang biang noodle–centric menus; it’s mainly seafood and especially seafood boils, which means corn and sausage and crab and pretty much anything you like thrown in your choice of several types of broth. (You can, and should, get at least one biang biang noodle in the boil.) For a big waterfront restaurant, it offers reasonable, family-friendly prices — for a little under $80 you can get a boil that feeds three adults, which is pretty good by 2025 standards.
Roy Southern Thai Phinney
Roy Southern is part of a wave ofnew Thai restaurants that are serving more than the usual combo of pad thai and curries. Southern Thai food tends to feature seafood and coconut milk and incorporate influences from around Southeast Asia; here the resulting flavors are more vibrant and deep than you’d expect from a neighborhood Thai joint. Even a simple lamb massaman curry dish is rich and earthy. Also, many of the dishes here are naturally gluten-free.
The Little Beast Ballard
For years Kevin Smith has been Ballard’s mad scientist of meat at his highly lauded butcher shop-slash-restaurantBeast and Cleaver, but its small size means reservations are hard to come by. If all Little Beast did was make Smith’s dry-aged steaks more widely available, it’d be worth writing up. But Little Beast is also the London native’s attempt torecreate a high-end English pub, and it features rare-in-Seattle dishes like sausage rolls, scotched eggs (Smith says that’s the correct term for the dish commonly called “Scotch eggs”), and Yorkshire pudding. The steak and pork chop may tempt, but don’t miss out on thelamb korma pie, with luxuriously fatty lamb neck encased in a thick hot water crust pastry and covered in rich, cumin-y gravy.
Pidgin Cooperative
Thishighly anticipated restaurant in Fisherman’s Terminal from longtime Seattle chefs Zach and Seth Pacleb is hard to describe. The food is a mashup of cuisines from around the Pacific Rim combined with seasonal local Pacific Northwest ingredients — but that makes it sound so much more pretentious than it is. Think Hawaiian-style plate lunch with creamy, peanutty mac salad; butter mochi topped with tart seasonal fruit; kimchi that is tingly-spicy with hidden sweet undertones; and rockfish battered with flecks of seaweed for a sea-salt-y kick.
Uncle Dom’s Italian Kitchen
Restaurateur Travis Rosenthal took over the massive space on Pine and Summit that used to house Mezcaleria Oaxaca and has turned it into a combination rooftop bar/smash burger window/tapas spot/Italian restaurant. Uncle Dom’s, headed by former Vito’s chef Michael Crossley, is probably the headliner of the bunch. The vibe is new-wave Italian-American, more based AJ Soprano than Tony Soprano — the space is lit up by a massive UNCLE DOM’s neon light — but the menu pretty much just does the classics. Bread, garlic, olive oil, a hearty and meaty bolognese. It’s the three-chord power pop version of Italian cuisine, and it works. Note that because Uncle Dom’s shares the kitchen with Bar Tango, a revival of the old Tango Restaurant and Lounge, you can order off both menus — try the El Diablo, a classic Tango dessert that consists of a massive cube of dark chocolate surrounded by a ring of meringue that’s dusted with cayenne pepper. It’s spicy, rich, and definitely enough for two.
Cafe Calaveras
This queer Latina-owned coffee shop soft opened in late August but it already feels like a well-worn hangout place. There are couches for lounging, booths adorned with striped serape blankets for meet-ups, and nods to Calaveras’s Dia de los Muertos–inspired branding all over the place. The cafe menu features typical coffee drinks alongside some Mexican-inspired twists, like the horchata latte, which has a heavy dose of cinnamon and tastes like Christmas. There’s also a food menu of breakfast sandwiches, tacos, and conchas.
The Pastry Project
The Pastry Project, a space in Pioneer Square that offers training to people facing barriers to employment, doubles as one of the city’s best ice cream shops in the summer, when it dispenses soft serve from a walk-up window. This fall, that window has turned into a walk-up bakery serving some truly innovative items, like a moist molasses bread topped with whipped butter that is laced with citrus for a fun note of tartness. And the maple pancake croissant is… somehow a flaky croissant that tastes like a pancake? Show up Thursday through Saturday morning, but be prepared for a line.
A.K. Pizza
The hype around this takeout spot has led to a supply-demand imbalance such that to actually order a pizza from A.K. Pizza, you have to be on the site and hit “add to cart” atexactly noonwhen preorders for the following day open — seriously, it sells out instantaneously. But if you navigate that, prepare for the best pizza sauce in town, a textured, savory, oregano-forward concoction that we would eat by itself. The charred New York–style crust is pretty exceptional as well.
- 6901 Martin Luther King Jr Way South, Seattle, Washington 98118, United States
- (206) 569-8082
- Visit website
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