After coming around to something approaching normal, we headed north and dropped in on my friend Chase Jarvis. 

Chase was addressing a group of students form the Art Institute of Seattle. We caught the tail end of on inspiring presentation. Chase has a great tradition of posting one photo from his iPhone each day on Twitter – and here he is shooting today’s:

After this we had a few moments to say hello and meet the crew, then Chase, being the busy and inventive guy that he is, had to hop on a conference call. So, we continued to get to know his wife and crew (awesome peeps) and asked about where to get breakfast.

Chase is a guy to watch. Check out his blog, Twitter and Facebook group.

Voula’s is in a part of town that someone said was the University District, but it seemed more like folks working the the marine industries, no university in sight. This is just a perfect greasy spoon. Simple, hearty, and famous for a dish called “the Hobo”, which is a mess of hash browns, eggs, sausage, peppers, mushrooms, onions, topped with cheddar cheese. It was awesome, but a couple more of those and there goes the boyish figure.

What was funny is that this place was featured on the Food Network’s road trip show, “Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives” … out of all the breakfast places we could have ended up at.

Definitely worth the stop, and maybe another on our way out.

The Tap Room: 160 beers on tap, heavily skewed towards North America. This is not a place to go to pick up women, but an okay place to catch a game. Had some popcorn shrimp, eh, not bad, not great.

Whiskey Bar: Wanna-be hipster dive (it’s hard to be a real dive if you’ve only been open for 5 years). Awesome Whiskey selection — they had the Yamazaki. Bartender Christie (or maybe Chrissy?) was cool and friendly. Patrons discussing their baby-momma, scoffing at homeless people, Spanish speaking people, and other relatively retarded conversation.

Casablanca: How can a bar in a city be totally dead on a Thursday night. Lame.

Shorty’s: Now we’re getting there. Hipster bar that Melissa B took me to in after our “meeting” in January ‘06. Pinball, Hamm’s, cute patrons. Good place to throw back a few.

Juju: I stepped outside of Shorty’s and ran into Mantero, a psuedo-homeless guy who pointed me at Uma and Amanda (pictures of the latter to follow). I actually left my beer at Shorty’s to join the rubicund Uma and sort of contrarian Amanda. The drinks were top notch, muddled lime gimlet was just about perfect. Sort of felt like Elixir North.