By MEG VAN HUYGEN

Tacoma’s food scene is seriously giving the rest of the PNW a reason to be nervous right now, my dudes. Fine dining has especially ramped up in Tac lately, which you wouldn’t always think is something to celebrate, but the success of the new upscale joints is drawing a diverse host of restaurants to open and to thrive, both fancy and blue-collar. So there’s more and more options for everyone’s wallet and swag level lately. Everybody wins.

All of this is to say that I dined out a whooooooole lot more than I could afford to this year! Whoops. Here are ten Tacoma bites that stayed on my mind weeks and months after the fact, sometimes to an obsessive degree. From Nepalese dumplings to elaborate mac and cheese, this list ranges among divey drunk food, fast food, haute cuisine, and even fresh produce. Tacoma’s really got it all.

Pork momos in chili-coconut broth at The Momo King

I dunno about you guys, but I wasn’t expecting to find Nepalese food at the mall, to say nothing of kickass Nepalese food. In the Tacoma Mall food court, nestled between the Sbarro and the cheesesteak place, lurks The Momo King, serving swirly Himalayan dumplings in a variety of fillings and sauces. All the flavor permutations are pretty good, and the butter chicken momos are a solid runner-up, but the momos that lived in my skull all year are the pork ones. Lookin’ like little Russian onion domes, they’re swimming in a fragrant yellow lake of coconut milk and chili and curry and garlic and ginger. One time, we rolled up right when they were closing and had to take our momos away to eat in the truck, and now I feel like that’s the most correct way to have them: in the parking lot on a cold night with the windows all fogged up, while the momos warm you up from the inside. They’ll forever be truck dumplings to me.

Buffalo chicken Tim-chos at The Valley

This is the most brilliant thing. It’s nachos, right?, but made with Tim’s Cascade Chips! Also buffalo-sauced fried chicken chunks, cheddar-Jack, and gorgonzola, all of which is spread out on a sheet pan and baked into a spicy, cheesy, chickeny morass before being garnished with carrots and celery. It’s the archetypal drunk food: sloppy, indulgent, a little scandalous. They also serve it with a side of gorgonzola dressing, in case you need extra sauce on your sauce. A genius is who came up with this thing, and I love it.

The hot honey chicken sando at Dusty’s Hideaway

Fried chicken is having a trendy little moment right now, and it’s getting expensiver and expensiver as a result. It’s definitely hard to defend a seventeen- dollar fried chicken sandwich, especially one that kinda looks like a McChicken at first glance, but there’s way more to this sando than meets the eye. The patty is not made of boring breast meat or compressed rib meat (like Mickey D’s) but instead rich, flavorful chicken thigh, and it’s fried out with a crisp battered shell whose texture rockets your brain back to McDonald’s. Then it’s piled with red cabbage slaw and pickles, the mayo is imbued with Mama Lil’s peppers, and the whole thing’s doused in warm, spicy honey. This slightly dressy take on the fast-food classic is the chicken sandwich of your life and will force you to remember it every time you drive down McKinley. I’m telling you.

Corn risotto with fennel, pickled onions, and buttered Dungeness crab at Field Bar

Got something to celebrate? There’s lots of swanky dinner spots on Sixth Avenue to choose from, but Field Bar is doing farm-to-table in such a creative, lighthearted way that it’s been my go-to for birthdays lately. I almost passed on the corn risotto the other day because it seemed, I dunno, quotidian, and it would have been a big fucking mistake. I only added the Dungeness crab at the last second too! Do not forget to do these things. The risotto not only came with hellllaaaa butter-drenched claw meat, but it’s tinged with that Szechuan chili- garlic crisp to cut through the richness in the specific way you want. That, plus the combined mélange of rice and pickles and butter and chili and crunchy veggies... it’s a comfort-food high I’ve been chasing for months. This said, Field Bar changes their menu a lot, based on what’s in season, so if you want this dish, you’d better get your skates on.

A single black plum from Tacoma Boys

Don’t believe the hype from the Washington Apple Commission: At the height of fruit season, Washington State does apples well, but stone fruit the best! And especially plums. On top of that, at Tacoma Boys, all the fruit is excessively flawless, like one of those fruit museums in Japan, except the fruit doesn’t cost fifty bucks an ounce or whatever. This plum was fucking BEAUTIFUL—the
peel looked like the purple night sky, speckled with little pinpoint white dots for stars—and eating it was like eating
a cupcake. Sugar-sweet, absurdly ripe, ready to burst. I ate it while walking through the blueberry park, with the storybook rivulet of plum juice running down my chin, while the late summer sun shone on us both, the plum and me. You’ll have to mark your calendar for early September in order to live out this same Enid Blyton fantasy, but you won’t regret it, I promise.
The fried chicken, sure, but especially the jojos at 2121 Pub

A lot of things in the world are mistakenly called jojos or jos, first of all. A deep-fried potato wedge is a deep- fried potato wedge, but to make an anatomically correct jojo, one must have a pressure fryer, ideally a Broaster. The older, the better. The point is to seal in the moisture of [your item] and crackle up the exterior in the process. If you see the big crank on top, you know the jojos that’re coming out of that sucker are about to be fire AF. Well, 2121 Pub, est. 1966, is doing it exactly right, making jojos in the same pressure fryer they use for their chicken, and the result is what you want: crusty and craggy on the outside and steamy and baked-potatoey on the inside. It’s not a real jo unless you scald the living shit out of the roof of your mouth on the cloud of steam that’s released on your first bite, and 2121’s got the steam burn on lock.

Mac and cheese at the Blue Rose Bar, FKA Stink

Not to be rude, but it’s a relief to see that Stink, whose menu focused on ripe cheeses, has at last seen a name change with its new ownership. No shade on
the food or drinks—it’s all killer, always has been—but folks understandably had trouble getting past the name, and this place deserves all the glory and attention possible. More great news: the menu’s stayed mostly the same, so the mac and cheese is as delirious-making as it ever was. One memorable evening, after a few glasses of cab, my boyfriend and I ordered the ever-changing special mac and cheese, with extra blue cheese added to it that night, and the very second we finished it, we looked at each other and ordered a second one to go. We weren’t done tasting this magnificent taste yet. Only caveat is that the mac is incredibly rich, so you may want to add a li’l side salad... to, ahem, cut the cheese.

The putaco at Balcon Express

It’s hard to know what to expect when one reads the word putaco, especially if one has a basic grasp of Mexican Spanish slang, but your dirty mind won’t help you at Balcon X. It’s a hybrid of a pupusa and a taco. (Wait, what did YOU think it was?) Even after you grok that part, there’s a few ways this could go: Do they use the pupusa in place of the tortilla, or wrapped around it like a double-decker taco? Is it a pupusa INSIDE a taco, like as the taco filling? Nah. Turns out, they pry apart a pupusa and then use its empty carcass as a taco. This silly idea is a Balcon X original, and it looks pretty weird, but it’s good as hell, because everything at Balcon X is good as hell— especially if it has chorizo or carne asada in it. Of course, you can get regular tacos and pupasas here too, and they will be similarly good as hell, but I’m always a sucker for a new idea. It’s all super affordable too, and the people here are just so nice.

Elk sliders with pimento cheese and lingonberry jam at Bar Bistro

Look, this might sound bizarre, but I implore you to try this dish. Way out in Midland, Bar Bistro is bringing neon- blue Vegas Strip vibes to the dusty old decommissioned railroad district, and everything—seriously, everything—they serve is the tiiiiiits. For fifteen bucks, you get two pretty sizable pretzel buns loaded with grilled elk patties that are absolutely coated in lingonberry jam and bright orange pimento cheese, which is made in house. A generous portion of their thin, beer-battered fries come on the side. The juicy, savory elk patty, the soft pretzel bun, the creamy-salty cheese, the sharp lingonberries... all of it is orchestrated perfectly. Again, it’s almost impossible to make a misstep on Bar Bistro’s menu, but this dish is both spectacular and just plain wacky, and your life will be better for eating it. Spec-wackular.

Extra-frico slice with pancetta at Tacoma Pie

Tacoma’s got a rep for being pizza town these days! There’s so much pizza! Like, historically, there’s been tons and tons of pizza, but brand-new pizzerias are also sprouting up every month, seems like! Is it because people think “working class” and think of pizza? The reason is not known, I do know that Tacoma Pie, which opened in 2020, is a standout among these bold young pizza upstarts. These folks are not fucking around: They’re doing Detroit-style square pies, with dark, lacy caramelized sides and sky-high frico edges. The pizza that ruined me for other pizza (uh, for a while) was the Vito, made with pancetta, cherry peppers, green onions, and a profound abundance of roasted garlic. A pretty simple concept, but it’s the dumptrucksworth of garlic, the crispy fried cheese perimeter, and the extra-unctuous pancetta that made it unforgettable. Bring Altoids, for your blood will become garlic.