As part of Seattle Met’s Best Restaurants feature, we asked dozens of Seattle chefs and restaurateurs to give us their take on trends, customers, competition—pretty much everything under the restaurant sun. What we got was an earful of juicy insider insight. We’ll be posting some of the responses in the coming weeks.

They were recent subjects of Food Network fawning, and all the critics love ’em, yet Rachel Yang and Seif Chirchi just don’t get the props they should. The duo behind Joule, Quoin, and Revel are Seattle’s most underrated restaurateurs, according to the crew we polled.

Commented one chef: “People who are really into food know about them, but I don’t know if they’re really attracting the crowds they deserve. Revel and Joule—they’re very unique, nothing else like what they do.” Said another: “They get a lot of local attention, but then you kind of forget they’re there, you don’t hear much about them.”

Behind Yang and Chirchi was Renee Erickson of Boat Street Cafe and The Walrus and the Carpenter (“She’s just doing her thing, she doesn’t do PR; she just has really cool, straight-ahead places”); and Dana Tough and Brian McCracken (Spur, Tavern Law, Coterie Room).

Other mentions included Scott Carsberg, Ba Culbert, Jim Drohman, Bruce Naftaly, Ryuichi Nakano, Melissa Nyffeler, and Scott Staples.