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What’s Wrong with Tourist Restaurants?

Or: Should you dine at Orfeo?

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Not everyone’s a fan of my Orfeo review in this month’s Seattle Met.

Orfeo is the new enterprise of the folks who brought us Blueacre Seafood and Steelhead Diner—and, like those restaurants, it aims a straight pitch at out-of-towners.

How can you tell? Huge space. Crowdpleaser menu. Little discernible vision from the kitchen. In short, Orfeo is generic. Tourists often wind up in these places because hotel concierges—whose job it is to study up on the scene and know what restaurants are out there—send them. The more generic a place, after all, the more pleasing it’s likely to be to a greater number of folks.

However! If you find yourself at Orfeo, one dish rises above the rest as pretty darn good. Which one? Find out here.

 











Kathryn Robinson
Kathryn Robinson
Senior Writer Seattle native Kathryn Robinson, award-winning restaurant critic and senior writer at Seattle Met, has been anonymously reviewing restaurants for over 30 years—first as editor of the Best Places guidebook series, then as staff critic at Seattle Weekly and contributing critic at The Seattle Times and Seattle magazine.  Midcareer she spent a year-long sabbatical studying comparative religion as a Knight Fellow at Stanford University where she had been an undergrad 10 years earlier, gaining a knowledge base she now calls upon for her monthly “Back Fence” column on our collective urban existence and the meaning it holds for our personal lives. In her off hours she is a partner and a parent—which means she has no off hours.