My Town: Ken Jennings’ Picks for Seattle

Make a reservation at …

Le Pichet. It’s a French place down by Pike Place Market that’s been there forever. I feel very loyal to it because it almost closed last year. Its original owners were going to move to Provence and had abruptly closed their other restaurant on Capitol Hill that we loved. So a lot of Seattleites stepped in, including me, to kind of help these employees fund a couple of the longtime employees to buy the place and take over the lease and the restaurant. It serves great simple French bistro food. If it’s cold out, [order the] French onion soup.

Le Pichet serves up French bistro fare seven days a week.

Chona Kasinger

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Enjoy live music at …

The Neptune Theater. If I’m there, it’s usually because it’s an indie band or something that reminds me of my love of indie pop in the early 2000s. It’s an old movie house with beautiful stained-glass windows, scenes from Greek mythology. … I will say that the acoustics are terrible, but I love the building so much that I go to concerts there all the time.

The Neptune Theater hosts a variety of events, including musical performances, film screenings and arts education programs.

Chona Kasinger

Witness civil engineering at work at …

[Hiram M. Chittenden] Ballard Locks. [The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers] cut a ship canal through Seattle into Lake Washington in the early 20th century, and that means the boats have to go from sea level up to the level of Lake Washington. It’s a massive boat elevator, gravity powered, right in the middle of Ballard. Water flows in from Lake Washington to lift the boats up, and it goes back down. It’s fun to just spend an hour there watching the boats go up and down. There’s a beautiful botanical garden [Carl S. English Jr. Botanical Garden]. The Army Corps of Engineers built it; there’s a little museum about the history of the spot. And there’s a fish ladder. You can watch the salmon head upstream to spawn, getting their strength back before they tackle swimming up the fish ladder next to the locks.

Visitors can watch a variety of ships pass through Seattle's Ballard Locks system.

Chona Kasinger

Rent a movie — yes, that’s still a thing — at …

Scarecrow Video. At this point, Scarecrow Video has by far the biggest collection of any [independent] video store in North America. It’s a Seattle institution. As people moved to streaming services, they have stayed alive by becoming a nonprofit. They’re basically, at this point … a motion picture and video archive. Their goal is to own one of everything. I’m a longtime fan. I used to go there in college because it was all the stuff I was dying to see that I’d read about that you just couldn’t see anywhere else. … It’s great for browsing. That’s what I miss about video stores. 

Scarecrow Video is currently the largest independently owned video and physical media library in the country and boasts more than 145,000 titles.

COURTESY JENNINGS

Insider tip:

Park at …

Amazon’s parking garages. Amazon has these abundant eight-story parking garages under a lot of their [office] buildings in Seattle. All these garages are free after 4 p.m. [on weekdays] and on weekends. So anytime [my family and I] go downtown, we park at Amazon. There’s charging [stations] down there. We drive an electric car, so we charge down there.

Jennings suggests parking at one of Amazon's Seattle-area garages.

Chona Kasinger