Uwajimaya Food Court

When we got to Uwajimaya, we were pretty hungry. Although we wanted to investigate the store, we thought it would be a bad idea to do that on an empty stomach, so we stopped at the first stall in the food court that looked good to us. It happened to be the very first stall right next to the doors, but not that surprising that we stopped there since we like takoyaki.

We placed our order and then waited for a short time as they put together the takoyaki. Since they were freshly made, they were pretty hot when they got to us. We only had a thin stick to eat them with, which when combined with their temperature, made it more challenging to eat.

The takoyaki was good and tasted as we expected it to. The only problem was that not long before our trip, we had stopped by Otafuku in the East Village for some takoyaki, and we've never had better takoyaki than Otafuku (haven't been to Japan), so it suffered a little bit in comparison. The batter here wasn't quite as good as Otafuku, and the octopus came out a little on the chewier side, but as a pre-shopping snack, it definitely worked.

After buying some grocery souvenirs and snacks (probably too many, but that's the usual, and at least we did already eat most of the snacks), we were still hungry. We had planned on visiting Pike Place Market later in the afternoon and food crawling, but it was still a decent walk to get there, so we got one more snack from Uwajimaya.

Right near the registers, there was a deli-like counter with a bunch of different prepared foods from Chef Kenzo, including a bunch of different croquettes - shrimp, kabocha squash, and plain (which was potato). We decided to get one of the shrimp and one of the squash and split them. The croquettes came with a small sauce on the side. Not sure exactly what that was, but it tasted both a little salty and a little sweet. Neither of us really liked the sauce that much and preferred the croquettes without it.

Both croquettes were nicely deep-fried. Between the two, the shrimp one had more flavor and you could see the actual pieces of shrimp inside. The squash one didn't have a ton of flavor to it, but it was kind of comforting, sort of like mashed potatoes are.

There were a lot of stalls at Uwajimaya's food court that had more substantial food that would probably have been healthier than what we got, but we were just looking for something small for a snack. Overall, we had a nice visit to Uwajimaya. Not sure if we would go back on another Seattle trip, just because we have Asian grocery stores and food courts at home, but we're glad we went.