There’s a tiny white building on 15th Avenue NW in Ballard where every weekend you’ll see a line of people, all smiles, pushing their way inside the vintage lunchbox- and kitsch-swathed tiny dining room of Lunchbox Laboratory, home to some of the best burgers in Seattle. They’re truly gourmet. Restaurant-owner Scott Simpson ditched his gourmet digs to use his culinary training and homestyle inclinations to create high-end comfort food that spares no expense.
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Ballard, bugers, fries, homestyle, laboratory, lunchbox, Seattle
by Alex Russell
Nervous Nellie’s Café in Ballard has a vibe, and I’m not sure how or why. It’s at the corner of a relatively new condominium complex, and the main entry doors at both sides of the café are shared on one side with a law office and on the other a dentist. New buildings are almost always sterile. There’s no soul in the uniform texture on the walls, the rigid angles and parallels of plumbing pipe and conduit hung from the steel of the ceiling. Somehow still, at Nervous Nellie’s there’s a vibe.
It’s an open space with a high-ceilinged main floor and stairs at the back leading up to a landing overlooking it. There is a whole other area, a couple rooms worth, until the owners put up doors and closed it to the public. They serve the best drip coffee I’ve had in Seattle and make artisan toast with all kinds of homemade jams and cheeses, Swedish-style. The café itself is a mixed space, the downstairs for oldschool café socializing and upstairs for more private or computer-based work.
And that’s kind of where it started, with a vibe and then some trouble.
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Ballard, cafe, condos, Nervous Nellie's, strawberry jam, Swedish toast, vibe