1447 NW Ballard Way
Seattle, WA 98107-4641
(206) 782-2808
The connotation I have of the word 'parlor' is one of seediness or sordidness; a parlor is a place one hides out in, taking part in activities society at large may find distasteful or criminal. That connotation makes me love Mike's Chili Parlor all the more. An institution in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood, Mike's has been owned and staffed by four generations of the Semandiris family, dating back to 1922. With its brick pillbox exterior design, ample neon and art deco marquee, Mike's stands as a strident survivor of Old Ballard. A neighborhood that was originally settled by hardscrabble immigrant dockworkers and mariners, Ballard found itself at a crossroads in the '90s; with Seattle's real estate suddenly a hot commodity post-grunge and post-Microsoft, Ballard's single family residences and quietly dying industrial zoning offered up a waterside playland for developers in the aughts.
Mike's, itself, seems strangely disconnected from the rest of the city and the world. Surrounded on one side by an overpass, on another by a giant pit in the ground and the remaining two by the kind of aforementioned character-assassinating development, Mike's represents a strange wormhole into past Americana. Inside, the lighting is befitting a dive bar, giving just enough ambiance for the red-plastic upholstered barstools and booths. Newspaper clippings about the restaurant, from decades past, adorn the walls and upon seating yourself, you're usually greeted with the kind of refreshingly sassy, young waitress who'll talk shit with you about the drunken patrons three tables down, acting the fool.
The menu is, obviously, chili-based, with the secret Semandiris family recipe served by the cup, bowl and "big ass bowl." There are, also, your typical dive bar hot dogs and burgers, but true beauty occurs when those two options collide. On the menu board, the kind that's basically a Pepsi advertisement with little, removable black letters, Mike's offers chili dogs, chili fries, chili burgers, chili pasta and chili steaks. Each of these items is served on a plate in their original form with a helping of chili poured on top of it, as though it were Holy Water, sanctifying a greasy hot dog or sub-par burger as part of a rite in some kind of unspoken, pagan religion.
During my visits there, my friends and I usually start by whetting our appetites with cheap pitchers of Rainier beer and, before long, I hear the siren song of the chili burger calling. It's a burger and bun, sliced in half, chili dumped on top of it. Ordered with cheese, jalapenos and diced onions, it's as great as you'd imagine a chili burger to be. What really sets this fork-and-knife burger experience off is your mouth's realization that the bun has been buttered and grilled; it's excess only until you taste it.
Mike's chili won't be the best you've ever tasted; it's pretty salty and is notorious for its grease rising to the top, if you're foolish enough to let it sit that long. Yet, if you're the kind of person who's made it this far in my review of a place that serves chili on top of spaghetti, you're exactly the kind of person who'll appreciate Mike's. In a city where $9 gourmet sandwiches never touch their cheaper WaWa counterparts of my native suburban Philadelphia and in a city where I saw a co-owner of the now-defunct "sustainable burger stand," GreenGo, exasperatedly tell a customer, "Fries? We don't serve fries here," taking it upon herself to police diners' eating habits, Mike's exists as a kind of a shrine, stoking mid-20th century nostalgia.
In a former union city whose blue collar heritage is continually threatened by developers and unsympathetic domestic emigrants, Mike's Chili Parlor is one of the few hold-outs to ignore trendy dietary habits and, also, the general belief that something as mindlessly pleasurable as eating needs to be infused with political action. At Mike's, the jukebox has Link Wray, Del Shannon and the Stones and often, you'll see the youngest Mike bust through the door, carrying giant cans of sliced jalapenos or bags of frozen burger patties he obviously bought at the food service wholesaler the next block over- ingredients for food to be unceremoniously prepared in old scorched cookware, before your eyes, behind the bar. I doubt the Semandirises would apologize for any of that, which might appear chintzy to some. Instead, it's like they're offering you a seat at their home, which it pretty much has been for 80 years plus.
by Chris Middleman
[Photos: Kevin Schlosser and Mary Witter]>
