I’m sitting at a neon-blue bar 15 feet from a Spanish 21 table, and I just ordered veggie fried rice and veggie chow mein. Am I in Las Vegas? No—I’m at Goldie’s Casino (15030 Aurora Ave. N., Shoreline).
The air is artificially cool, and at noon on a Wednesday there are a smattering of card players at the gaming tables and only a few people who have ordered food. The sound of plastic chips fills the air, and outside the dimly lit establishment it’s sunny, cloudless. The bartender (let’s call her Gemma) is chatting with me. When I ask how long Goldie’s has been here, she and her co-worker both shrug. “Longer than 10 years, I guess,” she says.
I learn later from food and beverage manager Chao Victorino that prior to the ethnic cuisine, Goldie’s served traditional American bar food. Victorino doesn’t know how long exactly the Chinese restaurant has been there, but “It’s been a long time.” I ask why they chose Chinese food. “Because,” she says, “a lot of our guests are Chinese and we wanted to cater to them.” Fair enough!
The current Goldie’s menu includes seafood tofu hot pot, charbroiled steak, wraps, pork chops, chow foon, and congee. They have build-your-own omelets and other breakfast items, too. It’s a menu meant, I gather, to make patrons feel comfortable, composed, and ready to place their bets.
I ask Gemma what her favorite things on the menu are. “Well, the vermicelli bowls and Szechuan prawns are really good. I don’t eat meat, so I get the banh mi sandwiches with avocado. We have pea vines, which not every place has, and won ton noodle soup. Our Mexican food is really good too. We have Mexican cooks, Chinese cooks, Vietnamese cooks. And on Wednesday we have a special crab soup—that’s what I’m going to have for lunch today!”
The tables in Goldie’s are dark faux wood, and on each rests containers of soy sauce and bottles of Sriracha. Mirrors are everywhere. Funk music plays on the overhead speakers and sports-talk shows shine brightly, but muted, on the overhanging televisions. You don’t see casinos in Seattle proper (gambling licenses are illegal in King County), but they are legally all over Aurora, Edmonds, and White Center. And, for whatever reason, many of them fuel their patrons with Chinese food.
Is this a family-run establishment? I ask Gemma, who’s worked here “a couple years.” “No, it’s owned by a couple guys with a bunch of money. I think they have investors, too.” It turns out Goldie’s is owned by Evergreen Gaming Corporation, which acquired it in 2011. Just then, an announcement over the speakers invites one lucky customer, a fellow named Ben, to spin a wheel. Ben steps up, spins, and wins $25. People cheer; this occurs every two hours.
At the end of the bar a bouncer/manager fellow is watching me type into my phone and take pictures of the menu. He is bald, tan and big. I imagine he doesn’t like me. When I walked in, he gruffly said hello, noted it was a slow day, and asked to take my backpack to put behind a security table. Perhaps it makes sense; Goldie’s did survive its own violent robbery in 2009, and security is good for business.
My eyes go to a big CASHIER sign in gold and purple hanging on the east wall like a beacon in this place of worn-out-carpet malaise. People walk by me using gambling vernacular and saying things like “The prostitutes just went outside for a smoke” without skipping a beat.
When my fried rice arrives, I grin. It is packed with sterile, almost fake-looking veggies—bright-green broccoli, bright-orange carrots, baby corn. It’s light, not too greasy, and just what you’d expect. The chow mein is eerily similar to the rice, with the same bright veggies (except, for some reason, they’re all 25 percent bigger). The thin noodles are slippery and sloppy with a delightful thin beige gravy and little umbrella-shaped mushrooms.
After lunch, I sit at a table and I’m dealt two cards. A couple other guys each have small stacks of chips. When you first sit down, you can never tell if someone is winning or losing. I win a few hands, but eventually and expectedly lose my $20. Full-bellied, I leave Goldie’s for the bright outdoors.
I want to get a taste for another of these odd places, so I drive down to Roxbury Lanes (2823 S.W. Roxbury St., White Center): a combination bowling alley, card room, bar, and Chinese-food oasis. The first thing I notice is the stale cigarette smell. Even though smoking’s forbidden, the odor, I think, lingers from decades prior. The next thing I notice is the Cosmic Crane—one of those machines where you put in change and try to grab a stuffed toy, but the claw is so loose you never win. Young and old saunter about Roxbury, bowling and playing games. There is a sense that everyone here is blue-collar, a little rough about the edges. I make my way to the back toward the bar/restaurant. TVs are everywhere—it makes you wonder what places like this would do without the glow of ESPN. The casino is in an adjacent room. I can’t see it from where I sit, and I don’t bother to go in.
I’m handed a menu and poured a Pepsi. This place, along with the Chinese fare, serves nachos, wings, pizza, burgers, turkey dips, pie. and eggs Benedict, among other dishes—the kind of stuff you’d want if you were 9 years old and ready for an afternoon birthday party.
“What’s your favorite item on the menu?” I ask the blonde bartender. “Probably the Sizzling Mongolian Chicken,” she says. “Or the kung pao.” She tells me that Roxbury has been here since the ’50s, she thinks, but that the Chinese food came in later. Restaurant manager David Ngo tells me his father brought Chinese food to Roxbury in 2004 when he took over.
I order the veggie yakisoba. It doesn’t look like the thinner yakisoba noodles I’ve come to know in Seattle, but more like the thicker lo mein I had as a kid in New Jersey. Eating it, though, I feel as if I’m wrapped in a warm blanket of soy sauce and MSG. It gives me a jolt—sugar and carbs—but again I resist the excitement of the card room. There are no cocktail waitresses handing out free drinks or meals being comped by pit bosses. But who needs a comped meal when the best things on the menu are just $7.99?
food@seattleweekly.com
