Seattle Underground Market

SUM will be in Portland for the coming months and will return in April. I’m gonna be going down to PDX to see what is happening down there.

If you ever wanted to experience a black market for foodies, this is the event you need to sign yourself up for! Be warned you will feel very incognito, a bit undercover, like there is this secret hand shake and nod you must know in order to be part of this but it’s fun. It’s a lot of fun actually. Our foodie group decided to buck up and try it…
You don’t actually know the meet up location until the day before (I won’t go into details why, but ask the coordinator if you’re curious), but if you can make it to one of these events — they are fantastic.
At these events you will find a group of up and coming chefs trying out their experiments on you so proceed at your own risk. I’m pregnant and I came out fine so I’m sure others would too!
The good part? The food is so delicious and some of these chef’s are indeed on the horizon of making a mark here in Seattle! Also, portions at each booth are just the right size where you can plan to try several booths or revisit favorites if you like. I ate so much I can’t even begin to recall all of it… but I’ll try.
From ginger juice to noodles to a cheesy mash to lemon bars to a balsamic gelato to vegan cheesecake to tacos to dumplings — I mean I really ate a lot here!
To get in on this fun little event, sign up, become a member and then you will pay $ 10 to get in. Each booth will have several items ranging from $ 1 – 5 with almost always a vegan/​vegetarian option and enjoy.
We had a total blast. Support the Seattle Underground Market :)

I like the concept a lot– budding chefs testing out new ideas.
The food was, for the most part, just ok. Lines were really long and extraordinarily slow moving. Would loved to have seen more vendors, but understand this is a new idea and will take some time to develop.
I was surprised at the comment that over half the food was vegetarian or gluten free. As a vegetarian I tried all savory veggie options, of which there were exactly 4. My daughter (not vegetarian) had many more options to try.
I would love a comment card to leave for vendors. The venue isn’t really conducive to feedback but would have liked to be able to discretely let vendors know where little tweaks would make a big difference (like cooking rice all the way through and presentation or nomenclature of dishes).
All in all, will give it another try or two and see how it shapes up. Hoping it’ll improve in the future!

I liked it. More than the reviews here led me to believe I would.
I was a bit thrown at the $ 10 charge to get in, but that’s really not much, given what they’re doing and once I started eating, that seemed like a bargain!
I’m feeling like this is a great idea that will just keep growing.
I’ve only been once, granted, but that visit definitely made me want to go back for a second trip.
I think it’d be interesting– once it gets up and humming along– to have more things like the next one– a brunch theme at a different time of day. I would feel great knowing that the vendors would be different by at least 50% each time so I got the variety I liked, maybe a feedback loop/​voting of who should come back would be a good feature.
Give every attendee a ticket and have them drop it in a box for their favorite vendor on their way out.
Also the band, while fun, was waaaay too loud, and the lack of seating wasn’t my favorite but otherwise, that was some amazing food!

Bottom line: being there once is way more than enough…
I was tempted by the idea of passionate food entrepreneurs, new chef trying out menu, etc from the ad.
This is totally wrong when we got there tonight. Most of the vendors are already established business and trying to sell old menu food such as Gumbo, cheesecake, etc. There is no new creation and what worse is over 50% of the food there is gluten-​free and/​or vegan… i want REAL food. come on!
We tried about 7 food there. Most of them were cold, lukwarm. very small portion for $ 3 or tasted so average that i really don’t want to brother (but sadly we already paid $ 10 pp to get in and spent over an hour going there all the way from Eastside.)
After being there for about 30 mins seeing all the long lines for food and tried a few average food, we decided not to spend further more. Honestly $ 40 – 50 can get us better food in a sit down restaurant.

Disappointingly small number of vendors, and disappointing food. Including $ 5 pp admission to the event, we spent about $ 50 for a party of three, and then left to get Chinese take-​out after deciding our wallets had taken a big enough hit.
We bought food from 8 of the stalls (out of ~12 total vendors), and of those I’d say 1 was great, 3 were okay to pretty good, and the rest were disappointing. For $ 3 – 5 per small plate, that’s a pretty sad showing.
Note: The one stand-​out dish of the night was a fresh honey-​drizzled pork belly on a piece of toast with fresh arugula. Wish I’d caught the name of the vendors, because that was delicious.

Not bad.
It is not 5-​star for me because the vendor options were rather limited. Also some items are definitely overpriced. I have rarely heard of a vendor could sell a small bottled water or diet soda (without refills) for $ 2.
I was able to get inside quickly. Once inside, I was rather disappointed. For some reasons I had the impression that there would be booths packed everywhere. Rather, there were only about 10 — 15 tables around. I walked around first and thought oh maybe there would be more tables outside. But that was not the case.
Yes there were long queues everywhere. However, the wait for me was not too bad. It was about 5 to 10 minutes of a wait. Food portion was small but many items were reasonably priced. Some items were definitely overpriced. There were a couple of tables where the food was pretty yummy. The chowder lady was so amazing! Too bad she has not officially opened up her business just yet. There were a couple of popular tables that sold out very quickly. I was able to try/​sample at least 5 or 6 booths. I am glad I got there early.
I will come back if there is a next time, just perhaps with much less excitement for sure.

I signed up for their first event after reading great things on their website. It said «The Seattle Underground Market is a venue for passionate food entrepreneurs to share their food creations with others and get valuable feedback». So well great, I was feeling all adventurous and totally excited.
We arrived there a little after 6 (it was supposed to be (6 – 9) and it was a very easy check-​in process. Once inside, almost everything had LONG queues. That was sad, for everything, you had to queue up for at least 7 – 8 min to buy a small portion. There were about 20 vendors and all of them had slow moving queues, possibly because of cash transactions that took time. I gave up! I went to a single stall where they sold cupcakes and there was no queue (possible coz people were focusing on main course rather than desserts). And then I headed out.
The food options looked mixed. Some of them were good but not outstanding. Some very bad — one guy was assembling store-​bought stuff and selling it.
Overall — you might stumble upon good stuff, but not worth my time.