One of the Seattle attractions is the restaurant at the top of the Needle called SkyCity restaurant. Since we were here, we were not going to miss the opportunity to try this place out.
The check-in for the restaurant is at the entrance where the gift shops are at the ground floor. After a little gift shop browsing it was time to go up the super fast elevator. The Needle is 605 ft tall and it takes about 45 seconds to get from the bottom to the top. Since we were a bit early, we were given a buzzer and told to go to the observation deck. The view is very nice; however, the Space Needle (being only the 7th tallest building in Seattle) is not really that tall, you can still see cars and signs on the streets. But a beautiful city view non-the-less. If you book your reservation just right, we were able to see the daylight, sunset, and evening skyline (Beautiful!).
Pretty soon we were buzzed and made our way to the restaurant. We were very lucky to get a table for 2 by the window. The floor of the restaurant, only the seating portion and not the center lobby, rotates and you get a 360 degree view of the city about every 47 minutes. One funny thing is that people put personal notes by the glass window and others put comments and you get to see your comments and other patrons’ additional comments as you go round and round slowly.
We opted for 2 appetizers and 1 entrée to share. We ordered crab fritters and grilled gulf prawns for appetizers and a grilled wild king salmon for entrée. The food was really delicious, especially the prawns and the salmon. I was disappointed that there was no rice pilaf with the salmon and instead the fish was sitting in a bed of spinach and potatoes. But otherwise, we really enjoyed our dinner.
I would like to add a note about pricing at the restaurant. Yes, it is very pricey as you would expect at such a location. However, the elevator fee of 19$ /person is waived if you come here for the restaurant so our meal was already subsidized by about 38$ had we just came up for the view and not the food. That made the somewhat expensive meal more palatable. 🙂
My rating:
- Service: **** 1/2
- Food: **** 1/2
- Ambience: *****