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So right after work yesterday, I met up with Laney for our June Happy Hour, this time at a place we've talked about going to for ages:
Raygun Lounge, or maybe I guess now known as
The Tilted Table—even though the only functional website to be found is still raygunlounge.com—thanks to an effort
to save them from closing, an effort that met with success only last month! Which is sort of funny because Laney and I have probably talked about one day going there for our monthly Happy Hour for a couple of years.
This place clearly exists as a hangout for gamers more than anything. Its interior perimeter, at least on the west and east walls, is lined with arcade games. The east wall has a slew of pinball machines specifically, and if there are any other places like this in Seattle, there must be very few. (I'm excluding GameWorks downtown, even though, and I only learned this by looking it up just now, that
used to have 30 locations across the country; all but one of them was closed in 2021; and the Seattle flagship location was reopened under new ownership, much like Raygun Lounge just did, in 2022. But! That's still a far bigger arcade and a throwback to nationwide franchise companies.)
When it comes to concessions, the options are super limited. They serve only a few beers and ciders on tap, no liquor (Laney noted this had to be the distinction and why kids could come in); and the one food option was a 10" cheese pizza that was just taken frozen out of a freezer and heated for 10 minutes in a convection oven. It was still officially "Happy Hour," though, and their ciders and beers were a dollar off, and the pizzas, usually $10, were $2 off between 4 and 6. I don't know that it would be very important for me to go back again, given my lack of interest in arcades and the limited options, but I'm glad we finally checked it out.
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Shobhit, who had been out walking, getting in some steps as he's been below his daily goals for a few days, joined us for a little while. The 10" pizza was surprisingly good and honestly more than I needed; I kept one of the four slices for him to eat. But, he also noticed the soft serve ice cream place across the street from there on Pine, a place I have noticed people taking ice cream from for a while and have been very curious about, called
Baiten—it's apparently a Japanese dessert place that also serves some bakery and food items. Anyway, they serve ice cream with several topping options, and Shobhit came back to The Tilted Table with a single scoop and a "flight" of six of their toppings in tiny little cups. Two of them were disgusting to me, the matcha and the tea; the strawberry and chocolate ones were pretty good, and I was surprised by how much I liked the black sesame one and the yuzu / Japanese Citrus one was okay.
Laney had just a couple of bites, and Shobhit and I split the rest. He went on to find something more to eat after hanging out with us for maybe a cumulative half an hour. But hey, it still earns him a Social Review point!
I'd say Laney and I hung out there just a bit over two hours; we had plenty to talk about but nothing especially critical for me to note here. Her van was parked up by Volunteer Park and so she always wants to wait for the #10 bus to get her close to it. I waited with her for the bus she needed, which also goes right by my place, but I preferred to walk the rest of the way home. Shobhit and I watched a few episodes of season 4 of
Curb Your Enthusiasm on HBO Max while he did some vegetable chopping to prep for the veggie chili tacos we're bringing to Action Movie Night tonight, and that about sums up my Tuesday evening.
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[posted 12:36pm]
