Seattle's Underground Food Scene

Shauna Balderson, Fulcrum's Finance Guru, checks out some of the colorful street art that can be found near many of the iconic underground restaurants near the Seattle HQ - where the food rivals any city on earth.  Sandwiches from Salumi, Pasta from Il Corvo, Philly Cheese Steaks from Tats, and much, much more.  There is also a plethora of fantastic international cuisines available nearby in the Seattle International District, including our CEO Brent Bauer's favorite dim sum at Harbor City. 

Graffiti came to Seattle by way of San Francisco and New York, where 1980s-era practitioners started tagging trains and then painting much larger, more complex pieces on the exteriors of the train cars. Their now iconic “wild style” is characterized by bold color schemes and complicated lettering that conveys a sense of movement and flow. Wild style pioneers such as Dondi, Zephyr and Twist bent, twisted and connected letters, creating 3D effects and adding little embellishments like arrows, bubbles and characters. (Read typography expert John D. Berry's story on the relationship between graffiti and typography.) Wild style quickly took root on the west coast, where local artists replicated and innovated. The Seattle graffiti scene of the early 1990s was influenced heavily by New York, where lettering was king, and San Francisco, where graffiti grew more curves and characters. Seattle law enforcement played a role in the evolution of the local art form too.