Dot’s Delicatessen – A Review

By Iron Chef Leftovers

The stretch of Fremont Avenue between 41st and 43rd in Fremont is becoming a dining hotspot – you have old stalwarts Paseo and The Swingside Café (although the Buckaroo Tavern is missed) and newcomers Via Tribunali, Hunger, Uneeda Burger, Pecado Bueno and Dots Deli. On top of this, we now have the food centric bookstore, The Book Larder located here. This stretch of road has always been a good spot to eat, but it is starting to rival downtown Fremont for the best places in the neighborhood.

I took advantage of a day off to visit Dot’s Deli for the first time. Dot’s is located next to the Fremont Abbey, in a space which I believe used to be home to a bookstore and was empty for quite a while before Dot’s came along. Dot’s menu is small and consists mostly of meat dishes, predominately house made sausages and charcuterie. The prices are relatively good for lunch, with nothing really coming in at over $10. They also have a small dinner menu with about 5 items that mostly consists of comfort food items such as coq au vin and mac and cheese. Those entrees were priced in the $15 range.

The place is small – 4 tables that will seat maybe 10 people and six counter stools, so if you are thinking about going, you might have to plan on taking your food elsewhere to eat it. Everything is cooked to order, so it will take you a few minutes to get your order. I was there at 1:30 in the afternoon and the place was relatively crowded and the line was about 5 people deep when I arrived. I placed my order and had my food ready in a little less than 10 minutes and I was able to grab a counter seat (warning – the counter seat chairs are not comfortable). There were also a number of choices that were completely sold out (the Reuben, the Braised Ox Tail Sandwich).

I ordered the spicy polish sausage with sauerkraut ($8) and mustard and a small order of frites ($3.50). The sausage was a generous link (guessing somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 lbs.) grilled on what looks like it may be a specially made baguette like roll (it definitely was not a supermarket bought hotdog bun) topped with a nice amount of sauerkraut with caraway (not sure if this was house made or not). On its own, the sauerkraut was nothing to write home about and was very acidic with overpowering caraway, but the sausage had a nice heat and spice flavor to it and I could have eaten it by itself. The roll was a nice combination of soft and chewy. When you put all of the elements together, you got what may have been the perfect sausage sandwich – the acidity of the sauerkraut balanced the spiciness of the sausage and married well, but still allowed you to taste the individual components with the mustard playing a supporting role in boosting the flavor (it was yellow mustard – not an Iron Chef favorite, but that is for another show).

The frites were good – hand cut potatoes, which seemed to be only fried once, but not great. They were hot and well seasoned, but not as crispy as I would like. Texture aside, they were tasty and the small portion could easily be split between 2 people and I would order them again. My only other complaint about the frites was the lack of aioli. Can they really be called frites without aioli?

Dot’s will also sell you their sausages to bring home (they run about $8/lb) as well as their house made pates (at varying prices). They had a nice selection of both when I was in and I had to resist the temptation to bring home one of everything in the deli case. My only other complaint – no website (but here is their Facebook page). I really hate this trend of places not having websites.

A return trip to Dot’s is definitely in order for both lunch to sample more of their lunch choices and for dinner to get some potentially tasty comfort food on a grey Seattle winter day. Dot’s gets 4 polka(dots) out of 5 for the killer spicy Polish sandwich.