Northlake Tavern and Pizza House: down-to-earth food, upper-crust quality

It’s not the best looking pizza place in Seattle. It doesn’t have cheap pizza prices to lure in college students. So what attracts University of Washington students to Northlake Tavern and Pizza House? After all, in Seattle great pizza can be found many places.

The answer, of course, is the food. While other more trendy places drop a few toppings on a crust along with some unpronounceable cheese and call it a pizza, Northlake Tavern and Pizza House loads the pizzas up with toppings. This is not gourmet pizza, and it isn’t a haven for thin-crust lovers either; if someone is looking for the latest trends in pizza making, Northlake Tavern isn’t the place for them. The only concession they make is an option of whole-wheat crust.

With loads of toppings, a large pizza comes in at over 6 pounds; as one Yelp reviewer noted, “They're hefty, thick crust pizzas, typically dense with toppings…my arms were tired from carrying them!” The pepperoni and beef sausage is specially ground to the restaurant’s specifications, and, as the legend goes, the original owner got the pizza recipe from an old friend in New York who ran an Italian restaurant.

Of course at UW pizza and beer go together, and Northlake delivers a good selection of brews as well. It has 17 beers on tap and 40 in bottles, and features brews like Snoqualmie Wildcat IPA, Hale’s Cream Ale, and even Moose Drool brown ale in the bottle. They also serve up pitchers of Pabst Blue Ribbon as well as other regular domestic beers, but this also means that patrons wanting to eat in the restaurant must be over 21; although they do not deliver, they do take-out.

When UW sports season comes around, the TVs are showing the games—meaning that for students from UW pizza and beer are vital both during and after the games. Acclaimed by food critics and ravenous students alike, in Seattle great pizza can be found at Northlake Tavern and Pizza House--an unlikely champion in Seattle's pizza wars.