Down a hallway and tucked into the basement of Harborview Medical Center, an affordable and unexpectedly delicious culinary scene unfolds every day.
What looks like a typical hospital cafeteria is, in fact, one of Seattle’s most surprising hidden food destinations. The Harborview cafeteria, however, is not a total secret.
“We get outside guests just come here to eat the food because they appreciate it and always tell us how good it is compared to other hospitals,” said Chris Tharpe, retail manager at the medical center.
The cafeteria’s growing fanbase includes everyone from hospital staff and patients’ families to construction workers and local residents making the trip just for lunch.
The driving force behind Harborview’s surprising deliciousness is Executive Chef Vanessa Gray, who brought a bold vision—and a non-traditional résumé—to the job.
“I come from sports and entertainment… I wanted to make our cafeteria a fun place to eat with surprising food, not the same thing, hamburger, hot dog, pizza, kinds of things you see in a lot of cafeterias,” Gray said.
Her kitchen focuses on fresh, made-from-scratch meals instead of the frozen, pre-packaged fare common in institutional settings.
Each month, the cafeteria features rotating menus that reflect Seattle’s rich cultural heritage. The effort is led in part by Susan McBride, Director of Nutrition and Food Services.
“This one is Asian, Native American, Pacific Islander month, Black History month,” McBride tells CHS as she lays out menus for each month… “we have dishes that are representing different countries within that geographic area. The Native American Heritage Month features recipes from different tribes,” McBride said.
Gray emphasized that the team strives for authenticity. “If I take a recipe straight from a chef, then we try to do a bio to show that that chef is the one who created that item,” Gray said.
Big Volume, High Standards
Feeding thousands of people daily means scaling up without sacrificing quality.
“We’re cooking in batches as much as we can, so that we’re not having a lot of food just sitting in and holding,” said Gray. “It’s mainly about the constant turnover of food.”
Gray has to find a recipe she likes, simplify for her staff, then convert it to feed several hundred people.
Gray also noted the sheer volume of meals prepared each day — “About 1,400 a day… 1,500 to 2,000 out in the cafeteria” plus another 1,200 patient meals.
Among Harborview’s most legendary items? The Thursday scones.
“They’re famous. People come in, they buy like bags of them… we tried from scratch, and people wanted the old scones back… they’re gone by like 9am,” McBride said.
Making them fresh means starting the process well before sunrise: “2:30 AM on Thursday morning,” she added.
Though the cafeteria isn’t open 24/7, it comes close. “We open at 6 AM and we shut down like at 7:30 PM,” said McBride. But even overnight staff are fed: “We have a late night meal service that is three hours in the middle of the night… more like chicken wings and kind of the fun, fast stuff.”
And when it comes to eating in the middle of the night? “People like to eat different things the middle of the night than they do in the middle of the day.” Chef Gray tells CHS.
In a city where affordable meals can be hard to come by, Harborview’s pricing stands out.
“We have a $5 meal deal… entree, a side and a beverage,” said McBride. “The other two entrees… will be $7.50 to $9.”
“We have a long history of trying to have a really diverse menu that just hits a lot of different palettes and is representative of all the cultures that come to Harborview and work at Harborview”, McBride added.
The team’s sense of care goes beyond the menu. “We just go the extra mile for our customers,” said Tharpe.
“I think it’s just Harborview is a special place,” said Gray.
For those willing to step away from the usual lunch spots, Harborview’s cafeteria offers more than just a good meal—it offers connection, care, and yes, scones worth setting an alarm for.
Harborview Cafeteria is open to the public and located on the basement level of the medical center at 325 9th Ave. Learn more at uwmedicine.org.
$5 A MONTH TO HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE THIS SPRING Subscribe to CHS to help us hire writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. To stay that way, we need you.
Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for $5 a month -- or choose your level of support
Midway through the season one finale of Daredevil: Born Again, the mayor of New York City delivers a powerful speech about the dignity of the city’s police force. Positioning himself as someone who understands “the rank and file… down there on the streets, risking their lives to keep New York safe,” the mayor berates his opponent’s moral cowardice.
Scenes like this happen every day on television, but Daredevil: Born Again puts a unique twist on the concept. It’s not just that it occurs in a series about Marvel superhero Daredevil (Charlie Cox), a blind lawyer who uses his enhanced senses to fight crime. Nor is that the mayor is Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), the one-time Kingpin of Crime who has found new power as the elected leader of the city.
No, the twist is that Fisk’s valorizing of the police is presented as deeply sinister. Against the wishes of his opponent, NYPD Commissioner Gallo (Michael Gaston), Fisk has put together a special Anti-Vigilante Task Force and authorized them to use lethal force as they see fit. He justifies his actions not in legal or rational terms, instead grounding his argument in manipulative pathos, insisting that cops have such a hard job keeping people safe that they should be able to act as they see fit, even killing with impunity.
The scene ends with a gory climax, as the cops watch in shock and awe as Fisk crushes Gallo’s head with his bare hands. But as over-the-top as it gets, in one key aspect the scene is incredibly realistic—it’s one of many instances in which Daredevil: Born Again boldly reminds viewers that for many citizens, the criminal justice system fails to provide either safety or justice.
Copaganda on Patrol
Credit: Marvel Television
The idea of a renegade police force taking hold of the city might seem like a wild concept, a storyline ripped from the pages of an old Marvel comic book, but the focus on police is arguably one of the more mainstream aspects of Daredevil: Born Again. Police and law enforcement have long been fixtures of American popular culture, so prevalent that almost half of all dramatic television produced in 2020 was about cops.
Going far beyond a matter of taste or a mere cultural trend, the prevalence of cop shows and movies has real effects on the way we think about law enforcement. According to scholars such as Alex S. Vitale and Mark Neocleous, modern policing, first in the UK and then in the US, began as a method to oppress immigrants, non-white citizens, and the working class. Yet, thanks to these shows and movies, which has become known as “copaganda,” people are conditioned to think of law enforcement as a necessary social good, something that can and must exist for our protection and well-being, despite mounting evidence that the police do not stop crimes and often make situations less safe.
Copaganda is as old as moving pictures themselves. When Berkley Police Chief August Vollmer came to power in the early 20th century and instituted the reforms that would earn him the title “the Father of Modern Policing,” he took aim at the media, criticizing movies featuring the comedic Keystone Cops and appearing in one of the first examples of movie copaganda, the 1926 serial Officer 444.
In 1949, one of Volmer’s protégés, L.A. Police Chief William Parker, followed in his mentor’s footsteps by working with Jack Webb to create Dragnet, which soon became a television show in 1951. In addition to establishing the procedural model that continues to this day, Dragnet also put an emphasis on greater realism. Each of the episodes purported to be based on a case file from the LAPD (with the permission of Parker and his associates) and each episode portrayed Webb’s Sgt. Joe Friday and associates as consummate professionals, heroes who effectively kept citizens safe from danger.
The model established by Dragnet can still be see in use today in hits like the Law & Order franchise, Chicago P.D., and Blue Bloods, with the same attitudes and narratives reflected even in so-called reality shows like Cops, which tends to valorize police officers even when they disregard and violate rules of conduct while taking down “bad guys.”
Even after the Black Lives Matter movement brought greater attention to police brutality against Black citizens and called for a massive reappraisal of copaganda, TV shows and movies about heroic cops continue to hit our screens. Daredevil: Born Again might seem to follow suit with sympathetic characters such as no-nonsense hostage negotiator Angie Kim (Ruibo Qian) and retired cop-turned-Matt Murdock associate Cherry (Clark Johnson, formerly of Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire)—both, it’s worth noting, are people of color. However, these good apples are completely outnumbered, buried under an avalanche of disturbingly bad apples, making Born Again a welcome corrective to the familiar narrative we’ve been taught to expect and accept.
Crime and Punishment
Credit: Marvel Television
As Kingpin prepares for his grisly work against Gallo, the leaders of his task force come face to face with their true inspiration, Frank Castle, aka the Punisher. “I’m a big admirer of your work,” says the task force’s leader Powell (Hamish Allan-Headley), hoping to convince Frank to join them. “Everything you do, you can do with us,” Powell tells him, promising that Frank can continue to execute those he considers guilty with impunity.
Frank Castle may be a fictional character, first introduced in a 1973 issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, but the scene feels utterly realistic. For years, American police officers have adopted the Punisher’s skull logo, sporting it on their personal belongings and sometimes even their cars and on-duty uniforms, against department regulations, claiming as a hero a brutal vigilante who murders at will. Even though Punisher co-creator Gerry Conway has spoken out against the practice and the character of the Punisher himself called out the practice in the pages of Marvel comics, it still continues today.
It’s particularly powerful, then, to see this version of the Punisher, as played by Jon Bernthal, mocking the corrupt police for modeling themselves after him, precisely because of that history, and the utter pervasiveness of copaganda in most popular entertainment. “Buncha clowns,” Castle mutters to himself before telling them off, screaming “You think you know me? You think you know my pain?” With those questions, Castle forcefully underscores the show’s point: anyone who would try to live like Frank Castle must be broken, like him.
The showdown with the Punisher is just one of many depictions of violent police in Daredevil: Born Again. The first major arc involves Daredevil, in his civilian identity as Matt Murdock, defending a man named Hector Ayala (Kamar de los Reyes), who has been charged with killing a police officer. However, the officer in question died when Ayala stopped him and Powell, both undercover, from beating up a witness. Ayala simply saw two men brutalizing another and came to help, and when one of the aggressors accidentally fell into an oncoming subway train during the fracas, Powell immediately pinned the blame on the do-gooder.
The two-episode arc shows off a different side to Matt’s heroism, underscoring his resourcefulness as a lawyer and, of course, how his superpowers help him to gather evidence. In every instance, Matt finds himself stymied not by some costumed supervillain, but by police officers, both in and out of uniform. It’s not just Powell but the entire force who choose to stand by their fellow officer and hold the Blue Line rather than seeking true justice. Even after Matt proves his client’s innocence and helps him go free, Ayala is executed in the streets by a cop.
Was he killed in revenge for speaking out against the cops? Was he killed because the cops believe he’d killed one of their own? Was he murdered just because the cops hate him? It isn’t clear and doesn’t matter. The point is that the cops kill who they want.
That point is driven home even further by two shorter vignettes throughout the season. In one, a Black man named Leroy Bradford (Charlie Hudson III) is transported to Rikers Island for stealing a couple boxes of caramel corn from a bodega. The sequence, in which Matt uses his considerable charm to get Leroy’s sentence reduced down to ten days, serves to underscore our hero’s eroding faith in the law. We also see two cops munching on the caramel corn that Leroy stole and didn’t open, mockingly snacking on the merchandise that was used to justify taking away a man’s freedom. Bradford’s story illuminates the various ways in which the system is rigged against some members of society.
The other example serves to show that the systemic corruption of law enforcement extends far beyond Fisk’s clearly villainous task force to the uniformed police who patrol the city. In the finale, we witness a regular beat cop shooting an unarmed man looting a store. When the cop’s partner questions him over the killing, he simply pulls a knit cap over the dead man’s face and declares that his unarmed victim was a “masked vigilante.”
The fact that even these random, unnamed cops defy the law so flagrantly—shooting and killing unarmed people, and framing them as violent offenders, knowing that they will almost certainly be absolved of any blame, as we’ve seen time and again in real life—demonstrates that it’s not just Fisk’s handpicked officers that feel empowered to act with impunity. Born Again is not interested in assigning blame to a few very bad apples—in this story, the rot runs deep, from the very top all the way down through the rank and file. The system is irreparably broken, and there are no easy fixes—only hard questions, and the dire need for a sincere, constructive conversation about establishing a just and humane approach to public safety.
Devil’s Advocate
Credit: Marvel Television
Some might argue that Daredevil: Born Again is overly sensational in its depiction of police, and that’s fair. After all, this is a Marvel superhero show, and the first season ends with Fisk declaring martial law, sending his task force to lay siege upon the city. Others will point out that the season finale’s closing montage, in which Daredevil gathers with supporters to plan a season two counterattack, does include some cops on his side, including the aforementioned Cherry and Kim.
However, when balanced against the oppressive, hulking weight of decades of shows and movies that depict the police as an inherent good without question, even when cops brutalize witnesses, disregard the law, and kill the innocent, Born Again is still an insufficient corrective, even at its most outrageous. In order to properly assess the effects of policing in our cities and communities, we need to be able to ask relevant questions, recognize systemic problems in policing and the justice system, and seek a clearer perspective on what’s wrong, and the endless stream of copaganda has muddied those waters for far too long.
It may be uncomfortable for many viewers to consider Born Again’s portrayal of most, if not all, cops in a negative light, and to see law enforcement depicted as broken and corrupt. But here in 2025, after over a century of glowing portrayals that focus heavily on acts of service, bravery, and sacrifice while ignoring or minimizing the darker realities of police brutality, misconduct, systemic racism and abuse, it’s time for those realities to take center stage. This certainly isn’t the first show to feature police corruption and officers who believe they’re above the law—not by a long shot. But usually, that corruption is seen as an aberration—the assumption is that the system might break down from time to time, but the good cops will inevitable win out, restoring law and order. It’s only recently that we’ve been invited to question the validity of that convenient, comfortable framing of reality, and whether it reflects the world we see around us.
Leave it to Daredevil, a show about a blind man seeking justice, to help us begin to balance the scales.[end-mark]
Marches and “fast food strikes” like this one in 2015 outside the First Hill McDonald’s were part of the push for the new minimum wage
By Domenic Strazzabosco
April marks the tenth anniversary of Seattle taking a new path on its minimum wage. On April 1, 2015, the city became the first in the United States to enact a $15 minimum wage and a process to lever the wage higher to account for rising costs and inflation. As of January 1st, Seattle’s minimum wage sits at $20.76 an hour.
It has been a long climb to get here. A look around Capitol Hill shows some of the impact.
CHS checked out local postings to see what employers were offering new workers come the decade anniversary of the legislation.
Glo’s Diner, now next to Cal Anderson Park, is looking for a line cook and pays $21 an hour, just over the minimum, and the position is included in the tip pool. Menya Musashi Tsukemen & Ramen offers slightly more at $22 an hour, plus tips. Salt & Straw’s Seasonal Scooper position pays exactly the minimum wage, $20.76, and calculates that the average tip rate is $7.89 an hour.
Outside of the service industry, the Member Experience Sales Associate role at Orangetheory Fitness on Broadway pays $21 an hour, and the posting notes other benefits like a 401K and the potential for PTO and medical insurance after an “initial measurement period.”
Meanwhile, a Food & Beverage Lead with Seattle Rep pays $23.01 to $25.12 an hour, while an Administrative Assistant for affordable housing developer Community Roots Housing pays $24.50 to $26.50, depending on experience.
Both the Minimum Wage Ordinance and Wage Theft Ordinance were passed on April 1, 2015. The former immediately increased the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour (it was slightly over $9 an hour in 2014) with yearly increases, while the latter ensured that employers paid all owed wages and tips to employees.
Lan Chase, who is paid minimum wage at his job at Goodwill on Belmont, says that although the annual increases are nice, it never feels like enough. Soon after Chase received a pay increase at the new year, he was notified by his landlord that rent would be going up.
“Maybe for the first couple of months it’s nice and you’re able to put a little bit away because the cost of everything else hasn’t gone up yet, but after a little bit—after that initial raise and everything else around you starts to adjust to that—you’re not really able to put a lot away,” he said.
Chase said that his friends who make a few dollars an hour more seem more comfortable living in the neighborhood. He said that if minimum wage were somewhere between $23 and $25 an hour, minimum wage workers would feel more financially secure and be able to set money aside and save up for things.
Blue, who was involved with organizing the Fight for 15 movement starting back in 2011, said something along the same lines. Thirty dollars an hour is what she says would be an appropriate minimum wage to make life in Capitol Hill affordable.
“If you have to cut your profit margin down, that’s fine, pay your workers,” Blue said. “My personal philosophy is if you can’t afford to pay a living wage, you have no business being in business—point blank.”
The movement began with calls for “$15 Now”. It took Seattle seven years to get there.
Unanimously approved by the Seattle City Council in 2014, Chapter 14.19 required businesses in Seattle to incrementally raise their minimum wage each year until reaching $15 per hour over seven years. At the beginning of 2021, Seattle’s minimum wage increased to $16.69 per hour for large employers with more than 500 employees and small businesses with less than 500 employees finally reached the $15 an hour mark.
Flanked by Sawant’s Socialist Alternative wage advocates, Seattle’s mayor signed the minimum wage ordinance into law at a table in Cal Anderson Park in 2014
In 2013, the Seattle Central and Seattle University economics professor included a promise of a fight for a $15 minimum wage in announcing she would take on incumbent Richard Conlin for his seat on the Seattle City Council.
By 2014 following Sawant’s victory at the polls, then-Mayor Ed Murray joined Seattle officials in applauding passage of the legislation as the city’s political establishment embraced the higher wage.
It is sometimes a tenuous hold. Last year, current District 3 representative Joy Hollingsworth backed off a proposal to permanently extend a tip credit put in place ten years ago to protect the city’s small businesses during the phase-in of the higher minimum wage tied to inflation. The expiration meant hourly pay rates for the many small businesses subject to the credit leapt about $3 an hour in 2025.
While many predicted a massive wave of shutdowns in the city’s food and drink industry, there has not been an obvious increase in closures. The proposal was a reminder for many that the fight for the city’s minimum wage won’t ever really end.
From a worker’s view, the end of the tip credit and higher wages is hard to argue with. Chase said he doesn’t see how anyone could see expiration as anything but fair. He doesn’t think that being paid the minimum should depend on whether or not you receive the tips you’re hoping to get.
Recent data shows that the average Capitol Hill apartment costs about $2,100 per month, while working a minimum wage job at Seattle’s current rate comes out to $4,023 a month before taxes. Seattle’s current rate of $20.76 an hour is the highest for any major city in the United States and the fourth highest overall, coming in behind Burien, Tukwila and Renton, respectively.
$5 A MONTH TO HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE THIS SPRING Subscribe to CHS to help us hire writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. To stay that way, we need you.
Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for $5 a month -- or choose your level of support
I’m into Bernie Sanders’ and AOC’s Fighting Oligarchy Tour. It is the one thing that genuinely gets me excited in a good way about modern politics.
Because, and I know I’m not alone in saying this, enough is enough. It’s time for the next version of Occupy. Things have gotten way WAY worse, and not better at all, in terms of the the power of the very rich dictating to the rest of society since the original Occupy.
And when I see media coverage of them speaking in places like Montana and Utah and Idaho, I’m thinking to myself, about fucking TIME some folks on the left talk to the people of these states about the way things are actually working against the working person.
So it came as a big surprise when I heard some folks on MSNBC talking about this. One of them was a TV journalist who just interviews people all the time about politics, and the other represented the Democratic party. I don’t remember their names and so I can’t find the clip, but it went something like this:
Journalist: why are Bernie and AOC in Utah? Isn’t that a super red state? They have no chance to help elect a Dem! There’s not even a viable candidate nor an election!
DNC rep: Well, my theory is that they are there to get media coverage, and after all we are talking about them.
Journo: Oh, that makes sense.
This, to me, is a great illustration of one of the many things that the Democrats have really really wrong. At some point in the distant past, they stopped thinking about voters. Instead they started looking at numbers, and polls, and focusing very narrowly on incremental elections and surgical strikes into purple states.
In other words, I don’t think it occured to either of these people that Bernie and AOC are actually there to talk to actual people with actual problems, and trying to persuade those folks by paying actual attention to them and their problems, even though they are not going to be living in a blue state tomorrow.
This blindness to how people actually are makes the poll-watchers super blind to what really matters in terms of changing people’s minds. And it’s a widespread illness for so many folks you see on TV. They literally don’t see the point of talking to people who live in red states. And that’s why the red states get deeper red and will continue to if those folks are in charge. Yeesh.
This NPR interview with with Angela Saini about how race science never really left the global scientific consciousness is super interesting! I’m gonna read her book!
my girlfriend has been talking about this since ancestry kits became A Thing
Log in
Down a hallway and tucked into the basement of Harborview Medical Center, an affordable and unexpectedly delicious culinary scene unfolds every day.
$5 A MONTH TO HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE THIS SPRING
reply
