Viking kings left their mark not far from where I'm having dinner. In 1975, Norway's King Olav stopped by to christen a plaza; two decades later, his son, Harald, came to dedicate an accompanying mural. Cheering throngs greeted them. OK, they weren't really Vikings anymore, but this is Ballard, a Seattle neighborhood and one of the largest Scandinavian communities outside Scandinavia. In 1995 the attention of a Norwegian ruler was fantastisk , as they say in Norway. {bull} That was then. {bull} This is now, and my waitress and I are discussing the chiles in a salsa at a dandy little Puerto Rican restaurant, La Isla Seattle . They're serranos, habaneros, and Thai hots ("They scare the heck out of me," she confides) and aside from jazzing up my "chuletas a la criolla" (pork chops smothered in a red creole sauce) they show how much things have changed here. Not only is my dish hot, Ballard's hot, having undergone a revolution from erstwhile Scandinavian mill town to trendy neighborhood in just a decade.
Ballard has more than a dozen high-profile restaurants , including three of the best Mexican cafes in Seattle, and I mean Mexican, not Tex-Mex or Cal-Mex or any sort of US Mex. There are also a dozen ultra-popular watering holes ranging from a revamped hardware store to one of the Northwest's premier intimate music venues. At King's Hardware you can get an After School Special (hamburger with peanut butter) and a Dark and Stormy (dark rum with ginger beer) while you admire the paintings of Mount Rainier. At Tractor Tavern you can jig to the rollicking Paperboys, a premier Northwest Celtic rock band, or marvel at Wylie Gustafson 's world-class Western yodeling.
The two bars anchor the lower end of the nightlife strip on Ballard Avenue, a four-block historic landmark district in which, on warm weekend nights, there are often as many people out on the sidewalks as inside the nightclubs and restaurants. In between are chic shops (get a daisy-bedecked pair of summer flats at Resole Shoes), architect studios, and galleries such as Souvenir, offering a whimsically eclectic assortment of oddments ranging from an old paintbrush to tiny abalone-shell purses.
On weekends, once the Saturday night crowds clear out, the street is barricaded for local growers to set up the Sunday Farmers Market. Yes, of course there are rutabagas.
Hip notwithstanding, the area remains colorfully down to earth, just as its Scandinavian residents a century ago would have wanted it.
"Sure, there are trendy bars and zippy restaurants, but this is also a good place to buy comfortable shoes or vacuum cleaner bags," says Glenn Kelman, a Ballard habitué, tucking into a Triple Threat at Cupcake Royale . This version of the cafe's namesake offering is chocolate with chocolate icing and chocolate sprinkles. Kelman is the chief executive of Redfin.com , an Internet start-up getting a lot of press. "Saw you in Fortune magazine this morning," an acquaintance tells Kelman as she enters the shop.
Lots of people are coming in; the line remains a constant half-dozen or so on a Saturday afternoon. Facing out on Market Street, Ballard's main drag, the cafe is housed in a renovated early 20th century building of a sort -- red brick, sturdy, no-nonsense -- that is quintessentially Ballard.
"Who still eats cupcakes?" Kelman says. "People in Ballard do." He lives elsewhere in the city, but frequents Cupcake Royale. Naturally, there's WiFi; you could describe both the cafe, and Ballard, as retro-chic, but it would be impossible to say whether retro or chic dominates. This fits a place that has always been determinedly working class.
First homesteaded in 1852, Ballard drew throngs of Norwegians, Swedes, Danes , and Finns in the late 19th century who found here what they had left behind : timber and fish. Mills sprang up along the Shilshole Bay waterfront, and by the turn of the 20th century Ballard was advertising itself as Shingletown, USA, and more than a third of the town's foreign-born residents were from Scandinavia. There were said to be 18 churches and 17 shingle mills, and the city fathers enacted an ordinance that required a new house of worship for every new tavern.
But Ballard had no reliable fresh water supply. Seattle did, and the bigger city exacted a price: annexation. Ballard ceased to exist as an independent city on May 29, 1907, when residents hung black crepe at City Hall and flew the flag at half-staff .
The occasion is noted today on the broad streetfront windows at Archie McPhee , where glass paintings show a tombstone emblazoned "Ballard RIP" and "1907-2007-- a century of Seattle tyranny." Just west of downtown Ballard, the store is popular because it's so unusual. Ostensibly a purveyor of party favors and costumes, it is in fact a fabulously bizarre emporium of the weird where you can get bacon-flavored toothpicks and a latex tabletop vulture sculpture.
It was Seattle that imposed the numbered street system on Ballard's more colorful nomenclature. Wilbert became 57th, the stately Times Street 59th, and State Street an unstately 56th. Broadway was the main street, but Seattle already had a Broadway, so it's now Market Street. Look closely at street corners today and you'll find small tile plaques commemorating the original street names.
A much more colorful reflection of neighborhood character thrives at the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks, named for a US Army Corps of Engineers supervisor. Popularly known as the Ballard Locks, the facility turned the freshwater lakes around Seattle into safe harbor for boats when the facility opened in 1917. Much of the Alaska fishing fleet docks just upstream, and industrial shipfitters still line the waterfront while hundreds of pleasure boats berth in marinas along Union and Washington lakes. On a sunny afternoon, crowds watch vessels ranging from multi million-dollar yachts to gravel barges and kayaks make the 21-foot vertical passage between sea and lake level.
One of the small harbor tugs starts dropping suddenly as the locks empty, and Ermias Afeworki's eyes widen. "This is amazing," says Afeworki, a Minneapolis resident. "It's like an elevator. I've never seen anything like it."
When the locks were built they blocked the passageway of up to a half-million salmon that migrate upstream each summer and fall through Lake Washington to its Cascade Range headwaters. So the Corps of Engineers installed one of the first fish ladders.
Salmon aren't the only long-distance arrivals. John and Kendell Sillers came north from San Francisco in 2000 to kick off the dining boom when they opened Market Street Grill , two blocks east of Cupcake Royale, and lured some high-octane chefs to their kitchen. A mural map of Ballard (with Seattle street names, alas) rises roof-high along one wall. Dark old-growth Douglas-fir rafters line the ceiling. Tidy banquettes surround a semicircle bar.
Chef Nathan Rundle honed his skills at Napa Valley's Bouchon and French Laundry , and his cuisine bears the earthiness of that background. Appetizers include foie gras brulee and steamed clams with bacon. For main courses, halibut is perched on baby artichokes, exquisite lamb sirloin sinks into garlic mashed potatoes, and seared sea scallops rest on a white bean ragout.
The food's great, and the service is, well, proprietary: Our waitress is the proprietress. "You're the owner, right?" I ask. Kendell Sillers nods. "And you're serving us?"
"John and I take the front of the house very seriously," she says with a smile as her husband bustles by with a platter of calamari. The exchange seems quintessentially Ballard: Relative newcomers so dedicated to their craft that they are hands-on practitioners.
At Olsen's Scandinavian Foods , a block down from Cupcake Royale, I try out "rulle polse ," a handmade lamb sandwich meat, and pickled herring in sweetened vinegar, both Norwegian foods that date back centuries.
There are equally traditional but utterly non-Scandinavian delights at Señor Moose, whose owner spent 20 years in central Mexico and makes sure the recipes are authentic. It's the only place in the Northwest where I've had a worthwhile mole, "en el tipo Tlaxcalteca," and the only northern latitude place I know of to sample "esquites," hominy with epazote and cream.
Back on Ballard Avenue, which once boasted the greatest number of bars per foot of boardwalk in the country, someone has tacked new posters on the telephone poles. "Please be advised this will be the best summer ever," they say. "Things to watch out for BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO include:
"Co-ed hula hooping.
"Fabulous hats.
"Gathering and imbibing of roadside berries.
"Mango salsa."
The poster credits no author, pleads for no business, and advertises nothing -- except what Ballard is like.
King Harald should come back and try out the hula -hooping and mango salsa.
Eric Lucas, a freelance writer in Seattle, can be reached at eric plucas@yahoo.com. 
