Three I've been to recently, and two others I'd like to try

Three I've been to recently:

Downtown Renton used to have an Afghan restaurant. It was really good. I miss it.  There aren't very many Afghan restaurants in the Seattle area. Maybe four or five in the entire Seattle area?
 And that's too bad, because it's really a marvelous, wonderful cuisine. Sorta kinda like Indian food, sorta kinda like Turkish or Greek , and sorta kinda like Middle Eastern. Really delicious.
Anyway, the Afghan restaurant in downtown Renton burnt down a few years ago, along with the very nice Thai restaurant next door to it. They didn't rebuild, and the Afghan place relocated to ritzier Bellevue.
Some kinds of  foods you have to seek out: Places there just aren't a lot of nearby. Afghan is one of those. Maybe six months ago, I was reading a local food forum, and someone asked if anybody knew about a new Afghan place opening in downtown Kent, maybe a seventeen minute drive from home. Nobody knew anything, and google searches proved futile.
Fast forward a couple of months, and I read about a new Kenyan restaurant in downtown Kent. When I found it on the map, the place next door was labeled "Afghan Cuisine Kent", I did a little bit of digging, and found out that it was indeed now open. We went recently, and it was so good! Nobody does eggplant better than the Afghanis. Smooth, silky, smoky, minty, creamy, just incredible.
Needless to say, I consider Afghan Cuisine Kent to be a real find.  Service is a little slow, but it takes time to cook food like that. It's on the inexpensive side( The most expensive thing on the menu is about fourteen dollars, lots of great things in the ten to twelve dollar dollar range). Even the house salad is exceptional. Service is very friendly. Afghan Cuisine Kent is on this one block in downtown Kent which just has some great places to eat. It's the same block as the Wild Wheat Bakery, the Kenyan place, a good Thai place, and where a great Greek place used to be.
The meal at Afghan Cuisine Kent was one of the best I've had in months.

Afghan Cuisine Kent- 224 1st avenue S., Kent, WA

Fifteen years ago, one of my favorite places in Renton was Japan Thai, next to the Renton Civic Theatre. I thought it was Renton's best Thai food( and there were and are a lot of places to get Thai food), and I explored Japanese food there, and enjoyed it very much. I was crushed when they closed. They didn't have sushi, but had a lot of other things. Currently occupying the same space is New Zen Sushi and Japanese, and a bunch of us went about a month ago, and it was great. I'm no expert on Japanese food, but I can tell when things are fresh. As sushi should be. You don't want to go to a place that advertises " Three day old sushi, half price.".
New Zen's food is very fresh. You can taste it. We had various kinds of rolls, Saba shioyaki( which I got to know at Japan Thai), eel, spinach, cucumber salad, seaweed salad, etc. Service was great, and the food was lovely. Yumi, the chef/owner is rare in that there aren't a whole lot of women sushi chefs. she does a great job, and prepares delicious food. Yumi prepares yummies.  Sometimes I get a hankering for sushi, and now I have a new favorite place to satisfy that hankering.

New Zen Sushi- 509 S. 3rd St, Renton WA


Forty something years ago, a friend of mine and his girlfriend were living in Cholula, Puebla, mexico attending the University of the Americas. I was planning to move to Western Washington to attend the Evergreen State College, but had time for an adventure beforehand. My friend suggested that I join them in Mexico, and as school was ending, we would drive all over Mexico in their van, bring it to Belize, sell the van there, and fly back to New Jersey. It didn't go as planned, but I did go to mexico then, and fell in love with Mexican food, something New Jersey just didn't have at the time.
Upon moving west, I found more Mexican food than New Jersey had, but not much of it. At some point, all the Mexican restaurants in Seattle were owned by people from Cuautla, Jalisco. Over time, the Seattle area saw a dramatic increase in Mexican restaurants, and now there are plenty of them, something I'm very happy about. My current favorite purveyor of Mexican eats in Renton is Chilolos Tacos trailer, but there is no seating, and sometimes I like to kick back in a place that is not my home, and have some Mexican food and a beer.
I recently tried the Santa Fe in Renton, a sit down place. It was really good, though very crowded. Sometimes that's a good sign. Other times, a restaurant is crowded because people want to be seen there, or they see that it's crowded so it must be good. But sometimes really mediocre places stay popular for years, or decades. And sometimes excellent places are empty.
Santa Fe is really good. The fish tacos were made of grilled fish, unlike many which feature deep fried breaded fish. I'm happy eating either kind, but if a place has fish that's not perfectly fresh, they can disguise a lot by breading and deep frying it. I have to say that Santa Fe's fish tacos were very much above average, with a generous portion of fish , onion, and cilantro.
They're a little more seafoody that most Mexican restaurants, and have menu items that contain fish, shrimp, crab, scallops, octopus, and mussels. They also have raw oysters, which is another good sign.
The place is good, and I can see why people like it. They don't do mushroom quesadillas and tacos on house made tortillas like Chilolos does, but you can eat  good fresh seafood and have a Dos Equis on tap. What could be so bad?

Santa Fe Mexican Grill-1170 Sunset Blvd NE, Renton

And two others I'd like to try:

Rafiki in Kent. This is the Kenyan place next door to the Afghani place, and they also serve beer, including Kenyan beer, which I haven't had. I did eat Kenyan cuisine at a restaurant in Seattle's Columbia City neighborhood, and it was really good. So I'm hoping Rafiki is also really good.

Rafiki- 222 1st Ave S, Kent

and...
Renton now has a pupusa truck. Mostly known as being from El Salvador, pupusas are a stuffed  small corn pancake, sometimes with meat, or cheese, or beans, or vegetables. They are always served with a yummy fermented cabbage slaw.  I'm looking forward to trying this. There's closer pupusas, as this truck is on the east end of Renton, and I'm closer to the west end. But I'll get there, and report back. Maybe we should have a pupusa off, and compare a few places. That's research I'd volunteer for.