SEATTLE — A restaurant in Seattle's Columbia City neighborhood kept serving up tacos Sunday despite an outage that left thousands of people without power.
A gusty Sunday meant a busy evening for utility workers. Around 5 p.m., more than 26,000 Seattle City Light customers were without power, and that number did not include the thousands of Puget Sound Energy customers impacted.
The company blamed strong gusts for downing trees and power lines across the western Washington.
The weather-related headaches came after a chaotic thunderstorm that brought lightning to the area Saturday night. On Sunday, chaos continued; just in a different form.
"The light just like, kept coming back and forth, and then there's like, a big sound, and it just went off," Taco City Taqueria cook Victor Ramirez said through another employee who helped translate.
But their power outage that didn’t stop the hardworking staff from whipping up delicious tacos and burritos for customers, "working with gas," said Ramirez.
The kitchen stayed open, but without electricity to power the cooking fans, the restaurant's interior filled up with cooking smoke.
"It’s hard to cook because of the air ventilation and all that," said Ramirez, via interpreter.
But the longer this went on, what became even harder was this: a general lack of gratuities.
"We don’t get tips, people in, work," said Ramirez.
It would make sense some customers were blown off course from typical Sunday night dinner plans. Taco City's usual dinner rush was reduced to just a few patio patrons Sunday -- patrons for whom the staff were grateful.
The interpreter said, "[Ramirez] feels great seeing customers coming in and knowing that we’re still open because they were probably hungry. And so we’re getting to serve them.”
A couple customers came in during the outage to order takeout, however.
"Well I hope this resolves soon," said one woman. "But thank you so much."
Taco City has since gotten their power back, but as of Monday morning, there were several Seattle City Light customers in other areas of Seattle who had not gotten power back.