I've written about themed restaurants before, and I'll keep saying it: most of them are atmospheric wallpaper over a forgettable kitchen. You walk in, the decor holds your attention for about four minutes, then you're eating something lukewarm and wondering why you drove forty minutes out of your way. But every so often you find the rare ones that commit on both fronts, where someone decided the food mattered as much as the concept. Those are worth a detour.

Family Destinations Guide put together a list of seven wildly themed restaurants in Washington state, and it's a solid mix. Washington has always been good at weird. The state has enough remote coastline, dense forest, and quirky small-town energy to produce restaurants that feel like they grew out of the landscape rather than being installed by a marketing team.

The one that jumps out at me from this list is the Lost Roo in Ocean Shores. It's a Lost-themed restaurant, which, okay, hear me out. I have never watched a single episode of Lost. I know. I grew up in Colorado without reliable television reception and by the time I had streaming access I was already deep into a pattern of falling asleep to trail cam footage instead of actual shows. I don't think you need to know anything about the show to appreciate what the Lost Roo is doing, though. It's a tiki bar on the Washington coast that leaned fully into a theme and apparently serves food that holds its own. Ocean Shores is already the kind of place you end up when you want to stare at the Pacific and not talk to anyone for a while, so a themed tiki bar with decent food fits that mood perfectly.

The other spots on the list run the gamut. There's a restaurant built to look like a medieval castle. There's a spot with an old-school diner aesthetic that probably does a burger well or doesn't deserve to exist. A few lean into Pacific Northwest kitsch, which Washington can pull off without trying because the place is genuinely strange and beautiful in a way that doesn't need to be invented.

What I like about lists like this is that themed restaurants work best when they're tied to a specific place. A medieval castle restaurant makes more sense on a foggy Washington back road than it would in a strip mall in Phoenix. The themed places that feel forced are the ones with no relationship to where they sit. The good ones feel like they couldn't exist anywhere else.

I haven't been to any of the seven yet. The Lost Roo is going on the list for the next time I'm heading up the Washington coast, which I should probably pair with a visit to Nick Crews to talk about vehicle setups for coastal road trips. The panhandle Florida trip I keep promising myself is still on the board too, and there's a motorcycle restaurant in Panama City Beach I've been wanting to check out since I first heard about it.

But back to Washington. If you've done any of these seven, I want to know whether the food lived up to the decor. That's always the question with themed restaurants, and the answer is almost always no. When the answer is yes, those are the places you remember ten years later and tell every friend who's passing through.

Plan a drive. Pick one or two. Eat something weird in a building that looks like it shouldn't have a kitchen. That's a good day.