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Restaurant Trend of the Year: A Water Bottle on Every Table

Frequent diners have surely noted that the last year or so has seen a water refilling revolution: Reusable swingtop water bottles on every table, so diners can replenish their own glasses.

Bottles like this have been recently spied at Sitka and Spruce, Ba Bar, Local 360, RN74, and Golden Beetle. So has this revolution gone, it feels newsworthy when a restaurant doesn’t offer a bottle—as Harvest Vine recently did not.

Instead, a busser came around periodically with a pitcher. Trés 2010.

And yet…strangely appreciated, allowing several more touchpoints of human service than we’d have gotten otherwise. A moment to order another cocktail, perhaps, or ask a question about a dish.

So you tell us: In your opinion do water bottles on tables represent better or lesser service?











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Kathryn Robinson
Kathryn Robinson
Senior Writer Seattle native Kathryn Robinson, award-winning restaurant critic and senior writer at Seattle Met, has been anonymously reviewing restaurants for over 30 years—first as editor of the Best Places guidebook series, then as staff critic at Seattle Weekly and contributing critic at The Seattle Times and Seattle magazine.  Midcareer she spent a year-long sabbatical studying comparative religion as a Knight Fellow at Stanford University where she had been an undergrad 10 years earlier, gaining a knowledge base she now calls upon for her monthly “Back Fence” column on our collective urban existence and the meaning it holds for our personal lives. In her off hours she is a partner and a parent—which means she has no off hours.