Favorite
Just like its elder sibling, Vif, this spare little bar on Beacon Avenue knows its minimal intervention wines and coaxes memorable plates of food from the humblest of kitchens: The croque forestiere submits smoked ham, king oyster mushrooms, and Sea Wolf sourdough to the unifying powers of melty gruyere and mornay. Any bottle of wine on the shelves is fair Read more...
Favorite
One of Portland’s favorite sushi restaurants has landed at U Village, in a space as vast as Bamboo’s ambitions for sustainable seafood. Rigorous transparency and certification standards surround every piece of sashimi, but the menu’s big and has a sense of adventure—albacore dotted with shiitakes and smoked onions, even a riff on orange chicken that coats fried cauliflower in a Read more...
Favorite
The counter once home to Bar Ferdinand has a sharp new aesthetic and a continued dedication to natural wine. Owner Brandin Myett’s glass list is a concentrated blast of esoteric fun (like a rotating orange wine), and the staff’s happy to explain the finer points of carbonic maceration pinot noir without getting all wonky about it. Drinking these discoveries in Read more...
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Some bars on Capitol Hill are audible from two blocks away, and then there’s this soft-spoken little number tucked on Madison near 13th Avenue. Footprint arrived just over a year ago, preaching the gospel of sustainable keg wines. It stocks its dozens of taps—lined up on a copper wall behind the bar—with Washington, and a few Oregon, varietals. The list Read more...
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A low wall and curtain demarcate this wine bar inside Fiasco, the all-day Italian restaurant on Stone Way. Both establishments hail from the folks behind Barrio, Meet the Moon, and Pablo y Pablo, thus sommeliers keep the vibe accessible—no shame if your wine selections usually center on cute labels. However, this is also the restaurant group that brought us Purple Read more...
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At the base of Bellevue’s Soma Towers, this mostly French wine bar and L’ Experience Paris bakery share a gently industrial space, one where you can sip Beaujolais at one counter and purchase croissants and cruffins at the other. The wines lining the long, blond wood shelves mostly hail from owner Julien Hervet’s import portfolio and come by the glass Read more...
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Precept, a growing collection of Northwest wine labels, has styled a slot in South Lake Union’s 400 Fairview food hall as a popup wine bar, complete with neon and Scrabble-inspired signage, globe pendants, and shelves of merch. Technically it’s more of a tasting room, serving the company’s various wines, with each season’s list organized around a particular theme—the first few Read more...
Favorite
Bar impresarios Anu and Chris Elford converted a slip of a coffee counter in between two other bars into a den of raw seafood and natural wine. Get past that whole brightly lit “we used to sell lattes” aesthetic and you’ll find an explorer’s map of tart rosé and funky lambrusco, all made with minimal intervention, and seafood where the Read more...
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A trip to this South Park destination near a tire factory might not bring to mind the cobblestone streets of Paris’s own Left Bank. But tuck into the microstudio-size wine-bar-slash-shop and gaze upon the old-world, naturally produced French bottles lining the walls and suddenly the name makes sense. That wall, plus a tiny bar with lots of records and a Read more...
Favorite
A good conversation bar is a rare and wonderful thing, especially on Belltown’s Second Ave. But one of the neighborhood’s newest wine and cocktail haunts, Mr. Darcy’s, is just that. In keeping with it’s Jane Austen moniker, a genteel literary mood gently infuses the space: gold-lettering on the windows, a decorative (presumably) phonograph and piano, an antique clock, lots of woodwork, Read more...