Bottlehouse

Bottlehouse occupies a restored house from 1910 on 34th Avenue in Madrona, and the building does most of the work: a front porch, rooms rather than a dining room, a bar, and a back garden that is the reason to come in summer. Its motto is printed on every menu it publishes — dwell, drink, be well — and it is an accurate description of the pace. This is a wine bar built for staying put. The food is seasonal small plates: a house salad at $16, grilled local asparagus at $18, seasonal burrata at $18, a kale and white bean risotto at $23, house mac and cheese at $16, a petite steak at $32, and a tahini chocolate blondie at $9. Happy hour runs daily in the late afternoon.

We owe a correction here, because our earlier entry for this bar was wrong in two places. We said the non-alcoholic offering extended to non-alcoholic wine, and we listed a persimmon-vanilla soda. Neither appears on any of the printed menus we could check across the past two years, and the drink we described as a house thyme iced tea is in fact a house strawberry-thyme soda. What is genuinely there is a section headed simply Non-Alcoholic, and its shape is worth knowing. There is one house zero-proof cocktail at a time — currently Root Ritual at $14, built on Pathfinder with lemon, blackberry and salt, the salt doing the job that makes a fruit drink taste like a cocktail rather than a squash. Next to it sits a bottled St. Agrestis Phony Negroni at $9, which is the cheapest way in Seattle to have a proper bitter aperitif without alcohol. Then house sodas and lemonade at $8, Rachel's Ginger Beer at $7, a Seattle Soda Co. cola at $6, Saint Aniol sparkling water at $5, a non-alcoholic Fremont IPA or stout at $6, and a genuinely considered loose-leaf tea list from Apolis at $5 — genmaicha, vanilla chai, ceylon-darjeeling, ginger lemon and a tranquility herbal blend. The house cocktail rotates seasonally, so expect the name to have moved on; the section will not have.