Deep Dive

Deep Dive sits beneath the Amazon Spheres in South Lake Union and opened in August 2018, one of two Renée Erickson rooms in that development. Seattle Met's line on opening was cheerfully unimpressed with its own hype — it's called Deep Dive, it's beautiful, and there's a Renée Erickson-style hot dog on the menu. The space was assembled by Curtis Steiner, owner of the Ballard home store that bears his name, and it is dense with curios on shelves and under specially lit bell jars. The Seattle Times' review is the most vivid account of what that actually feels like, and it is worth quoting in full rather than cherry-picking: the metal grooves overhead look like ribs, the critic wrote, she saw mangled fingers and mannequin hand displays, and she felt she was in the bowels of a sea creature. She was also blunt about the room's limits — that no matter how full it is, and it is almost always full, the energy never quite sparks; that it is meant to feel glamorous but ends up stage-set-like, all artifice and no heart. Readers can decide which of those appeals. The bar is strictly 21-and-over with physical ID required.

For a non-drinker the draw is a dedicated menu with a name that fits the conceit: Above Water. Two of its drinks are documented — the Sinless Sour, built on Pathfinder with orgeat and lemon, and A Bitter Whisper, which layers Pathfinder with both Wilderton Lustre and Wilderton Aperitivo, giving it two separate bitter registers rather than one. That is a serious build, and consistent with a bar of this budget. What we cannot do is confirm what is on the list today, and we would rather say so than guess. Deep Dive's website sits behind a security challenge we cannot get past, and the cocktail menu file it used to publish has since been taken offline, so the current Above Water drinks and their prices are unverifiable from outside. Treat the two named above as indicative of the style rather than as a promise. One clarification while we are here, because it travels with every Erickson venue: she won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Northwest in 2016, and that award was for The Whale Wins, two years before Deep Dive existed.