Inside Passage

Inside Passage opened on 25 June 2021 in a former Stussy shop on Pike Street, reached through a passage inside Rumba, and it is the most committed piece of set design in Seattle drinking. Travis Rosenthal's Pike Street Hospitality Group is behind it, with interiors by Notch Gonzalez. The walls are aged wooden ship hull with light leaking through the plank cracks; the ceiling carries float lamps and pufferfish lights and Kiki, an octopus whose tentacles run up to eighteen feet, described by Seattle Met as suspended overhead in a perpetual state of mid-slither. Some of the city's best bartenders spent a spring at home making her fake suckers. The drinks are served with matching theatre — Seattle Met coined "the fajita effect" for it: a bartender walks a drink carefully through the tight interior, and every table pauses, hushed, to take in the spectacle. Manager Jen Akin's framing of how the bar arrived at its concept is characteristically unromantic: they had done a lot of learning in the last year.

The bar keeps a dedicated non-alcoholic menu, and it is headed Spirit Free Libations — we can confirm the section exists and what it is called. What we cannot give you is what is on it, and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise. Inside Passage publishes all of its menus through a system that assembles them in the browser, with no readable version underneath, so the drinks, their ingredients and their prices cannot be checked from outside. That also means we could not complete the check we run on every venue for cannabis, kava or other infused ingredients hiding under a zero-proof heading — not because we found something, but because we could not see the list at all. For a bar this theatrical the spirit-free drinks are very likely to be worth ordering, and every account of the room suggests the staff take them seriously. Just ask at the bar rather than planning around a name. Practical notes that do check out: it is 21-and-over with a physical ID required, seats parties of six or fewer because the room is small, takes reservations up to six weeks ahead with a $20-per-person no-show charge, and adds a 20% service charge retained by the house.