Stampede Cocktail Club

Stampede Cocktail Club took over the former Helm space in Fremont in 2018, under owner Paul Shanrock, and built its identity around a menu that is genuinely a piece of design work: a lavishly illustrated zine that changes theme entirely with each season. Past editions have run from an homage to 1940s comic books and art-deco travel posters to a vaporwave alcove to the current Gundam-inflected one. The food is deliberately singular — dumplings, ten to an order, at $15, or a full rack at $55 — and happy hour runs 5 to 7 every day with cocktails and pork dumplings at $9.99.

Its non-alcoholic programme is real and unusually well established. Seattle Met's 2024 report on the city's zero-proof bars found that bar manager Adam Fought estimates one person in every party of five or six now goes the spirit-free route, that Stampede was among the first bars in Seattle to plant a flag on making great temperate drinks, and that it keeps roughly six non-alcoholic cocktails on the rotating themed menu at any time — each of which takes two or three times as long to develop as an ordinary cocktail, because, as Fought puts it, you get so much flavour from fermentation and alcohol. An earlier bar lead, Kayleigh Blome, described falling head over heels with making something special for an underserved demographic, and framed the offer as letting people be intentional about the choice, whether they are not drinking or simply choosing to drink less. The practical consequence of a fully themed, fully rotating menu is that no drink name survives long. Not one of the spirit-free cocktails documented in coverage of this bar over the past several years — under any of its themes — appears on the current list. So come for the programme, not for a name. What does stay put is a standing list of nine non-alcoholic spirits sold by the pour at $9 each: Jalisco 55, Kentucky 74, Pathfinder Amaro, Seedlip in Garden, Grove and Spice, and Wilderton in Aperitivo, Earthen and Lustre. That shelf means the bar can build almost anything for you on request. Athletic non-alcoholic beer and Gruvi dry red are $8.