Zig Zag Café

Zig Zag Café opened in 1999 on the Pike Place Market hillclimb, in the 1910 Fix-Madore Building, and it has a genuine claim on cocktail history. The original owners hired Ben Dougherty and Kacy Fitch to build a credible drinks programme, and the two later bought the place. Around 2002 Murray Stenson came over from Il Bistro because, as he put it, they wanted to focus on classic cocktails. What happened next is the bar's monument: Stenson found the Last Word — equal parts gin, chartreuse, maraschino and lime — in Ted Saucier's 1951 book Bottoms Up, the only place he had ever seen the recipe, and started making it. A visiting bartender took it to New York, from where it went to San Francisco and then London and then everywhere. The cocktail historian Robert Hess's verdict on the bar is the fair one: it basically put Seattle on the map from a cocktail standpoint. Stenson was named the country's best bartender in 2010, left in 2011, and died in September 2023. The room today is what its own site describes — a low, sultry glow over the dining room, a verdant patio, and a soundtrack of jazz, cumbia and highlife — with live jazz Sunday through Wednesday. The kitchen is real: oysters at $25 the half dozen, a burger at $23, dry-aged flank steak at $44.

The non-alcoholic drinks get their own printed heading, Zero Proof Drinks, priced flat at $15, and the construction is exactly what you would hope from a bar with this pedigree — four drinks built on four different non-alcoholic houses rather than one bottled shortcut. Daybreak uses Yu No non-alcoholic gin with lemon, a pineapple cordial and Giffard's non-alcoholic spritz liqueur. Jardin Sauvage is the fresh, herbal one: mint, lime and ginger against Midnight Sun non-alcoholic aperitif. Rose-Colored Glasses is the most ambitious, layering Roots non-alcoholic bianco vermouth with grenadine, grapefruit, old-fashioned bitters and a non-alcoholic sparkling wine, which gives it the length and the lift of a proper aperitif cocktail. Dark Horse is the bitter one, on Dr. Zero Zero non-alcoholic amaro with lime cordial and Giffard aperitif syrup. The bar is 21-and-over and opens at 5pm every day.