From The Stranger:
New bars spring up in Seattle like weeds in sidewalk cracks: anywhere, everywhere, and in droves. Recently, though, there’s a new trend where people can find their favorite beverage in a place that speaks directly to the need for coziness, companionship, and intellectual fodder through the dark and damp Seattle winter: bars in bookstores.
For a place that consistently tops both “most literate city” and “best beer town” lists, the combination makes sense—it coddles the introvert nature of locals while allowing an opportunity to get out into the world. “The whole point is to build community,” says Danielle Hulton, co-owner of Ada’s Technical Books and Cafe, which recently added a cocktail bar and event space called the Lab. “Having food and drink helps.”
In a similar spirit, Third Place Books has devoted the basement and part of the main floor of its new Seward Park location, which opened in May 2016, to Raconteur, an all-day bar and restaurant by the folks from Flying Squirrel Pizza Co. The concept is meant to appeal to a wide swath of customers. In the upstairs bookshop, there’s a coffee bar and a restaurant serving fried-chicken sandwiches and halibut tacos. A staircase leads down to the bar, where you can wash down the house-made pretzels (served with beer-cheese fondue) or drive-in burger (served in a burger bag) with beers from one of their 20 beer taps (plus six wine taps), including local options like the custom-brewed Raconteur Rye by Counterbalance Brewing Company, Machine House Brewery’s Golden Ale, and Georgetown Brewing Company’s award-winning Bodhizafa IPA.
. . . .
The Lab is everything you’d imagine a bar in a store that stocks science and engineering books to be: a Marie Curie–inspired room that boasts a sleek chandelier made of test tubes and a nook wallpapered with old textbook pages. While the cafe at Ada’s serves beer and wine, cocktails are available only in the Lab, which doesn’t keep regular hours.
Link to the rest at The Stranger and thanks to Dave for the tip.
There’s a rather nice brewpub/bookstore here in Indianapolis.
I haven’t even read the article yet, I just want to say that A) the title grabbed me and B)I just told the wife that we’re moving.
“To Seattle?”
“Wine…on…tap.”
“Wake up the kids, I’ll grab the suitcases.”
But it maximizes the opportunity to virtue signal to a slightly tipsy potential partner with the book you’re holding, the text of which may be getting a bit blurry.
Good beer or wine makes reading more difficult. It doesn’t seem a good match, unless you stock lots of Goodnight Moon.
This is Seattle in a flying squirrel’s nutshell… more than a trend to expect in a city near the rest of us anytime soon.