#adventurelikealocal

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Best theater ever - Central Cinema. Tonight: nobody puts baby in a corner.

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...according to the Wall Street Journal!

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Want to have a knowledgeable and friendly local create a custom itinerary for your visit to Seattle? Check out Localist Seattle!

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Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein share their favorite San Francisco spots!

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Bauhaus Coffee

This is quintessential Seattle. As far as I’m concerned, Starbucks can go suck an egg; Bauhaus Books and Coffee is where the current incarnation of American Café Culture got its start. Admittedly, I don’t know much about other cities’ contribution to this cultural trend early on, but I know that the coffee in New York is generally finesse-less swill and people in Boston get their coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts. I don’t really know about coffee in LA, but San Fran and Portland, I admit, do a pretty good job.

Yes, I’m propagating the Seattelite stereotype of being a coffee snob, but with all due respect, fellow habitants and I frequently debrief from our travels by remarking at how spoiled we are by excellent coffee here in the Northwest.

There are a lot of places here where you can get great coffee, but to see where the protozoa of the ubiquitous Third Place movement first coalesced, the best place for my money is Bauhaus.

I spent a lot of my high school years here. I felt comfortable coming here throughout the many phases of discovering myself in those darkened caverns of misunderstanding that we call adolescence. I drank sweet Irish cream lattes sporting flannel with a jean jacket and a rat tail. I sipped chai in ratty t-shirts and corduroys from Value Village (the local thrift store chain, more on that in another post). I drank black coffee at the counter against the floor to ceiling windows and read Waiting For Godot  (for AP English) in a crushed velvet purple skirt, watching Queen Anne hill morse its love message to the unresponsive, so-close-yet-so-far Space Needle.

Those lovely windows. They wrap around the whole coffee shop, found on the corner of Pine Street and Melrose. Bauhaus used to really be the only thing at that intersection. The Italian staple Machiavelli was always across the street. For a while the mortuary on the north side of the intersection was Chapel, a pleasant, multi-martini’d club/bar, but that’s recently closed. Now there’s the middle-aged foodie playground Melrose Market, where you’ll find many of us giggling, drooling , and clapping about all the cuts of meat and types of cheeses that we’ve only heard mentioned at underground dinner parties and Grant Achatz cookbooks.

But I digress.

You walk in. You wait in line for a minute, admiring the old cereal boxes above the counter on the right. You admire how cool the baristas are, whether they’re beautiful or not, because they vary. (That’s fair for me to say since I’ve been going there for nearly 20 years.) You order your drink, maybe even just Kool-Aid, and then where to sit paralyzes you for a moment. While checking out the baristas, you didn’t think about whether you wanted to sit outside or right here in the main room. Then you realize that there’s the counter along the windows of Melrose that are the greatest for people watching in the city. Then you remember the nook just behind said counter that is one of the best seclusionary corners in the city. Even then, you wonder that maybe the upstairs seating area, where people read and truck away on MacBooks and talk about reading assignments and tech innovations and multivariate dramatic relationship, among other subjects which distract them from the stunning visual vector between the corner of the coffee shop and the Space Needle, preening, hyperbolic and tall, shuffling stunningly through the greys, pinks, white, and oranges of its Seattle weather wardrobe.

Watch this. Read for a little while. Take a sip of great coffee. Write in the margins. Look back up and eavesdrop a little while the Needle doesn’t bother looking back at you. Look back at your book and let that smile creep across your face. You’re in Seattle.

Bauhaus Books and Coffee, 301 E Pine Street, Seattle, WA 98122

- Matt Longman, Seattle native, on tumblr, on twitter

- Photo from Flickr mvjantzen

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*image by Foxtongue / Flickr

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The mystery of Phoenix Jones — the citizen superhero who stalks the streets of Seattle seeking out injustice and, for the most part, gets his ass kicked —