The High (End) Life

On a late December evening, three friends and I were sitting around the bar at Zig Zag, musing over drinks brown and potent, when my friend Anne asked bartender Murray Stenson about his well-stocked shelf of bitters.

Stenson is a greyhound of a man who organizes glasses and consults books during every moment that business slows down, like a runner jogging in place at each stoplight. He sprinted to the other end of the bar and gathered five bottles from the shelves. A few drops from each were squirted into separate shot glasses. Then Stenson lined up the glasses and respective bottles in front of us, arranged from least intense (a Japanese orange bitters) to most aromatic (Angostura). It took us 10 minutes to sniff our way through the bitters, arguing over the aromas we picked up like birdwatchers debating the species flashing its wings in a far-off tree. Meanwhile, Stenson was showing off a small-batch rye from Iowa to the couple next to me, explaining that it was made by an MIT grad using Al Capone's old recipe.

It was the most productive happy hour I've ever spent.

Stenson is certainly a legend in Seattle, the bartender that all other bartenders in this city bow down to. But the booze-geek experience that patrons come to Zig Zag for is less and less an anomaly. The drinking scene in this once-microbrew-mad town is changing as the city fills up with premium cocktail and wine bars. Seattleites who spent their 20s quaffing porters are now discussing the bouquets of syrah and the merits of artisanally produced gin. Drinking is no longer a social pastime. It's edutainment.

By now, we've become accustomed to being told we need to pay more attention to our food, and always for a premium. Chocolate now expresses the terroir of the places where cacao beans were grown. The Los Angeles Times just ran a story extolling the deliciousness of rare varieties of black pepper. Imported salt, for chrissakes, is a multimillion-dollar industry. Is the $10 drink as ridiculous a pretension as Hawaiian sea salt? Not when you do it right.

Seattle is arriving relatively late to "the cocktail revolution" (as the glossy food mags like to call it), which has been in full swing for a decade now. The Deco Dotties and Tiki Toms who first resurrected cocktail lore and paraphernalia as part of their passion for vintage have been absorbed into a much larger, and more contemporary, fascination with the gastronomic possibilities of the mixed drink. Restaurants like Moto in Chicago and T'afia in Houston have been serving martinis chilled with frozen "olive melting essence" or using chemicals like calcium chloride and sodium alginate to turn mojitos into carbonated blobs. Six-year-old Milk & Honey in Manhattan serves $14 drinks with ice cubes hand-chipped to fit the size of the glass and won't seat drinkers unless they are referred by an existing patron.

As usual, Seattle takes a more egalitarian approach. The new breed of local wine bars and cocktail havens are open to all—as long as they've got the plastic to whip out of their wallets at the end of the night. More and more Seattleites are showing that they're willing to pay higher prices for drinks, as long as they're also being educated and improved. The city's bartenders, too, are taking a more scholarly approach than the mad-scientist set, one that's better tailored to this city's intellectually curious, chichi-suspicious diners.

"What customers should be getting out of any wine bar is to expand their wine knowledge," says Kevin Erickson, who opened Bricco della Regina Anna on Queen Anne last January, a sentiment echoed by almost all the new bar owners in town.

Washington State's restrictive spirits laws long limited spirits/beer/wine licenses to restaurants that derived at least 30 percent or more of their income from food. Businesses had to serve food in order to sell spirits or forgo the hooch in favor of a beer-and-wine-only tavern license. A 1995 reform to the state's liquor laws removed the 30 percent food-sales minimum. A second change in 2000 relaxed the definition of "restaurant" even further; the state now permits bars with only a microwave and a few TV dinners on offer to stock a full bar. As a result, the number of Seattle establishments with full bars has jumped from 427 in 1995 to 816 last year, according to the Washington State Liquor Control Board.

Zig Zag, which opened in 1998, was one of the first bars in town built solely to showcase spirits, though, like most of the other cocktail bars mentioned here, it also serves food. According to Ben Dougherty, who co-owns Zig Zag with Kacy Fitch, the two had been tending bar around town for a number of years, and found themselves coming to Pike Place Market landmark Il Bistro on their off nights to watch its bartender, Murray Stenson, work. Stenson's collection of rare scotches impressed them, as did his grasp of alcohol arcana.

The pair convinced a few investors to open Zig Zag on the Pike Street Hillclimb behind the Market, and they designed their ultimate bar in order to entice Stenson, whom Dougherty calls "our leader and teacher." "We wanted to offer a really extensive, in-depth collection of spirits," Dougherty says. "But we also wanted to build the place with spice racks and set it up so we could have all the ingredients to run a scratch bar, all from fresh products."