Ocho is not a dim or shady bar. It's just plain dark—candlelit and shadowed, rich with velvet blackness and gilt filigree—and coming through the door at 11 p.m. on a weekend is like walking straight into a wall of noise. The music is loud, coming from a stereo behind the bar tuned to a pure Nick Hornby station. I don't recognize a single song, but I like every one of them.
Steven Miller
Bartender Jeff Fielder shakes things up at Ocho.
Steven Miller
Tortilla Espanola and a fine cocktail at Ocho's bar.
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OCHO 2325 N.W. Market St., 784-0699, ochoballard.com. Dinner nightly 4 p.m–2 a.m., brunch Sat.–Sun.
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Because of the music, the people are loud too, having to shout over the droning sad-bastard keyboards and thrumming bass; to lean close and bellow across tables no bigger than two chess boards pushed together. When they laugh, they bray in a forced timbre, a crossing vector of strong drink and honest joy.
The plates are loud. The silver is loud. The walls, when everything hits the right frantic frequency, seem to reverberate with sound like a nightclub's—bouncing drum fills and moaning singers, voices, shouts, scraping flatware, everything. And in moments of strangely synchronized quiet—in the gap between one song and another, the space of a breath between outbursts—all that noise seems to live in the walls, just waiting to spill forth.
And I loved it. It was perfect. Loud was what I'd wanted—crowded, anonymous, somewhere to bury myself for an hour or two and not have to think. It'd been a rough day—busy at the office, miserable at home. I was longing for the comforting familiarity of my last half-dozen addresses, feeling the diffuse, drifty homesickness of the perennially misplaced, and felt a powerful need to cosh that spirit of melancholy before it bloomed into something too ugly and purple. The best way to do that is in a crowd, with a few drinks and some snacks, in a place where it is too busy, close, and thunderous to form coherent thoughts. A punk bar would've been ideal; a monster-truck rally, too. Ocho was the next best thing.
Inside the door, the bar is full, running two deep at the short end with suits and swells and night creatures sucking down cold beers and cocktails. The house special is a margarita, served in a pint glass, that's like swallowing an alcoholic time-bomb, but most reasonable folks seem to be satisfied with beers off the bar, tumblers of wine from the Spanish-heavy list, martini-glass cocktails in bright primary colors.
All the way down at the service end, I catch the eye of the single waitress working the floor in blue jeans and harness boots, and she nods me in the direction of an open table against the wall. Bodies are pressing in behind me already, muscling in out of the rain on Market Street, pushing their way out of the damp streetlight brightness and into the warm, close dark, so I take the seat in a hurry, jinking through the narrow alley between the bar and the banquette, then slump against the paneled back of the only seat available.
When the waitress comes, she has to lean in close to be heard. "How are you tonight?" she asks.
"Wet!" I shout back. "Thirsty!"
"Do you know what you want?"
"Estrella," I yell back—my favorite Spanish lager, which tastes like drinking dusty sunshine. "And some food."
For two solid years, Ocho has been a draw on this Ballard street corner, a tapas restaurant that lays no particular claim to any sort of "like dining on the streets of Madrid!" authenticity, but still manages to capture the feel of a proper, if très moderne, American vision of a cool Spanish bar.
Owner Zach Harjo envisioned the place after a summer spent eating his way through Spain, but he was already a restaurant veteran (most notably of La Carta de Oaxaca, just around the corner) with plenty of years behind him and understood, on some gut level, the danger of attempted transplantation. The chance of a "truly authentic" anything succeeding outside the place where its borrowed authenticity was born is slim. The odds of it becoming a Disney-fied theme park or a twee, cutesy recreation on par with those doilied repositories of kitsch that serve high tea and finger sandwiches to little girls in princess dresses are just too large.
Thus, Ocho gambled on notes of authenticity in an otherwise safety-netted environment. Its brick walls, dark wood, framed mirrors, and jewel-box size invoke visions of late-night carousing on Avenida Sant Domènec in Barcelona without all the pickpockets, tourists, and random outbursts of flamenco dancing, while the menu only skirts the edges of serious Spanish bar snacks (no chopitos, no bacalao or cut bits of octopus gleaming with oil), arranging them beautifully on white plates, taking care to make each one seem a doll's version of an entire meal.
My Estrella arrives along with another wave of customers, pushing against the bodies already there, adding to the noise level and the damp, steamy closeness that pervades Ocho—cozy but not claustrophobic, thanks mostly to the windows that line the front wall. I run a finger down the menu and, in the space between blaring anthems from the bar, civilly ask for patatas bravas, aceitunas (mixed olives, served in the same glass tumbler the wines come in, speared with a long toothpick) and jamon Serrano—an ideal start. This time the waitress says nothing. Like a fighter plane breaking off an engagement, she wheels away and disengages the minutes the words are out of my mouth. Busy already, she's about to get busier.
