It was maybe my fourth or fifth time at the Zig Zag Café before I ever ventured beyond the bar and sat at an actual table. I'd stood, with friends, outside the front door like a schlub waiting for the place to open, like a petitioner at the gates of a highly selective church. We'd watched the crowds grow and the line stretch across the little wedge of cement that makes up the landing on which the Zig Zag sits, trying not to look like we were peeking through the curtains hung over the front door or craning our necks to see in through the unbolted patio doors.
Peter Mumford
Known for its inventive cocktail menu, Tavern Law also boasts some of Seattle’s best-
prepared potatoes.
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Tavern Law 1406 12th Ave., 322-9734, tavernlaw.com. Daily, 5 p.m.–close.
Zig Zag Café 1501 Western Ave., 625-1146, zigzagseattle.com. Daily, 5 p.m.–2 a.m.
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When we saw a hand snaking around the drape to unlock the door, everyone shifted as though getting into sprint position, but it was a false alarm: a cook coming out, not yet ready to let the faithful in. There was grumbling. There were threats to just go next door to the Mexican restaurant with the big patio, the umbrellas, and the wide-open door.
But no one did.
When finally the hostess popped the lock and opened the door, everyone went through in a rush. Though the three of us there waiting were only a couple of parties back, the bar filled like that—one moment empty, the next every seat taken. It was a Friday, and apparently on Fridays this is just how things go at the Zig Zag. If you're really dying for a tall stool at the curving bar, you've got to camp out like a fat kid waiting on a Star Wars premiere.
So we were deflected—sent off to the patio, where we sat under an umbrella and waited for the flying squad of waiters and waitresses to carve their way through the first slug of customers choking the floor. We were given water, asked about cocktails, and handed the black folders which contain some of the best drinks invented in the last century, returned to life by a bar crew who operate like archaeologists of adult beverages—constantly on the prowl for those that died and were buried long ago, lost in the rubble of candy-colored shots and Jäger machines.
I took a folder off the stack, meaning just to peruse the offerings before ordering a single Redbreast with three ice cubes. But when I opened it, I found olives instead, hummus, flatbread pizzas, salads, and a steak. The Zig Zag is like a temple of cocktails—a church for those alcoholically inclined. Finding food there was kind of like discovering that St. Peter's serves chicken wings during services to those wise enough to ask.
It was my first time at Tavern Law. Stepping in off the street was like walking into a scene from The Sting—dark wood, leather chairs, soft, cool jazz popping with LP imperfections. There was no wait; the place was nearly deserted on a Monday evening—just a couple guys lounging around the small front dining room, two chefs at the far end of the bar talking about staffing problems and fruit emulsions, one bartender in a tie and buttoned vest.
Tavern Law is the cocktail-lounge concept launched by Brian McCracken and Dana Tough of Belltown's Spur. Like the Zig Zag, Tavern Law is a place of rebirth and investigation, where forgotten cocktails, even entire bodies of drink-mixing knowledge, are given a second chance to charm the livers out of those for whom a simple Jack and Coke will never be enough. Tavern Law's cocktail menu even comes with small history lessons, the points of origin briefly detailed for the Antoinette, the sangaree, the cobblers, fizzes, and shrubs that make up the complicated board.
The bar here is like a wizard's laboratory. There are bottles, flasks, and jeroboams everywhere, filled with strange colored liquids. Most of the labels are unfamiliar, the brands so boutique or relentlessly small-batch that I'd need an entire second life just to study them the way I have food. Who knew, for example, that a man could ever need seven different kinds of bitters? I have gone most of my life without needing even one.
One thing I do recognize, though, is the kitchen and the cook in it: one man, standing alone, dressed in a snap-front dish jacket and a plastic apron. He's dressed like a short-order fry cook in one of cuisine's lower hells, turning in slow circles in a galley the size of a decent walk-in closet but packed with gleaming equipment. Because this is a Tough and McCracken operation, I knew before walking in that there would be food here. But when I pick a stool at the center of the bar, no one hands me a menu. There's just a chalkboard, sketched with six or seven offerings as simple as the drinks are complex. There's foie, a single salad, one dessert, some finger food, and a burger.
"Is that the whole menu?" I ask the bartender.
"That's it," he says. "Are you hungry?"
The Zig Zag Café mixes some of the best cocktails in the city; is home to one of the country's best bartenders, Murray Stenson; and has one of the loveliest, most comfortable, in-demand bars around. The dining room, on the other hand, is like one big Siberia—so far gone from the hot, juicy center of the world that it feels like a different and alien continent. It is dark, somewhat lonely, and sparsely kept, looking for all the world like a very nice train-station men's room with its tile walls, cement floors, and bare Deco touches.
