It’s right across the street from the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co. Inside and out it’s a café that finds a perfect balance of sleepy and hip, busy and leisurely, with its baby blue interior fit with finished plywood cabinetry and rail station-style benches lining the back wall, complete with power strips every ten feet. Show posters cover the wall by the front door.
The mood at Neptune Coffee is pleasant and very workable: as I write this an enormous Mastiff named Oscar who came in with a young woman is making friends with a couple who are scratching his head asking, “Will you come home with us?” This is my kind of place.
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85th, cafe, coffee, Greenwood, Neptune, north Seattle, Seattle
by Alex Russell
It started with a chance latte.
One weekend last fall I had planned to shop at the downtown REI for some hiking boots, eager to catch the tail end of weather good enough to put the mountains on the other side of I-90 to good use. Espresso Vivace was right across the street and I needed a fix. I got my latte—they don’t do drip—walked outside and took a sip and stopped right outside the door. I looked at the cup. I was already in Seattle three years by then and this was the best latte I’d ever had in my life.
I used to smirk at the barista championships I’d see reported on television. They all used espresso and milk to make the same lattes and cappuccinos. I could not imagine any of them, simply by virtue of some magic-imbued twenty-something espresso guru, could be wildly different from the cups I picked up at Starbucks on my way to work every morning. Turns out it can, and the difference is immediate.
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barista, cafe, cappuccino, coffee, espresso, latte, Seattle, Vivace
by Alex Russell
Nervous Nellie’s Café in Ballard has a vibe, and I’m not sure how or why. It’s at the corner of a relatively new condominium complex, and the main entry doors at both sides of the café are shared on one side with a law office and on the other a dentist. New buildings are almost always sterile. There’s no soul in the uniform texture on the walls, the rigid angles and parallels of plumbing pipe and conduit hung from the steel of the ceiling. Somehow still, at Nervous Nellie’s there’s a vibe.
It’s an open space with a high-ceilinged main floor and stairs at the back leading up to a landing overlooking it. There is a whole other area, a couple rooms worth, until the owners put up doors and closed it to the public. They serve the best drip coffee I’ve had in Seattle and make artisan toast with all kinds of homemade jams and cheeses, Swedish-style. The café itself is a mixed space, the downstairs for oldschool café socializing and upstairs for more private or computer-based work.
And that’s kind of where it started, with a vibe and then some trouble.
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Ballard, cafe, condos, Nervous Nellie's, strawberry jam, Swedish toast, vibe
by Alex Russell
The intersection of N 130th St. and Linden Ave. N in north Seattle is always busy, something I’m sure Clarissa, the owner of Seattle Mobile Espresso counted on when she signed the lease. From my counter seat I can watch the world go by through the floor-to-ceiling windows that frame the front of the cafe. Small children run awkwardly through the woodchip and plastic play structure across the street at Bitterlake Park. Cars and trucks rush up and down 130th. Pedestrians of all kinds—locals out for a stroll or running errands, students with backpacks and pants sagging as they take their time getting home—all enjoy the unlikely afternoon sun.
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Bitterlake, Broadview, cafe, coffee, latte, north Seattle, tea