There's a bit of a disconnect at the Arctic Club Hotel, which has its ambitious gastronomic restaurant & bar, called JUNO, one level below the hotel's lobby & lounge, called Polar Bar. If you've come for the absinthe, you can't just wander into JUNO from 3rd Avenue and slide onto a stool; you've got to be aware that the Green Fairie awaits upstairs, past the hotel's reception desk. We attended the hotel's grand opening last......

Fortunate we are, in Seattle, to have lounges for serious drinkers of cocktails, connoisseurs of the art (as opposed to cocktail lounges for "serious drinkers," another category entirely). The best cocktail bars, the ones that care, cluster downtown, in or close to hotels. ZigZag, for one (a cocktail called the Toronto), Suite 410 (that's their Pisco Sour), Oliver's, Vessel. They're not flashy (Milk & Honey in New York is almost anonymous). They hire experts......

Cascadia's new cocktail menu (now that we've dispensed with Big City interlopers) includes a classic called Satan's Whiskers, a combination of gin (high-end Plymouth, ideally), sweet vermouth, dry vermouth, orange juice, Grand Marnier and (very important) orange bitters. All ingredients we're very fond of, so let's go for it. Bartender Michael Candelaria, long a master of his craft, builds the drink with care, measuring precise amounts of liquor into an empty glass, squeezing fresh juice,......

Ask anyone who's serious about cocktails, and they'll tell you that Murray Stenson at ZigZag is Seattle's best barman. Knows his drinks, knows and remembers his customers. Seattlest was hooked from hello on our first visit. Murray introduced us to cask-strength Macallan's, Hendrick's gin, super-premium vodkas. He works fast (not for nothing is he called Murr the Blur) but never seems rushed; he dips a straw and tastes a drop of virtually every drink......

Pete Wells, the guy who notoriously hates food bloggers, is now the Dining & Wine editor at the Noo Yawk Times. Seattlest, who wasn't indicted (in fact, escaped mention enitrely) is thus inclined to be charitable, despite, well, problems in several recent items. Wells's latest article, a melancholy piece about an underappreciated cocktail of his own invention, only serves to reinforce Seattle's place in the cocktail universe. (Leaving aside, for a moment, that NYT editors......

Seattle chefs are making national news: here's a roundup of the latest. More attention should have been paid to the James Beard awards this year. After three nominations, Scott Carsberg of Lampreia finally won as"Best Chef, Northwest." Backhanded compliment for this modest craftsman: they misspelled the restaurant's name on the website. Sheesh! Then again, most winners have, at some point, cooked a benefit dinner at James Beard House; not Scott. Nor did he attend the......

It's all about the gin, the vermouth, the garnish, the size of the glass, even the temperature of the ice. The folks who know are here in Seattle. Four luminaries on the dais at the Mayflower Park Hotel: from New York, authors Anistatia Miller and Jared Brown (Shaken, Not Stirred), local guru Robert Hess (drinkboy.com), and celebrity bartender Ryan Magarian. Two dozen people in the audience for a seminar on martinis. Anistatia Miller and Robert......