VESSEL

Abridged Review from The Stranger:

Vessel has great ice. Many of the drinks are made with pleasing-enough small pebbles of frozen water, like large-gauge snow-cone material. The ice cubes, one-and-a-quarter-inch perfect squares, are exactly what you picture in your mind when you think "ice cube," like a drawing for an alien of what an ice cube should be. The ice spheres are even better: baseball-sized, filling the majority of a tumbler, made from glacier water, and (through some magic of chemistry) purportedly melting at half speed.

Vessel's patrons generally select potent Vessel cocktails, featuring the aforementioned pebbles and cubes, and show the effects with impressive elegance. The bar is stylish very nearly to a fault. The windows with their gauze drapes, sleek bar, servers all in black—it's all quite familiar. A vertiginous translucent stairway is ostentatiously underlit in chartreuse. Sound reverberates, especially in an upstairs room with red walls.

What distinguishes Vessel from many similar spots is that it works. It's stupid-posh yet understated. It bears the imprint of an obsessive mind rather than a marketing plan. The ceiling high above the entryway, of ornate plasterwork, used to belong to the ladies' tearoom at the theater next door; this and other original 1926 elements interact with Vessel's modernity with admirable restraint. The details (pouty-lipped Spiegelau cocktail glasses, silver mesh soda siphons, a postmodern version of a French antique chair) quietly impress.

As one drinker ineloquently put it, "My drink was phenomenal. It was a drink I would've gotten another one of if I wanted to be knocked on my ass." Each drink on his menu bears a date, a place of origin, and a composer as available; you may get knocked on your ass here, but it's knocked on your ass by art.
VESSEL

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ADDRESS

1312 5th Avenue
Seattle, WA 98101
206-652-0521

VENUE WEBSITE

www.vesselseattle.com

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Martini Bars

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