Canlis' Almost Perfect Cocktail
A Nightcap at Canlis
A Nightcap at Canlis
When I was working on my book Last Call, it was important for me to feature a range of bars across America—from run-down haunted dive bars and casual corner taverns to storied cocktail dens and high-volume restaurant bars. But among that lineup of more than 50 bars, perhaps the rarefied was Canlis, the iconic Seattle fine-dining restaurant that sits atop Queen Anne Hill in a midcentury modern building with stunning views of Lake Union and the Cascade Mountains.
I lived in the same neighborhood as Canlis, yet in my eleven years as a resident of Seattle I had only dined at the third-generation, family-owned, award-winning restaurant twice. Once, with a handful of Amazon editorial colleagues at the invitation of a visiting publisher from New York, and later as a guest of my then-girlfriend’s parents, who were in town on their way to Vancouver.
Canlis has a celebrated reputation for the staff’s seamless hospitality but the pricey tab prohibited regular visits as it felt like more of a special-occasion fine-dining destination. The restaurant counts some of Seattle’s biggest names as frequent dinner guests (the kind of people who have streets named after them).
In early 2016, there was a major renovation at the bar and lounge at Canlis, with part of the goal to make the intimate bar that sits to the side of the main dining room a bit more welcoming to guests who might want to stop in for a sunset cocktail and some elegant yet affordable bar snacks to soak up the Lake Union view and the sounds of the lounge’s piano player seamlessly transitioning from Gershwin to Radiohead. The bar keeps most of its bottles out of sight with a curated selection on the backbar, but a secret door allows the bartender to disappear like a magician into a den of overstock featuring select bottles for regulars and vintage spirits.
My friend Rocky Yeh (RIP) was a fixture on the Seattle bar scene and regularly frequented the Canlis lounge. He kindly helped arrange an introduction to the Canlis team to coordinate an interview with James MacWilliams, the Head Bartender at Canlis for 15 years before stepping down in the summer of 2023 (in his time there it’s said he shook up exactly 252,814 cocktails).
