Good coffee in the Northern Wastes [updated]

Minor Update [May 28, 2008]: It turns the place at 123rd and 15th noted below is actually called Aroma City Café, not Cafe Aroma as I'd originally thought. Corrections have been made...

Finding good coffee up here was a challenge. Wedgwood had offered several serviceable options, two of which either opened or had just barely opened during the time we lived there. These are Grateful Bread (long time favorite in da 'hood), Top Pot (which took residence right across the street from GB), and Javasti just north of the 85th 'heart' of Wedgwood.

Well, things were not nearly as easy once we were residents of Pinehurst. The immediately apparent coffee options included several Starschmucks (both inside and outside other stores, which are not the topic here), a place at 123rd and 15th saddled with a bad reputation, a drive-through shack tucked behind a short strip mall at 125th & 15th, and a decent but overly grandmotherly place around 130th & Lake City Way.

Things have improved somewhat with new options, changes in ownership, and discoveries a bit farther afield. Here are the ones worth your time, in order of proximity to where I live:

Cafe Aroma Aroma City Café, 12303 15th Ave. NE (formerly Il Bacio)

This place had several former incarnations. At one time it was a hair salon, then a few years ago the first coffee shop opened up. It was called Scooter's Espresso Cafe before Il Bacio. Though the place had WiFi and a few adherents, apparently the owner managed to piss-off and estrange most of his clientele over a period of months, then sold the crippled coffee shop to a Moroccan fellow, followed by saddling him with months and months of unpaid Seattle City Light bills after the fact. So, Il Bacio struggled under the ruined reputation of Scooter's, and after a stab at being both a coffee shop and a Moroccan food restaurant, threw in the towel. The place stayed shuttered for a couple of months before re-opening recently as Cafe Aroma. To my knowledge, there's no relationship between this one and a very similarly named Cafe Aroma on 165th & 5th.

At any rate, in its newest incarnation it's just as small as before, but now has a comfy couch on one side, kickass coffee, crepes (I think...) and an interesting selection of Vietnamese-themed sandwiches.

Cactus Coffee & Tea, 330 Northgate Way NE

I had planned to avoid noting places here that didn't have significant sit-down options, like drive-in shacks. This place is more of a walk-up shack though, and they do so well with coffee that I had to mention them. Technically, during the better months of the year, they have seating - they have one small patio table right next to their shack, and because of a cooperative agreement with the Quizno's next door, one is also allowed to populate the Quizno's tables. The little shack in located in the pedestrian passage between the gargantuan center of consumption that is the chainstores of Northgate North, and the parking garage / Ross department store. Nice if you're into what they did with concrete in the 1990s, but really this is a great place to stop for a good coffee on your way to catch the bus or look for cheap shoes at Shoe Pavilion (eek, did I say that?)

Cafe Aroma, 509 NE 165th St.

An interesting coffee joint setup inside an old service station. It's kitty-corner from The Crest movie theater, has a drive-through (seems to be a necessity to stay alive as a small coffee shop in this area), and makes decent drinks. However, they have little in the way of ambience, relying on concrete floors and plastic outdoor furniture for sit-down customers. Nice if you're in the neighborhood, but by no means a 'destination'.

Hotwire Online Coffee, 17551 15th Ave. NE

Absolutely the best coffee place anywhere north of 85th, and probably north of the U. District for that matter. These people are serious about coffee, and the space is well-appointed, open, with nice light and full technological support for those who come with or without a computer of their own. The older sandy-haired female duo that own it are also friendly and real characters.

Did I mention I won 2nd place in a pumpkin carving contest there last Halloween?! $25 gift certificate - w00t!

No Sympathy for The Devil Mall Honorable Mention: the Nordstrom's eBar

Pros: Big Train chai, which is a passable alternative when what you really want is a Trabant Chaiwalla. People watching. Seating in the best (I say this with generosity) ambience the mall has to offer.

Cons: People watching. Seating in the best (I say this with generosity) ambience the mall has to offer.

The Greatness that is North City

I admit a sense of being a traitor at the start of this post. I enjoy identifying myself with Seattle, and yet have felt quite let down by 'my city' as I've experienced living North of Northgate. The basis of this disappointment is nowhere more obvious than crossing NE 145th into one of Seattle's neighbors to the north, Shoreline.

Shoreline incorporated as a city in 1995, and has done some truly impressive work in the 13 years since. I'll give Seattle the benefit of the doubt here - Shoreline is a much smaller city and I dare say it has a higher level of per-capita tax funding than Seattle. Working with that assumption, I imagine it has more money for public works than Seattle does. There are also notions about what modern urban design includes, as well as laws regarding amenities on new construction.

Most of Shoreline has sidewalks. A significant portion of Shoreline's roads have painted and signed bike routes. This is something you can't say for the northern reaches of Seattle.

Another thing Shoreline has that's missing from Seattle north of 85th is a friendly urban corridor composed of interesting and useful shops. The area I speak of is Shoreline's east-side neighborhood called North City. North City has within a 7 block stretch from NE 173rd to NE 180th along 15th Ave. NE:

• a pretty good Safeway (not my favorite store) with a BECU service center (our bank)
  
• a post office (the one where we have to go for undeliverable items, by the way)
  
• a Walgreens drug store (handy if you're there anyway)
  
• a very good coffee shop, Hotwire Online Coffee
  
• a fine greasy-spoon diner with all-day breakfast, Leena's
  
• and several other useful places like a lumber store, a CB/electronics shop, and so on

The whole setup strikes me as a blue collar answer to Capitol Hill's Broadway, a place where you can get almost anything you would need of a practical nature, and a few frills to top it off. Shoreline has put a lot of money into making this strip feel the way I've described it: wide sidewalks, traffic calming measures like variable curbs, and tasteful lighting.

A mere five blocks to the west of this little gem is the Shoreline branch of the King County Library System. We've taken to using this one quite a bit because of its proximity to North City, and the fact that it's just posh as hell compared to either the Lake City or Northgate branches of the Seattle Public Libraries. They have an amazing kids area, iBook laptops you can check out and use in the library and a huge collection of everything.

The biggest thing that sends me north instead of south to Northgate is scale. North City is still about people and walking and more practical needs. Northgate is about playing the Dance o'Death with speeding cars, trying not to get hit at all the entrances and exits to the Mall, and absorbing the concrete and asphalt, bummer atmosphere that permeates the whole thing. While I think the Northgate Library and Northgate Community Center are excellent additions, they have the feeling of being tacked-on afterthoughts to the real reason anyone should be in the area: to play good little consumer at the Mall. For that reason, I'd rather ride a bus 50 blocks north than 15 blocks south. The ride might be longer, but I'd have to walk 10 times as far in Northgate to get to all the same things, and that's just not fun.

Getting there by bus: Both the Metro 347 and 348 will get you from 125th & 15th to 175th & 15th, though the 348 gets there a little quicker. In the afternoons during commuter hours, you can also take the 77.

cycling from Pinehurst to North City on sideroads

One thing that prompted me to create this blog was the dearth of knowledge about good biking options up here, and the fact that somebody needed to fill in the blanks. There are few if any marked bike paths, and those that exist are generally too far west (Meridian, on the west side of I-5) to be useful.

The geography of Pinehurst, and really the whole area north of 95th, is largely determined by the Thornton Creek watershed. Thornton Creek has three arms, and I'm not real clear on where they start, diverge, or end. I do know that one major part runs from Northgate Community College, under Northgate Mall, and then east from around 104th and 5th clear out to Lake Washington. There's another portion of it that runs farther north, from the south end of Jackson Park golf course, around 130th and 5th, east by southeast, under 125th around 20th, and then under Lake City Way somewhere close to 105th.

As a result of these tributaries, there's rarely a flat stretch for more than a mile. Terra, the smaller boy, and I wanted to go for a nice bike ride this morning, up to the best coffee in the north end, Hotwire Online Coffee at 177th and 15th. Due to Metro's bus routing and the aforementioned terrain, it's actually quicker to go 2.5 miles north of where we live, into Shoreline, than 2.5 miles south to the Maple Leaf neighborhood of Seattle. Maple Leaf is, more or less, where cultured Seattle ends. This is to say people actually choose to live there because of what it is, and not primarily because rents are cheap or there's quick access to I-5.

Let me tell you first where *not* to bike up here. Forget 125th. It's a death trap, and everyone driving on it acts like they're already on the freeway. From 17th to 23rd is a death-defying downhill stretch (going east) or a real uphill slog (going west), and you don't want to be going 5 miles per hour uphill with no shoulder and two lanes of hell-bent-for-leather SOVs. Pinehurst, which merges into 15th going north, is also one to avoid, as people drive fast on it and it also lacks a shoulder. I say all of this as a fairly aggressive cyclist, and one who knows his rights and rules on the road, and isn't afraid to claim them. People up here just don't seem to think cyclists have a right to be on the road.

Starting at 145th and continuing north to 175th, 15th Ave. NE has a painted and marked bike lane. Shoreline may be a young city, but they make Seattle look like a bunch of chumps when it comes to bike paths and bike friendliness. Anyways, using a combination of my knowledge of local roads and a Google map, I laid out a route that would keep us off main roads or on marked bike paths all the way up to Hotwire.

We started out from 125th & 10th, north to 133rd, over to 11th, north to 135th, crossed 15th over to 17th, north on 17th to 150th, and then into the Fircrest military base. I knew that Fircrest has an entrance at 155th & 15th, but decided to explore a bit. We noodled around a bit and climbed extra hills I wasn't so excited about, before finally arriving at a chained gate separating the north end of Fircrest from Hamlin Park. I was annoyed. I mean, what use is it to have a locked gate there? Don't want the old folks housed in Fircrest makin' a break for the trees! So, disappointed, we turned back and went out the 155th entrance.

From 155th we followed the marked bike path on 15th up to 175th, got a few snacks at Safeway, and then ended up at Hotwire. I've debated hot-linking to their website, but unfortunately the North City Hotwire is treated like an ugly kid-sibling next to the original in West Seattle - there's almost never any content or cool news about the North City one on the website.

The way back was a bit trickier. Simply reversing our outbound route wouldn't work because there's a viciously steep hill from 135th and 15th to 135th and 11th. I worked out a return using Google again. This time we returned via 175th to 10th, 10th to 155th, 155th to 8th, 8th to 145th, 145th to 5th, then south on 5th to Roosevelt (which is basically 130th turning into 125th over a 5 block stretch), Roosevelt to 10th, and then home.

The only tricky bit here was getting psyched out by the three northbound lanes at 145th and 5th, and suddenly thinking there was no way to do a left turn onto 5th. So recumbent tandem with me and small boy astride continued across the overpass, into the left-hand southbound freeway onramp, then I abruptly jumped off and used the crosswalk to get back across. It must have taken about 10 minutes to wait for all the light cycles until we were finally going south on 5th again. There's a pretty nasty uphill going south on 5th, from around 140th to 132nd, and we had to walk that. Otherwise, it was a very pleasant and direct return route.

From Capitol Hill to Wedgwood to Pinehurst?

Shortly after I moved to Pinehurst (otherwise known as halfway between Northgate Mall and Seattle's city limit at 145th), I looked around the Web to see who else might be saying something about this area. One blogger had said a few things during 2005, but stopped well before I ended up here.

From the viewpoint of a decidedly un-hip but with-it 40 year-old, Pinehurst is pretty lame. Still, during the last year I've discovered a surprising number of interesting gems that allow this area and farther north to be survived, and to share them I've created this blog.

So, what's the focus here? Well, it's a lot like trying to find something like the somewhat cleverly-impoverished lifestyle I lived on Capitol Hill for 7 years, and in Wedgwood for 2 years, in this part of Seattle. FWIW, Seattle seems to forget that anything north of Northgate Mall exists, and when they remember it has to do with making sure all the upwardly mobile condo buyers can get to and from the freeway a little faster in their shiny, fossil-fuel burning conveyance of choice...

But, I digress. The focus here: eating, drinking coffee, getting the necessities of life cheaply and preferably second-hand. Parks and greenbelt-ish areas to stroll. Excellent ways to use mass transit and bicycles without a. taking an hour to go a couple of miles, and b. not becoming someone's hood ornament.

I generally leave Northgate Mall out of these equations for a couple of reasons. First, it's the assumed consumer destination for the north end. Second, everything there is expensive. Third, it's a massive, soul-sucking expanse of asphalt and concrete in which one cannot escape car exhaust or LCD screens spewing all variety of ill messages. However, in a pinch, I'll note a couple of things worth the sacrifice.