Seattle Pre & Post-Alaska Cruise Guide: Where To Stay, Eat & What To Do

Chihuly Garden and Glass

I’ve been here multiple times and it still stops me cold. Dale Chihuly’s permanent exhibition beneath the Space Needle features eight galleries and an outdoor garden tracing fifty years of his career, including a glasshouse with a hundred-foot suspended sculpture in colors you’ll struggle to describe afterward. Go in the morning when the light through the glass is most dramatic, and buy tickets online before you arrive.

Museum of Pop Culture (MoPop)

Frank Gehry’s wildly misshapen building at Seattle Center looks like a crumpled guitar made of stainless steel and is worth seeing for the architecture alone. Inside, rotating exhibitions and permanent collections explore rock and roll, science fiction, and popular culture with genuine depth and hands-on interactivity. Pair it with Chihuly in a single day—they’re neighbors at Seattle Center.

Secret Food Tours Seattle

This is one of my favorite ways to spend a morning in the city. A small-group walking food tour through Pike Place Market takes you to the spots most visitors walk straight past: the chowder that earns its reputation, the fish stalls that actually matter, the back-alley spots that have fed Seattle for decades. Go hungry. You’ll spend the rest of your trip going back to the places they showed you.

Pike Place Market and Olympic Sculpture Park

Approach Pike Place slowly, with good coffee in hand and nowhere specific to be. The fish-throwing is a spectacle worth seeing once, but the real market is in the stalls behind it, where gleaming produce, flower vendors, and small makers have held their spots for over a century. Walk the waterfront afterward to the Olympic Sculpture Park, one of the great free outdoor art experiences in the Pacific Northwest.

Capitol Hill

Capitol Hill is where Seattle actually lives—the city’s most creative, diverse, and culturally vital neighborhood, and the traditional home of Seattle’s LGBTQ community. It has a quality of welcome you feel without anyone announcing it, and the Pike/Pine corridor has the best concentration of restaurants, bars, and bookshops in the city. An evening that starts at dinner here and ends at a Capitol Hill cocktail bar is an evening you’ll describe for years.

Washington State Ferry to Bainbridge Island

The ferry from Pier 52 costs fifteen dollars round trip and delivers one of the great short sea journeys on the West Coast, with the Seattle skyline receding behind you and the Olympic Mountains growing ahead. Winslow, Bainbridge’s small downtown, is a short walk from the terminal: galleries, boutiques, good coffee, and a genuinely slow afternoon. Take the ferry back in the late afternoon when the light on the water turns golden. This is the perfect post-cruise day.

Ballard

Head north to Ballard for a walkable afternoon through one of Seattle’s most characterful neighborhoods. Old Ballard Avenue has beautifully preserved Scandinavian architecture, strong independent restaurants and shops, and the Hiram Chittenden Locks nearby, where you can watch boats pass between Puget Sound and Lake Union for free. It’s also where you’ll find the Walrus and the Carpenter, which alone makes the trip worth it.

Woodinville Wine Country

Thirty minutes northeast of Seattle, Woodinville puts dozens of acclaimed Washington State producers in a single afternoon. Washington’s Columbia Valley has been making world-class Cabernets and Syrahs for decades, and the tasting rooms make discovering them a genuine pleasure rather than a project. An excellent half-day if your schedule allows.

The Walrus and the Carpenter

Honestly, this might be my favorite restaurant in Seattle. Renee Erickson’s Ballard oyster bar opened in 2010 and is still, fifteen years later, the most loved restaurant in the city—no reservations, walk-in only, and worth every minute of the wait. Here’s what I order: whatever oysters are on the board, the sardines with walnut gremolata and the steak tartare on rye toast, which is the best in Seattle.

Taylor Shellfish Oyster Bar

Taylor Shellfish Farms is the producer behind most of the great oysters you’ll eat across Seattle, and going to their Capitol Hill bar is going straight to the source. I order the Shigoku and Kumamoto oysters, geoduck crudo when it’s on, and whatever the daily crab preparation is.

Canlis

Open since 1950 and still the most celebrated restaurant in the Pacific Northwest, Canlis is a five-course experience in a landmark building overlooking Lake Union, with twenty consecutive Wine Spectator Grand Awards, live piano every evening, and service that makes you feel like the only table in the room. Book it for the night before you board—you’ll think about that dinner on the ship.

Spinasse

Piedmontese pasta on Capitol Hill and one of Seattle’s most consistently outstanding restaurants. I order the hand-rolled tajarin with brown butter and sage, the seasonal braised meat, and a glass from the northern Italian section of the wine list. Book one to two weeks ahead—the room is small and fills every night.

Musang

Chef Melissa Miranda’s Beacon Hill restaurant channels the warmth of a Filipino family table through a lens that’s firmly contemporary, and it’s the most talked-about dining room in Seattle right now. The lechon, the sinigang, the whole experience—this is the dinner you describe to people when you get back.

Sushi Kashiba

Shiro Kashiba is a legend in Pacific Northwest Japanese cuisine, and his sushi bar at Pike Place Market, with views over Elliott Bay from the counter, offers some of the finest omakase in the region. Book the chef’s counter and leave the decisions entirely to Kashiba.

The Pink Door

There is no sign. You find the pink door on Post Alley near Pike Place Market, open it, and descend into one of Seattle’s most atmospheric rooms: Italian food, views over Elliott Bay, and live cabaret on certain evenings. The hidden entrance is part of the experience—go later in the evening for the full effect.

Tavern Law and Needle and Thread

Tavern Law has been a Capitol Hill institution since 2009, a GQ-recognized craft cocktail bar with rotating themed menus and what I’d argue is the best bar snack in Seattle (cheddar corn cracklins with serrano fondue). The real move is Needle and Thread, the speakeasy upstairs: reserve online, find the vintage phone in the back corner, call and a door unlocks. A bartender with no menu makes you something outstanding based on whatever you love.

Canon

Canon shows up on virtually every serious whiskey list in the country, from Garden & Gun’s top bourbon bars to North America’s 100 Best Bars. The inventory is extraordinary, and the bartenders know it the way a great sommelier knows a cellar. If whiskey is your thing, this one is not optional.

The Nest at Thompson Seattle

The Thompson’s rooftop bar sits sixteen floors above the city, with Puget Sound below and the Olympic Mountains on the horizon—it’s my first stop every time I check in. First-come, first-served, ages 21 and up. On a clear Seattle evening, it’s hard to argue with this view.