The Attic Alehouse & Eatery

What used to be a classic old Seattle bar (think the Roanoke on M. I) is now run by a VERY rude gate keeper who treats it like her special private club. Particularly on game days. I know no other place in Seattle that tells people to go down the street because they are saving the open tables. I’ve been one of those that came early enough that she couldn’t kick me out and watched people be turned away only to not have a full house.
Pubs are in the true fashion meant to be gathering spots for communities; open, FRIENDLY, and fun. The Attic is no longer any of these.

Have been going here for over 40 years because it s close. The woman bar keep has a chip on her shoulder. Not very nice. Never smiles and acts like she is doing us a favor to wat on us. Usually order up at the bar so we don’t have to deal with her. Too bad as we love the atmosphere and history.

Best Seattle Bar! Thanks Colleen for helping us find the perfect location for a 40^th birthday celebration in December!!! Great service, cheap string drinks & karaōke!!!

Great dive bar, something Seattle doesnt have enough of. Great beer list, darts, good menu, friendly but not overbearing staff. A nice reason to visit Madison Valley neighborhood. If youre over 25 and sick of the awful stereotypical and bro-​ish Cap Hill scene head here.

I love the attic: the atmosphere, food, and most the wait staff are great. However, there is one server who is honestly one of the rudest people I’ve ever met. I think her name starts with a C. Quite frankly, I do not think she should be working in the food industry – and reading the other Unilocal reviews it doesn’t look like I’m the only one who thinks so. So while I wish I could give the attic the review it deserves, I cannot.

Food is excellent — I go for the Lee wings (spicy buffalo and garlic), the steak salad, or the best burger I’ve had to date since moving to Seattle served on a Philly style hoagie roll with all the fixin’s.
Ding here is on service. When it’s good, it’s great. But when it’s bad, it is ridiculously awful.
The food and hopes of my favorite servers/​bartenders being on when I go keep me coming back.

There’s a white female heavier-​set bartender with red or blondish-​red hair who is simply rude to customers — I asked her what they had on tap and she pointer to the taps — I was on the side of the bar & couldn’t see — and taps were blocked and not easy to read. She avoided me for several minutes & finally my friend secured waiter service outside — I swear we said nothing wrong — just very rude service from that staffer who needs to be talked with about her lack of professionalism — i have stopped going to the Attic & was once a faithful customer there as they play good sports on their
TVs and have great outdoor seating

The perfect escape from the city in the city. What? Yep that’s what I said. One tasty crab cake melt, good beer selection. However watch out for poopie pants chubs the bartender. Would totally come back.

Great atmosphere for a Sunday afternoon. We loved the curry chicken salad and the meatloaf sandwich was amazing!!! If you like thick burgers (which I’m not into), this is your place. We got the White Russian burger, which was delicious. Lots of great bees on tap and everything is made in-​house.
Awesome, friendly staff and you can tell they get lots of regulars :)
Wonderful Irish pub!

Best. Bar. Ever. Unless you’re a total douche, then please stay away.
Apparently wasn’t enough to satisfy the Unilocal master, so this is just filler.

This is the first time I’ve been anywhere on a trivia night. It was a lot of fun! Drinks and food are totally reasonable and tasty. I had a great time, they played A LOT of Beyoncé which is a plus in my book! Even though our team might not have been the best at trivia, we will be back to try again, and we will win eventually!

Fun bar, good trivia night on Tuesdays. That’s all the good I have to say about the attic. First and foremost, the service is TERRIBLE. Particularly on trivia nights. More often than not the waitress won’t even stop by the table without us going up to the bar and asking for service. Last time we decided to play a little game and wait to see if we would get service and sure enough, 30 minutes without speaking with a waitress. Food is mediocre at best as well. Nachos were cold and dry and seemed like they had been sitting under a heat lamp for hours. Real shame. Could be a great neighborhood pub with better management.

Don’t dare to show up close to the start of Trivia Night (Tuesdays) and occupy a booth. You’ll get the quickest service ever –and no opportunity to order a second drink– as they shoo you out the door to make room for their regulars.
Half the bar was empty while we were eating and we would have happily moved to another table if anyone had cared to ask.

It has been a few years since I have been to this place but it still has that great atmosphere that I remembered from years past. The food was pretty good. I had the barbecue bacon burger. The burger was placed on a hoagie style roll. Unique in its presentation and rather delicious. I would have it again. Many types of beverages on tap and stocked at the bar. Prices were very reasonable and affordable. Parking is a little limited. Karaōke was the theme tonight and that was a lot of fun. If you are on the lower east side of capital hill near Madison St. then you should check this place out.

Great place to grab a beer and watch a sporting event. Gets super crowded on the weekends. Fun atmosphere with both a local vibe and young college crowd. Services can be slow when its busy but the staff is always friendly!

This place has the best damn hamburgers in Madison valley. The staff is super cool and orders come out quickly. Great place to watch any sporting event.
Late night happy hour is a great value.

I am an organizing member of a running group in Seattle. For the better part of a year, our group had been coming to The Attic every other Saturday for post-​run brunch. That ended about 4 months ago when we were informed that they would no longer accept separate checks. No problem – there are plenty of other restaurants that want our business, so we discontinued our patronage in favor of restaurants with better customer service.
On Sunday, November 2^nd, we decided to give them another chance. Big mistake. There were about 12 of us in attendance, and a majority of us were at one table. When we sat down, we were reminded that separate checks were not an option, but that we would be given one check but could use cards to pay. I believe the exact phrase was «a few cards». Side note: Clarify EXACTLY what that means in the future. End side note. (Relevance of side note to be established soon). We all ordered our meals. They took a while to come out, but we were generally OK with that due to the fact that there was a fair sized crowd in the bar. When we were done, the check came. It was a single check. I took it upon myself to separate it out and write down the exact amount to charge for each person’s card (which took about 5 minutes of figuring/​adding/​etc). This was listed meticulously on the back of the bill by name and amount, and this was handed to the server with the cards in the exact order as written on the back of the bill. It was at this point that things went horribly wrong. I was informed by the server that the maximum number of cards they would take was 4. This was the first time that a strict limit on number of cards had been mentioned. I was told that we would have to «consolidate and have people pay each other back» so we could get down to 4 cards. I took a hard line and told the server, under no uncertain terms, that they were going to take the cards as I was handing them to them, and that this was going to be the last time that we were going to patronize their bar. I had done legwork to make their job as simple as possible, so this was not an unreasonable request.
A few minutes later, the cards were brought back to me. The person returning them to me was not our server, but was rather a long-​time employee of the bar that I have had the «pleasure» of interacting with in the past. I am not going to name names, but this individual is the type that is usually grumpy and rubs a lot of people the wrong way. I guess some people find this «charming». They asked/​stated that «This is the last time, huh?» I responded in the affirmative, and questioned the business decision of making things difficult on regular customers. Their response was something along the lines of «We’ve told you several times about this». False – in fact, it was told to us just once, and it was several months ago (which is what caused us to stop coming in the first place). Also, that one time, they just mentioned that they wouldn’t do separate checks. They did NOT ever mention a specific limit on the number of cards we could use. This expectation need to be made clear up front, so the failure here is The Attic’s.
It would have been bad enough had things ended here. However, at this point, I was accused of having threatened the server that I would not pay if they wouldn’t take our cards. False. I told them, in no uncertain terms, that they were going to take all of our cards and collect money from us in that manner, but I never said that we weren’t going to pay. To accuse me of this was WAY over the line. I’m not going to get into what happened after that, because it got ugly.
To the owner of The Attic: Prior to June, our group had been patronizing your establishment every other Saturday for the better part of a year. I can say with confidence that at no time did any of our members do anything to warrant the type of treatment that we received this last time. We patronize many, many other establishments on our Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday runs, and every other place — EVERY. OTHER. PLACE. — loves us. YOU are the outlier, and because of your staff’s actions, you have lost approximately $ 5000 in business over the next year. (Do the math: every other week is about 25 times a year, and we conservatively do $ 200 in business each time: $ 5000).
REBUTTAL TO ATTIC RESPONSE:
If your claim that it takes 25 minutes to run 16 cards is true, then perhaps you need to invest in a modern POS system. I don’t know what I could have done to make it any easier to process our tabs (see original message), but if you consider this to be acting «self-​entitled», then we will have to agree to disagree on that.
To your claim that I was acting «boorish», your floor manager falsely accused me of threatening not to pay. That would make anyone furious. I know how hard it is to be a server, and I would never say this. I always tip 20% (hell, I tipped $ 3 on my $ 13 meal DESPITE all of this – you can go check). It’s YOUR employee that needs the attitude adjustment.

I’ve been to the Attic multiple times as part of a Saturday morning running group, and it seems like the service has become poorer each and every time. My last visit was recent, and it looks like they have chosen to not split bills among a group anymore. Which wasn’t a problem for my group, as we were willing to take one check and write out everyone’s charges (to pay via credit card).
Unfortunately, when the waitress stopped by our table to pick up the cards, she then promptly told us that they can only take up to a max of 4 credit cards, and that we needed to figure out the transfer of funds amongst ourselves afterwards.
Honestly, I had never seen anything like this in an establishment, even at the more dive of bars out there. We refused to do that, so they eventually took our credit cards (which tells me it wasn’t a capability function, but more of case that they’re lazy and didn’t want to run multiple credit cards, when most people don’t carry around cash on them anymore)
To add to that, the service was extremely slow, and it wasn’t as if they were that busy that morning. At one point, I asked a simple question if they could take their salmon and mix it with scrambled eggs. The bartender or someone from behind the bar heard my request and responded with a very curt ‘no’. (no other explanation behind it).
I will never enter this establishment again.

Best bar in Seattle. We walked in on a quiet night on some holiday weekend. I forget which one, but it was a holiday for sure — trust me.
Anyway we sat up at the bar and started talking to Colleen. She’s the best. Really great. We just talked and talked and chatted and talked. Then I looked at my watch — and man — we were there for like 3 hours!!! That’s like a quarter of my waking hours. Maybe a fifth. But it was great. I drank about 4 Manny’s then my sober friend (long story) drove me to Dicks and I took some burgers to the face and I was like «We did it!»
Good night? Great night!

The BF and I were starving and had some time to kill before meeting up with people at Red Onion Tavern just a couple doors down, so we decided to pop in to the Attic for a quick bite.
I have to be completely honest and admit that when we walked in, I wasn’t expecting much on the culinary front as bars typically don’t have the greatest food, but I was proven wrong! I was really craving a burger and fries, so I felt pretty lucky when I saw the vast varieties I could choose from. After thoroughly perusing the menu, I decided on the White Cheddar Russian because bacon sounded amazing but I didn’t want the BBQ sauce + bacon burger. I was shocked and intrigued that a divey-​looking bar served grass-​fed all natural beef (½ lb. patties!!), but took it as a good sign.
Lo and behold, when the food arrived, my assumption was correct! The burger was delicious and probably among the best I’ve ever had at a bar, and the fries were also perfect. Interestingly, the burger also came in a rectangular ciabatta-​like roll instead of a normal hamburger bun, probably to accommodate the ½ lb. patty. The BF ordered the chicken strips with fries and I was quite surprised to see that it had panko-​like breading instead of the typical flour/​buttermilk breading.
We sat at the bar and had very prompt service, and our pints were perfect with our meals. The crowd is definitely a mixed bag, we were the youngest people in there by at least 10 years for a while and then around 8 PM, other people in their 20’s started rolling in. I’d definitely love to come back if I ever find myself in the Madison Park area again!