Purple Café and Wine Bar

In 2004, The Seattle Public Library opened their spacey new building on Fourth Avenue in downtown, designed by architect Rem Koolhaas, featuring one of the most innovative things to happen to books since the Dewey Decimal System—The Books Spiral. The Books Spiral is like a parking garage for books, a four-tier ramp allowing contiguous access to the 1.5 million nonfiction books in their catalog. It’s damn impressive.

Walking into Purple Café, just a few blocks from the library, you’re met with the same kind of man-made wonder, the Wine Tower. This monolithic structure rising through two stories of vertical space, ribboned with a spiral staircase, is stocked up with countless bottles of wine, making your eyes widen as you step into the café like you’ve just stumbled upon the Holy Grail while window shopping. You immediately wish you could make like Jack and go beanstalking for treasure.

On the surface, the downtown Purple Café appears less like the small, quaint restaurant you’ve come to expect from a café, and more like the large, swank dining establishment you’d look for in the hub of the metropolis. Indeed, the location on Fourth Avenue is spacious, architecturally striking, and a bit on the posh side of the spectrum, but the truth is that it’s merely an exploded version of their much smaller cafés in Woodinville and Kirkland, both of which perfectly allow for the lazy afternoon of casual dining and wine sipping. Even the colossal Wine Tower is a larger version of the less imposing one found behind the bar in Kirkland.

The wine list is daunting—a hardbound, eighty-two page compendium of bottles, glasses and flights. Perhaps a better way to go is to order from their Tasting Bar menu, where you can find small delicacies paired with half-glasses of wine, like the gorgonzola stuffed dates with pine nuts and saba ($5)paired with a 2006 Colosi from Sicilia, Italy ($5), or the Bleu d’Auvergne ‘Terre des Volcans’ French bleu cheese ($3) with the 2005 Château Lagarosse Premières Côtes de Bordeaux ($5). You won’t find a hearty meal in the Tasting Bar menu, but you will find a delicious and fun pastime while you chat it up with a friend.

That’s really what makes Purple a true café. While lunch and dinner are options, Purple is a great place to meet up with friends while trying wine and food combinations that are bound to be part of the conversation.