The Top Pot of Belltown

Living in Seattle makes us all aware of the coffee lifestyle. Seattleites have their favorite, corky, coffee house, whether they drink coffee or not. Because it is not about the coffee, it is about what that time spent in a coffee house means; sitting down, reading books, sipping on one’s choice of beverage, which for me would be a 16 oz Americano. It feels like a European experience, where conversation or deep thoughts are the point of coming.

So as I was exploring Belltown, a place where every apartment building is required to have street level retail, I was keeping my eye out for that neighborhood’s corky coffee house that teleports one to the streets of Paris.

Top Pot is its name and hand-forged Doughnuts are its game. It is these doughnuts that separate Top Pot from many other Seattle coffee houses. Starbucks seems to think so as well since soon Starbucks will begin selling Top Pot’s doughnuts nation wide.

This is an important change for Top Pot, but will its corky customers begin to fade away? At first there were worries of this and perhaps there still remains some nerves, but every visit to Belltown’s Top Pot the same amount of tables remain filled and just as many coffees steam off the tables.

Set right off to the side of the monorail, Top Pot’s angular glass-front entry is opening and welcoming. The presence of “the regulars” of Top Pot is not off putting. On a Sunday afternoon every table is filled, occupied by couples and friends, and by singles sitting and writing on, most-commonly, at least for this afternoon, their MacBook computers.

Top Pot’s left and right walls contain floor to ceiling bookshelves, every shelf filled. The books staring at me are, Montaigne, Shakespeare I, Gilbert-Galileo-Harvey, Darwin, Tolstoy, Freud and the entire set of The Encyclopedia Americano.

As far as the requirement that all Belltown Apartment buildings must have retail stores, Top Pot seems to be something worth mentioning to any apartment shopper looking within the two-block radius of this coffee library.

Top Pot slips perfectly into Belltown’s corky and eclectic atmosphere. And though it’s doughnuts have gone corporate Top Pot still feels like that little whole in the wall.