After quite a long day out, and an evening visit to the Space Needle to come, we decided to stay around the area for an evening meal. We checked out a few fast food places but were not impressed with what we saw on offer… or they were closing up for the day.

Wandering back near the glass exhibition we noticed another building that houses the Chihuly Collections Cafe. We ventured inside and we were so glad we did.

The restaurant was an excellent choice for good fresh food and also for something quite different from blown glass…. Chihuly’s other addiction, collecting things! As David is an avid collector of stuff, it didn’t take much persuasion to get him to have a meal here.

As soon as you walk into the long, narrow room, you can’t help looking up into the high-ceiling adorned with accordions… just one of Chihuly’s collections.

One wall cabinet is filled with transistor radios… quite nostalgic.

Thirty six of Chihuly’s colourful drawings are back lit on another wall… looks like he’s a big kid at heart and I guess he is.

A window box is filled with coffee jugs.

And that’s not all. The centre of every table is fitted with a glass topped box, each one containing a selection from Chihuly’s personal collections of nostalgic Americana.

(Photo from the brochure we were given.)

  We shared our table with citrus juicers.

But we might just have easily been given a table that sported dollhouse furniture, inkwells, shaving brushes, metal toy dogs, christmas ornaments or little masks like these.

Even the cutlery was a bit out of the ordinary… nice to handle, though.

Much of the lighting in the restaurant came from flickering candles diffused behind textured glass… probably those modern electric candles, but the effect was good.

And after dining on our delicious meals, created with local, fresh ingredients, and thinking that we had seen it all, we discovered that we hadn’t!

The walls of the entrance hallways to the toilets are covered with many hundreds of bottle openers. Interestingly, these were ‘caged in’, probably against any light fingered person who just might decide to start their own collection!

Quite some restaurant! So, if you ever get to Seattle, we can recommend both the glass exhibition and the restaurant. We hope you’ve enjoyed this visit to the Chihuly Glass Exhibition and Gardens… and the Collections Cafe.

Next post we’ll visit another fascinating place in Seattle… the Aquarium.

Jennie and David

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