More Than Coffee Art: Art with Your Coffee
In Seattle, coffee shops are a stone’s throw away from another ranging from newly opened stores to one of the city’s originals. The market for quality coffee is fierce and thriving with avid consumers in search of premium brewed coffee and roasted beans. Whether a small coffee shop or robust roastery, people venture through heated competition searching for a better experience beyond a good sip.
Past the coffee cup, a thriving coffee shop is filled with satisfied customers having the ability to sit at a table, lounge leisurely, and possibly work on a laptop with free wifi. Seattle shops routinely deliver these modest customer requests.
Here are four coffee shops around the Seattle area that can be ideal for finding your next open seat—and of course local art.
“Meditation” by Steve Calandrillo hanging at Cafe Allegro / The Evergreen Echo
Established in 1975 and Seattle's original espresso bar, Cafe Allegro sits nestled in an alleyway in University District. The cafe is filled with generous seating and a small coffee bar. Seating is primarily two-tops with more limited seating for larger groups. While it is in the original space and structure from its founding, the business has grown and the tables are thoughtfully spaced to accommodate larger crowds.
Within Cafe Allegro’s early 2025 rotating art showcase features abstract artists Gail Brennan and Steve Calandrillo, a law professor at the University of Washington. Their art stresses the chaos in the world and comes to life with bold, vibrant colors vividly strewn across and around the canvas. The colors have high contrast against their backgrounds, which are primarily subtle, paler shades. While the application may seem untidy at first sight, there is an orderly and hopeful procedure behind the collection as a whole. The harmonious color choices are splashed and composed with intentional order and familiarity.
Farther south into the South Lake Union (SLU) neighborhood is one location of Cafe Vivace. The SLU location has a shy collection of art for sale and less foot traffic than its flagship counterpart, but has spacious, ample seating in a more inactive space. There’s high and low top seating along with multiple, larger group tables—some with six seats and another in a more rounded lounge setting.
Cafe Vivace has expansive walls to flaunt many art pieces. Some art are resident pieces like a latte art photograph collection and a grand 20th century European painting (not for sale). The cafe’s early 2025 art rotation at the SLU location hosts Ross Boa Collado, a Seattle-based abstract expressionist painter. While the for-sale art is battling the resident art for space within the cafe, Collado paints a myriad of desolate, abstract landscapes. There is a haunting emptiness from the lack of living creatures. From dim caves, vacant sunsets, and ominous mountains, Collado’s collection expands a space and brings depth with striking color gradients and deliberate application of textures that extend the painting’s experience beyond the canvas.
Shortly up Capitol Hill sits Ghost Note Coffee, serving their lattes with a grapefruit peel. Compared to the other mentioned coffee shops so far, Ghost Note Coffee has notably less seating. Though, being on a less busy end of Bellevue Ave, you can typically count on finding a small table for yourself.
In a resounding abstract artist theme, Ghost Note Coffee’s early 2025 artist exhibit is by abstract artist Ed Craggs. Cragg’s abstract art is heavy with color blocking. The various blocks are overlapping and squeezed into the confines of the canvas. Pieces within his #1s and #60s series jump off the boundaries of average canvas and spill over into their own custom panels of superimposed and brimmed color. In his earlier collections, each of the color blocks are their own distinct projects with individualized attention and richly unique texture. In his 2020s paintings, the artist moves into softer blending and texture sharing between the batches of color.
Oil on panel painting by Ed Craggs hanging at Ghost Note / The Evergreen Echo
New to the Capitol Hill area, specifically atop First Hill, is Piedmont Cafe, a coffee shop that opened early January 2025. The cafe is housed in an architecturally rich, mixed-use building with an interior of high ceilings. The furniture looks antique with well-crafted woodwork chairs and tables that comfortably fit yourself or a group up to four.
One of the business owners of Piedmont Cafe, Tom Cullen, put out two large pieces towering above a leather loveseat and lounge chair. Uncertain of the history of the paintings, Cullen could only recall that the baroque-inspired painting was by a Capitol Hill native, a man by the name of Coffin J., who has since passed. The piece features an eerie solace of a masculine figure smoking a cigarette observing an unlit candle alone in the darkness. The light source unexpectedly comes from the right side of the objects of focus, off frame.
The painting is potent with consuming blackness only broken by light illuminating a fraction of a man. There is duality balancing the unsettling spookiness and a peaceful moment of stillness.
