Dining and drinking in the Market
When was Three Girls Bakery founded?
Pike Place Market
While one can easily graze one's way through the Market food stalls and shops, the Pike Place Market offers numerous other eating (and drinking) options. The once endemic workingmen's and sailors' taverns are gone; at roughly opposite corners of the Market, the Virginia Inn (founded as Virginia Bar, approximately 1908; operated as a cardroom during Prohibition, then Virginia Inn; passed into current management 1980 and slowly gentrified) and Place Pigalle (originally Lotus Inn, name dates from 1950s, remodeled 1982) retain their names, but both have gone upmarket. The Athenian Inn in the Main Market traces its history back to a 1909 bakery and is a relatively ungentrified bar and restaurant. Three Girls Bakery dates back to 1912 and may have been the first Seattle business started by women. While it is not in its original Corner Market location, no longer bakes on premises, and its current owner Jack Levy is a man, it still sells a vast variety of baked goods, does a brisk business in takeaway sandwiches, and has an old-style lunch counter. For a different type of dining experience, the Pink Door (founded 1981), entered by a nearly unmarked door on upper Post Alley, is a favorite first-date restaurant, with solid Italian food, a fantasia of a dining room, a bar that sometimes features live jazz, and an outdoor deck overlooking Elliott Bay. Another restaurant combining Italian food and romantic ambience is the "grottolike" Il Bistro, located below grade in the Economy Market, off a cobblestone ramp that leads to Lower Post Alley. When it was founded in 1977 it was played an important role in the rise of fine dining in Seattle. Other longstanding Market restaurants and bars include Lowell's (founded 1957), an old Main Market standby self-described as "almost classy"; French bistro Maximilien, founded in 1975 by François Kissel, owned since 1997 by host Axel Macé and chef Eric Francy, and highly praised by Julia Child; and the Copacabana (founded 1964), Seattle's only Bolivian restaurant, upstairs in the Triangle Market with a balcony overlooking Pike Place.