Overview
Merchant's Cafe opened in 1890 in Pioneer Square as Seattle rebuilt from its Great Fire, and it has poured and fed ever since — the city's oldest restaurant by common claim — its long bar shipped round the Horn, its upper floors once lodging Gold Rush transients in rougher configurations, and its basement opening onto the buried sidewalks of the pre-fire street level that the Underground tours made famous. Its ghost lore is Pioneer Square distilled: staff, diners and tour guides describe a young girl on the stairs and in the dining room, figures in Klondike-era dress at the bar and in the card room, voices, glassware and chairs shifting, and a heavier presence in the underground levels, with tellers linking the stories — loosely and unprovenly — to the quarter's boom-time hardships. The cafe has featured on television investigations and neighbours the Underground tour routes. These accounts should be presented as the neighbourhood's accumulated telling, colourful and unverified. Current opening details should be confirmed before publishing, as historic Pioneer Square tenancies change.