Cafes in Fremont with Water Views

Milstead & Co.

The Fremont coffee bar people usually mean when they ask this question. Floor-to-ceiling windows and a roll-up garage door look south across Troll Ave to Lake Union under the Aurora Bridge, and the high counter at the front is the seat to get; one Seattle coffee blog calls it the best cafe view in the city. It is a multiroaster, pouring rotating beans from guest roasters rather than its own, in a big industrial room of concrete floors, exposed venting and communal tables. Open 7am to 4pm every day, with a patio on Troll Ave when the weather cooperates. It is busy on weekend mornings.

The Fremont Social

Fremont Mischief's distillery, kitchen and event space sits right on the ship canal, which makes it one of the very few places in the neighbourhood where you can sit at the water's edge with a coffee. The cafe counter has its own door at 129 N 35th Street and runs 8am to 5pm daily; the bar and kitchen only open in the afternoon. Seating is a big open courtyard strung with lights plus a covered rooftop upstairs, so it is more of a hang than a laptop stop. Worth knowing before you go: it is a distillery first, and the cocktail-and-dinner side is the main event.

Mansion Creek Cellars

A small family-owned Walla Walla winery whose Seattle tasting room sits just above the Burke-Gilman Trail on N 34th, with a light-filled room and a patio that take in the Aurora Bridge, the ship canal, the downtown skyline and Mt. Rainier. The pours lean Iberian: Albarino, Tempranillo, Touriga Nacional, alongside more familiar Washington reds. It is a tasting room rather than a cafe, so there is no coffee and it stays shut until 4pm on weekdays and 2pm at weekends, but of the three places here it has the widest view of the water.