- THEVIKINGBALLARD.COM
- Nooooooooooooo!
The Bus Stop is gone. So is the 1st Hill Bar & Grill. And the Broadway Grill.
And now the tiny, classic Viking Tavern—serving Ballard since 1950, with the photographs of opening day and timelessly great ambiance to prove it—is closing forever.
Here's an interview with longtime owner Tim Cannon, including when and why the Viking started selling fresh eggs by the dozen.
And here's an appreciation of both the Viking's barbecue and the place as a Seattle institution by Rachel Kessler from way back in 2001:
There is something about the Viking that reminds me of old Seattle: the lush and green and lonely Seattle of the 1970s, imbued with the infinite sadness of spent resources and industrialized, polluted, then abandoned riverbanks. In the old Seattle, there were weeds, and dogs without leashes. The paint peeled off houses and nobody bothered the city council about it. My grandpa, a lean man who sleeps with a gun under his pillow in his mossy rambler out in Preston, would drink at the Viking if he lived in Ballard. I imagine both my grandparents being very comfortable at the Viking, in fact, with their pair of Dobermans, Acey and Deucy, at attention next to several rib bones picked clean...The ground upon which the Viking stands will become a development called the Ballard Lofts. Please join me now in a moment of silent hating of the world.
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