The 5 Point Cafe

On a corner in Belltown, a few blocks from the waterfront, a diner that never closes has been serving Seattle since the 1920s. The 5 Point Cafe is part diner and part dive bar, and it refuses to choose: the griddle runs all day, the taps run all night, and the neon sign out front has been photographed by everybody who has ever walked past it. Anthony Bourdain came through for The Layover, and this is exactly the kind of place a host with one day in a city wants — open at every hour, cheap, loud, and full of locals rather than tourists.

The move here is the breakfast happy hour, the kind of policy that tells you everything about the room: cheap drinks and cheap eggs, early in the morning, for people who have either just finished work or just started. Order the cheese curds if they are on, hot and squeaky from the fryer, and the cheesesteak if you are eating a real meal — a griddled, properly messy example of the genre, with a pile of fries. Coffee comes in a mug and gets refilled without being asked.

It is a 24-hour room, so it has a 24-hour cast: stagehands, fishermen, night nurses and the occasional tourist who has been told it is the place to go. The staff are famously unimpressed by everybody, which is part of the pleasure. Bring cash, keep it simple, and do not ask for a table by the window at 3am.

Bourdain's point about a city is that its character lives in the places that have no reason to pretend, and the 5 Point is that to the letter: a diner that has outlasted every trend around it by refusing to be anything other than itself.