Death & Co Seattle opens its fifth bar in Pioneer Square

Death & Co Seattle opened Thursday, September 4, 2026, on RailSpur Alley in Pioneer Square, the fifth outpost for the New York cocktail bar group founded in 2007.

The room seats 80 people between an indoor bar and outdoor seating, set inside a restored brick-and-timber warehouse at 419 Occidental Avenue S. A white marble bar and underlit liquor steps carry over from the group's other rooms; a full wall of windows does not — the original East Village bar has none.

Death & Co Seattle by the numbers

Pioneer Square gets a marble bar and underlit shelves built for the long pour.

The drink menu runs 12 pages, split between seasonal builds and house standards, with a zero-proof section and a short reserve list for guests who want something rarer. Snacks, shared plates and tartines round out the kitchen, including seasonal turns on marionberry and Dungeness crab.

"Our fifth outpost brings our commitment to fine cocktails and exceptional hospitality to the Pacific Northwest while introducing a distinctly local expression of our bar," the company said in its opening statement.

Death & Co opened its flagship in Manhattan's East Village in 2007, at a moment when few American bars printed a cocktail list at all. The group is widely credited with helping push craft cocktails into the mainstream, and its house manuals have gone on to win a James Beard Award. Los Angeles, Denver and Washington D.C. followed before Seattle.

Why Pioneer Square, not somewhere flashier

Co-founder David Kaplan has lived in Seattle for several years and has pointed to Pioneer Square's history and walkability as the draw, saying the neighbourhood reminded him of the East Village where Death & Co began. The bar's arrival tracks a wider swing in the city's oldest district, where new restaurants and bars are filling ground floors that sat empty for years.

Death & Co is one of several openings inside RailSpur, the Occidental Avenue redevelopment from Urban Villages: three restaurants from chef Renee Erickson, Lowlander Brewery, Un Po Tipsy and Mio Oh Mio are moving in around it. That expansion runs against the grain of a hospitality trade where closures elsewhere have been running near twenty a day.

Death & Co has not named a sixth city. For now, Pioneer Square gets the marble bar, the underlit shelves and a wall of windows the East Village original was never built with.