How do you get into Needle & Thread?
Needle & Thread is listed as inside another business. Walk through a working business to reach the bar.
We hold a note of which business fronts it, from map data rather than from the venue. The venue has not published that itself, so we are not naming it: the front is the one step that gets a stranger through this kind of door, and that is the venue’s to give.
Reservations are taken through Opentable. Booking ahead is the surest way in.
What “inside another business” means in practice
A bar reached through a working business is the arrangement Prohibition actually produced. A shopfront that stood up to a glance from the street was the point, and the trade carried on behind it. The modern version keeps the structure and drops the risk: the front is a real business with real customers, and the door at the back is not hidden from anyone who asks. The practical consequence is that the front business’s hours can govern your access, not the bar’s.
The drinks at Needle & Thread
How the venue describes itself: “Capitol Hill cocktail bar since 2009, with the Needle & Thread speakeasy hidden upstairs. Seasonal cocktails, gastropub dinner, and happy hour daily 5 to 7 PM.” (from its own website, retrieved 9 October 2026)
Beyond what the venue publishes we have not verified a list, so what follows is the period rather than the bar: Bronx, Monkey Gland, and Hanky Panky are all drinks of this era, and each links to its origin and its build.
Where Needle & Thread sits
Needle & Thread is in Seattle, Washington, in King County, in the West of the United States. The city sits inside the Puget Sound metropolitan area.
Our directory currently lists twelve speakeasies and hidden bars in Seattle. The full list is on our guide to hidden bars in Seattle.
Measured from the map pins, the closest of those to Needle & Thread are Paper Fan Cocktail Bar, about 600 m away, Knee High Stocking Co., about 900 m away, and Temperance Bar, about 1.7 km away.
Washington holds 29 listed venues in this directory. See them all on our Washington speakeasy guide.
Prohibition in Washington
Washington did not wait for the federal government. Statewide prohibition took effect here in 1916, four years before the Eighteenth Amendment came into force nationally on 17 January 1920. By the time the Volstead Act was being enforced across the country, Washington already had an established illegal trade and the habits that went with it.
More on the period in our history of Prohibition in Washington.
What the newspapers recorded in Seattle
Searching the Library of Congress run of Washington newspapers for speakeasy, blind pig and bootlegger across 1920 to 1933 returns dated pages anyone can open. These are from Seattle:
- The Seattle star, September 21, 1925 — read the page at the Library of Congress
- The Seattle star, March 5, 1924 — read the page at the Library of Congress
- The Seattle star, October 30, 1923 — read the page at the Library of Congress
- The Seattle star, September 17, 1925 — read the page at the Library of Congress
Planning a visit
Hours published by the venue:
- 17:00-02:00
Hours as published on the venue’s own site, retrieved 9 October 2026.
You can reach Needle & Thread by phone on (206) 325-0133, through its own website, and on Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok.
The address is 1406 12th Avenue, Seattle, WA 98122. Open in Google Maps.
What we have confirmed
For Needle & Thread we hold street address, telephone number, official website, social accounts, opening hours, and an online booking link. We do not yet hold a published drinks list or a listed-building record.
It is in the directory because the description in the source data describes it as entered through another business and describes it as a speakeasy and the map tags on the record mark it a cocktail bar and mark it as serving cocktails.
Two independent open datasets, OpenStreetMap and Overture Maps, both carry this venue at this location. Agreement between them is the strongest existence check we can make without visiting.
The source data classifies the premises as a bar.