Bar #21: Cure - Capitol Hill

Wow, it's been almost three years since the last bar review? No time for excuses, though. Let's just jump back into it:

Cure is a small bar in Capitol Hill near Cal Anderson Park. The focus is on small plates (cured meats, fancy cheeses, olives) and drinks. There's an L-shaped bar area with nine seats, and 10 tables for groups of two to four. 

My lady and I sat at the bar and started with $10 cocktails, a Remedium and a Toronto. The cocktails were fine, but if I'm gonna pay double digits for a drink, I'd rather go to a place like Zig Zag, where the quality matches the price. We ordered a prosciutto plate, a speck plate and some olives. The meats and cheeses on the plates were tasty, but the portions were a little small for the prices ($11.95 and $12.95). Maybe the best thing foodwise was the complimentary bowls of spicy pumpkin seeds on the bar—we inhaled three bowls of the damn things.

I switched to beer and went with a Ninkasi IPA. Cure has three beers on tap (Ninkasi IPA, Odin's Gift and Busch), and a handful more in bottles and cans. The current can selection (Kokanee, Stella, Rolling Rock) is pretty lame. Would be nice to have something from Fremont or at least a more appealing shitty-beer option like Hamm's. The only good cheap beer option here is Rainier in bottles. But at $3.50 a pop, it really isn't cheap. You're better off throwing down $4.50 for a Ninkasi draft.

I liked the low-key feel of the bar. There were only a handful of people there on a Saturday evening, and I didn't want to strangle any of them (a rarity in Capitol Hill on a weekend night). While it's not the kind of bar I'd come to often, I could see returning occasionally for a snack and a drink.