Sushi Kashiba occupies 86 Pine Street, a half-block off Pike Place Market, where chef Shiro Kashiba opened his namesake room in December 2015. It is built around the sushi counter, and that counter, with a glass of sake in hand, is one of the great bar seats in Seattle.
The history is the reason it belongs in any serious guide to the city. Kashiba trained in Tokyo under the master Jiro Ono before moving to Seattle and opening the city's first true sushi bar in 1970, decades before raw fish was a local habit. Sushi Kashiba is the capstone of that career, and the chef still works the counter when he is in the house.
The room offers three ways in, and the bar is the best of them. The sushi counter serves omakase, chef's choice handed across the bar one piece at a time; the tables suit groups; and a separate cocktail bar handles the wait and the drinkers. For the purposes of a bar guide, the play is the counter or the cocktail bar, both built for sitting and sipping rather than rushing.
What to drink is sake, and the list is deep enough to reward asking the staff to match it to the fish. The cocktail bar adds a short, precise list for anyone holding for a counter seat. This is a special-occasion room and prices like one, so the omakase is the splurge and the cocktail bar is the lower-commitment way to taste the place.
Yelp logs more than 1,500 reviews through June 2026, and the consensus is steady: the counter is the experience, the omakase is worth the spend, and a seat in front of Kashiba himself is the version people remember. Reservations move fast, though the bar holds walk-in seats for the patient.
The crowd is a special-occasion mix of anniversaries, visitors and serious sushi eaters, with a quieter run of regulars who come for the cocktail bar and a few pieces a la carte. The counter sets the tone: it is a sitting, paying-attention room rather than a loud one, and the staff pace the omakase to match. Wikipedia traces the lineage that the reviews keep circling back to, the Jiro Ono training and the 1970 first-in-the-city sushi bar, which is why a seat in front of Kashiba carries the weight it does.
Best time to go is early in the evening at the counter, when the fish is freshest and the chef has room to work; a 5pm reservation beats a late one. For anyone unwilling to commit to the full omakase spend, the cocktail bar is the lower-stakes entry, a drink and a few pieces without the multi-course price. Either way the room rewards patience over speed, which is the whole point of a great sushi bar.
Mei-Lin's read: skip the table, take a counter stool, order the omakase and a flight of sake, and let the chef set the pace. If the counter is booked, the cocktail bar is a fair consolation with a drink and a few pieces a la carte. For more of the city, see the best bars in Seattle and the roundup of cocktail bars in Seattle, or browse the national cocktail bars pillar. A few blocks on, Zig Zag Cafe in Seattle is the classic post-dinner cocktail stop.
