
Update: Golden City closed in 2022
Now
this is a fine dive bar! This has more of what I was hoping to find in the Ballard Smoke Shop. It's dark, it's intimate, it has backlit "Chinese" art, a huge, old, and terribly executed painting of an antebellum riverside scene, and it has a slightly creepy history to match. (I was informed by a regular that in the old days this place was named "The Plantation.")
And indeed The Plantation was located here from at least the 1940s into the 1980s.

5518 20th Ave NW
Est. 1988 - Closed Aug 27, 2022 - Building constructed 1946
Previous bars at this location: Bayou Room (The Plantation Restaurant)
seattlest -
yelp