Seattleite Guide, Again

Around 2015, my team at Y-Designs and I built a thing called Seattleite Guide. It was a side project born out of the simple frustration that Yelp was noisy and Google Maps was generic. We wanted a curated, neighborhood-by-neighborhood guide to Seattle. Just the places we actually liked, with enough context to be useful.

We focused on what we called "Good Things," the places that make each Seattle neighborhood worth exploring. No chains. No algorithmic recommendations. Each neighborhood had its own page with character, local context, and a hand-drawn feel. You could browse by area, filter by category: Coffee, Dining, Nightlife, Art & Culture. Everything plotted on a map.

It ran on Google Maps and a CMS backed site. Simple and effective. Then Google changed their Maps API pricing, the site broke, and none of us got around to fixing it. The Internet Archive still has it, with the broken map tiles and all.

A decade passed. I kept a mental list the whole time: cafes where I could park my laptop for hours, late-night dessert spots for after-dinner, the bakery that actually does the croissant right, the tiny Lebanese place in Loyal Heights with the deepest wine list you've never heard of. I do still live in this town after all.

The list lived in my head, in scattered Google Maps saves, in texts to friends asking "where was that place again?" Google Maps still doesn't solve the problem that started all of this. When I search "date night Seattle" I get the same SEO-optimized Yelp results everyone else gets. When I want a work cafe that's open late, Google doesn't know what "work cafe" means. These are personal, opinionated categories that no algorithm can replicate because they're about my taste and my use cases.

New realities of kids and everything else made it so that whenever I would go out to dinner with the wife or out on my own (with the very little time I have now), I forget how many wonderful businesses exist here. I need a way to remember them for when I need them.

So I built it again. Different this time. Not a team project at a design/development agency, not trying to be a product. Just my personal list, verified against Google Places data, living as a single page on this site.

You can filter by what you're actually looking for: Coffee & Work, Date Night, Late Night, Dessert, etc. Search is fast (Cmd+K). Everything's on a map. Hours are front and center because the whole point of a guide like this is knowing what's open when you need it.

No accounts, no reviews from strangers, no ads. Just a list from someone who lives here.