Cha Cha Lounge: A review

The Cha Cha Lounge is a chill/hip bar in the Pike/Pine corridor in Seattle's CapHill district. It sells itself itself as a mexican cantina, but it's really a low-key dive bar.

There's two floors: a chill but small sitting space on the ground space, and a much larger space accommodating to larger groups as well, with a  huge dance floor and a very stylized bar downstairs. Often, customers will sit on the top floor as they wait for spaces to open on the lower, funner space. I have it on good authority that on certain nights they have softcore pornography playing there, but the two times I was there with friends, they had random old chinese movies, and really strange artsy sci-fi movies playing there.

The bathroom there is awful, terrible really, not somewhere anybody should ever have to go, even in the worst of situations. The door's broken, the toilets aren't in great shape, and you would be better off using the alley two blocks over and risking getting caught by the police and thrown into jail to be tortured instead of using the loo in here. Just avoid this region if you've got a bladder that's unable to last as long s would be preferable.

The drinks are pretty basic, this is after all a dive-ish bar. Beers are 7 bucks a pop -- five for cheaper crappier ones -- and 9 for mixed drinks. I bought a few for my compadres, and I'd rather have paid more for better ones.

To be quite honest, it's not a problem, the quality and price of the drinks here, because it's almost besides the point. The real question is that of the quality of the clientele: who are the people who show up here, and are they the sort of people you would want to spend any amount of time with, or be comfortable around when you're sober?

Exploratory research conducted in-situ on several occasion suggests that the clientele is actually quite nice and well-educated, which is to be expected considering the population of the city and the neighborhood around. Lots of tourists and new movers to the city as well, and everybody's so loud and friendly here. Complaints of the Seattle freeze are brought out often, but in the faces and eyes of these drunken patrons, that seems like mythology much like the Sasquatch.

This is a pretty decent place, all things considered.