Tom B.
Yelp
This place immediately leaps to the top of the list as the premiere hockey bar in Seattle, without a doubt. No one else is trying even remotely as hard to court the hockey fan as the Angry Beaver is. If you need a spot to watch hockey, you can round up the star rating, or you can just skip that and come in for the game. Odds are they will have it on one of the many big flat screens--even if there are several games happening at once.
If you're looking for live music or food and drinks, the experience may seem a bit more uneven. It's definitely not bad, but they're not really pushing to be amazing in any way other than in entertaining the hockey fan. We came in on a rainy Saturday night to watch the Hawks game after the windstorm knocked out our power at home. We had fun and will certainly come back for hockey.
It's a good-sized space; you might remember it was a medium-sized restaurant before. There's a long bar on the left and maybe a couple dozen tables on the right. The big windows facing Greenwood Ave all open so there's plenty of air, weather permitting. On the bar side, there are more tables, and a long raised shuffleboard table. There are big flat screen TVs everywhere, tuned to the game. Have I mentioned this is a good place to watch sports?
The staff here are young and funny; they're all outgoing and they know some good jokes. They sling a lot of basic mixed drinks and an awful lot of shots. Quite a few broskis in here shooting back the booze, at least on Saturday night. There are about a dozen taps, but they're essentially meaningless for a big beer lover. You can find decent beer for sure, but the pints we drank were a bit under-carbonated and maybe not the freshest. They don't turn kegs over quickly, if those pours were any indication.
The menu is brief; about 4 short pages of burgers, sandwiches, salads, and fried stuff. The menus themselves are old, tattered, and torn. They'll serve food, but you get the sense that people memorize what they want pretty quickly, and the physical menus are kind of a fallback mechanism they keep around mainly for newer customers. This place is only a couple years old, but the menus look ancient already.
The food itself is OK. We had an Angry Burger, advertised as containing ghost pepper sauce and other intense spices. It had some kick to it, but overall it was just a basic burger--it was trying to disintegrate before I was half done. We also had chicken strips (basically just microwaved frozen chicken strips with some hot sauce on them) and the poutine. The poutine is *rad* rad rad, but super salty. We had it with the turkey gravy, which was delicious, but it sounds like the curry might be even better.
As the night went on, a fairly competent cover band set up (took them about an hour to plug in) and started playing. They got a bustling crowd for it--they really started slinging some shots when the music crowd walked in. At this point, our service basically disappeared. It took half an hour to close our tab. Our bartender wandered by with the ice bucket, trays of drinks, and other assorted orders and sidework several times, with no chance to get her attention. A trainee finally rang us out.
They definitely go into live music mode past a certain hour on the weekends, it seems--placing our food order was like pulling fingernails; the bartender was so eager to write up the ticket and get it to the kitchen that every question we asked made her clearly want to punch us in the face. I'd prefer to have gone over 15% at the end of the night just on the chance that this might become a regular stop, but it looks more likely to be a landing zone for groups of people when hockey's on.