The night I visited Triumph Bar in Lower Queen Anne, the traffic on Denny Way was more awful than its usual awful. Cars snailed between lights. You could not make a left or right and break the spell of the slowness. All you could do was feel your short life bleeding lots of time into the red stream of a long jam. "Tonight is bad for driving up here," said the friendly bartender at Triumph, soon after I settled down and released from my nerves a hot blast of tension. "Ben Harper is playing at McCaw Hall and Selena Gomez at KeyArena. That's a double whammy for Denny."

He was pouring a glass of house wine. I was looking at the menu, and behind me were tall windows and a number of tables with 90-degree-angle banquettes that a friend of mine really dislikes ("They are designed for robot butts"). I did not like the furniture because of what it directly said to me when I walked into the place: "Sit here and spend lots of money." I chose the bar because its eyes were not so fixed on my wallet. At happy hour, the small plates go for about $5, the wine $6, and most of the items on the main menu ask for just below or just above $14.

Owned by two brothers who are both sommeliers, Jim and Brandon Marsh, Triumph Bar is, in essence, a wine bar. It has a huge and mostly Italian wine list—30 glass pours, more than 300 bottles, and so on. The brothers, however, do not describe their place as a wine bar; they instead want people to see it as a well-rounded affair of wines, cured meats, many cheeses, small plates, and not-so-small plates. (The food here, by the way, met my decent standards, and I especially loved the fried oysters.) But, really, why not call this place a wine bar? Because, like those tables next to the windows, the name "wine bar" always says: "Sit here and spend lots of money."

Lastly, the most special thing about the Triumph Bar—and it is something that's only visible from the tables by the windows—is the Space Needle rising behind its space-age sign, which hangs outside and above the sidewalk. recommended