Seattle has a lot to offer beyond soccer, and if you’re joining us from some faraway land (Bellevue), we compiled a list of some of our favorite places and things to eat, which are all easily accessible from the Seattle Stadium (aka Lumen Field—they’ve renamed it for the World Cup).
Slurp down fresh oysters at Taylor Shellfish Oyster Bar, which is just a five-minute stroll into Pioneer Square. Or walk about 15 minutes west to hop on a Washington State Ferry and take in spectacular views of the Seattle skyline. If you want to skip the tourist trap crap, you’ll find some real Seattle treasures at Lander Street Vintage, and you can experience virtual reality art that’s actually good throughout the downtown corridor. We even tell you where to buy weed, because it’s legal here! (You must be 21 or older, and you’re not supposed to consume it in public, just FYI.)
Food & Drink
Uwajimaya
Chinatown–International District
Uwajimaya is one of the largest Asian retailers in North America, and the Seattle location is a brisk 15-minute walk from the Seattle Stadium. It’s more than 35,000 square feet, and it will make all your snack cravings come true. There’s a grab-and-go deli department stocked with hot and cold dishes, including sushi, noodle bowls, musubi, banh mi, and some of the best inari you’ll ever have, as well as a food court with a dozen different eateries serving everything from cream puffs to hot pot. My favorite nook in the market, though, is the snack department. It’s stocked with dozens, nay hundreds, of chips, crisps, cookies, chocolates, gummy and chewy candies, and practically every imported KitKat flavor you can imagine. Flavors rotate, but I’ve grabbed Sakura, Melon, Salt Lemon, Pistachio, and Chocolate Daifuku in recent years. MEGAN SELING
Seattle-Style Hot Dogs
Various locations
Seattle Stadium will be surrounded by hot dog vendors during the World Cup matches, and you will see a lot of signs for Seattle-style dogs. Don’t be scared, they’re delicious! The main feature of a Seattle-style dog is the fat scoop of cream cheese, which is usually smeared on the bottom half of the bun or sometimes applied with what looks like a caulking gun. It’s very important that the cream cheese be applied to the bun before the weiner, so the hot dog—whether you get a veggie or meat option—gets the cream cheese all melty. Grilled onions are plopped on top, and from there you can dress it up however you’d like. Some add spice with jalapeños or sriracha, others load it up with sauerkraut. Follow your heart—we don’t have any weird anti-condiment rules, like Chicago. MEGAN SELING
Fuji Bakery
Chinatown–International District
Fuji Bakery is the place where any order is right. The spread at the walk-up storefront on King Street in the Chinatown–International District (which is less than a 15-minute walk from the stadium) is dazzling: sugar-dusted malasadas overflowing with sweet gobs of matcha or ube cream, crispy chicken katsu or egg salad sandwiches made with fat slices of fresh-baked milk bread, deep golden croissants, custardy canelés, and more. I found Fuji (or Fuji found me) shortly after moving to Seattle years ago, and in that time, I’ve tried nearly everything without disappointment, but the unassuming milk stick, a plain-looking chewy loaf sliced down the middle and slathered with a pillowy sweet cream filling, has emerged as my favorite. VIVIAN McCALL
Tai Tung Chinese Restaurant
Chinatown–International District
Before he was an internationally renowned martial arts superstar, Bruce Lee was just a college kid in Seattle, and his favorite dish was the beef in oyster sauce from Tai Tung—today the city’s oldest Chinese restaurant, founded in 1935. Reportedly, Lee was such a devoted regular that he didn’t even have to order—he’d just sit down at his favorite corner table, and the servers would bring him his food. Pay a visit to the local treasure to dine like the Little Dragon himself. Charismatic third-generation owner Harry Chan will greet you with a smile, and you’ll see that Lee’s entrée of choice is still a banger, swimming in savory-sweet sauce. JULIANNE BELL
Taylor Shellfish Oyster Bar
Pioneer Square
Our humble city happens to be one of the best places in the world to eat oysters, and it would be a shame not to take advantage of that. The “tide-to-table” retailer Taylor Shellfish has been in the game for five generations and sources the offerings at its oyster bars directly from its own farms daily for maximum freshness. Bonus: Their Pioneer Square location is a five-minute walk from the Seattle Stadium. Hit up their weekday happy hour (3–5 p.m.) for the $2.25 “shuck of the day,” and let the resident shuckers explain the finer points of the bivalves while you eat. JULIANNE BELL
Maneki
Chinatown–International District
Newcomers may not know that, although our city is pretty fucking white, Seattle’s Japanese American community has been in town almost as long as any other group of settlers—the first wave of emigrants arrived from Japan in 1880—and is a crucial part of our culinary psyche. Opening in 1904 and named for the maneki-neko, the beckoning cat figurine that apocryphally brings good luck to its owner, Maneki is the oldest sushi restaurant in the nation, and it’s been a paragon of Japanese cuisine in the US for 120 years. The original building mimicked a Japanese castle; it had private tatami rooms, the servers wore kimonos, and the restaurant could seat 500. But during WWII, when its owners were forcibly interned in camps, the building was vandalized and ransacked. The restaurant reopened half a block away in 1946, with new tatami rooms. Currently owned by former server Jean Nakayama, Maneki’s known by locals as the untouristy spot for world-class sushi (sorry, Shiro). If you ARE a tourist, you can eat geoduck here, a PNW delicacy that’s honestly just a big expensive clam shaped like a dick. But like everything else on the menu, Maneki styles it expertly, sautéing it with mushrooms, butter, and chili. MEG VAN HUYGEN
Arts and Culture
Cannonball Arts
Downtown
Cannonball Arts opened in August 2025 as Seattle’s largest contemporary art space. The 66,000-square-foot building, which used to be a Bed Bath & Beyond, is full of art you can touch, ride, walk through, sit on, and hold. There’s Monster, a virtual reality installation made from an old VR Monster Truck amusement park ride, and “Virginia Park,” an indoor sculpture park and trail. Even the individual bathroom stalls have their own art installations. A highlight of the space—and what you have likely seen photos of from travel bloggers all over Instagram—is Toxic Beauty, a bright-pink rideable plush nudibranch. What’s a nudibranch? Glad you asked! It’s a small marine animal in the same family as sea slugs, and you can find them in local tidepools. The nudibranch at Cannonball, made by fiber artist Stephanie Metz, is 10 feet long, and it swings around and bucks like a mechanical bull. How long can you hold on? MEGAN SELING
Seattle Art Museum
Downtown
The Seattle Art Museum has two fantastic exhibits worth seenig while you’re in town. The first is Samantha Yun Wall’s What We Leave Behind. The Portland-based artist is a master of rendering images in ink and conté, where layers of shadow intertwine with stark black silhouettes. Wall’s imagery reflects the artist’s multiethnic background, blending Korean folk stories with elements from Eurocentric mythology to create scenes that seem plucked from an untold fairy tale. What We Leave Behind, which is on display through October 4, features new works haunted by the iconography of the pasqueflower, a motif throughout Korean lore, which Wall has entwined with the memory of a lost grandmother.
The other is Monochrome: Calder and Tara Donovan. Tara Donovan is a renowned artist who works a special kind of alchemy: transforming mundane junk objects into the jaw-dropping sublime. Each of her sculptural installations is made from (roughly) hundreds of thousands of individual, tiny things—Styrofoam cups, drinking straws, toothpicks, Slinkys, Mylar, and hot glue—to create masses that undulate like oceans or resemble mountainous biological and geological formations. Donovan’s work at SAM is part of an ongoing series inviting artists to respond to pieces in the museum’s recently acquired Alexander Calder collection. Donovan—ever the monochromist—chose Calder’s use of the color black as her touchpoint, specifically responding to Mountains (1:5 Intermediate Maquette), a hulking geometric landscape made of overlapping black sheet metal plates pierced with holes. Come be blown away by delicacy and scale. AMANDA MANITACH
Forest for the Trees
Pioneer Square
For the past three summers, Forest for the Trees has brought the art outdoors, inviting artists to paint en plein air on huge canvases mounted to the exteriors of buildings and alleys across Pioneer Square. It’s an artgoer’s thrill to stumble on these museum-scale paintings in the wild (or treat it like an art scavenger hunt to explore all kinds of nooks and crannies of the city). This year, FFTT has teamed up with Seattle’s FIFA World Cup 2026 to commission 15 new Art Frames throughout the neighborhood, painted by artists repping countries participating in the Seattle games: Mauricio Ramirez (USA), Kwonny (Australia), Caratoes (Belgium), and Sa’rah Sabino (Egypt). A suite of soccer-related paintings by local artists (Al-Baseer Holly, Dana Blume, Devin Liston, and Nicol G) will go up in RailSpur Alley, and a final group of works will be going up on Jackson Street on June 1, each of which features art tied to specific games: Barry Johnson representing the Juneteenth game, Chloe King representing Pride, Chris Duenas representing the Puyallup tribe, and Saina Heshmati representing Iran. Finally, an accompanying group exhibition FFTT World Cup 26 will be on view indoors at RailSpur Studios. That show opens on June 4 for Pioneer Square Art Walk, and will have additional non-soccer art by all of the participating artists from the FFTT & SeaFWC26 collaboration. AMANDA MANITACH
Future Arts Way: Other Way
Downtown
Among the jaw-dropping art initiatives happening in conjunction with the World Cup, Future Arts Way: Other Way is an ambitious 2.5-mile interactive “Arches to Clock Tower” XR walking path that will wind from Pacific Science Center to King Street Station. Future Arts is a five-year-old, female-led nonprofit—one of the city’s coolest orgs working with artists to make tech-based art experiences in public places. No download needed to experience the 30-plus augmented reality stops along the downtown corridor; just chase the QR code “launch pads” located on the ground along the route. Those will guide viewers through digital stories spun in thin air, opening up an invisible other world of three-dimensional imagery layered over physical buildings and landmarks. The project centers storytelling by Indigenous, Black, diasporic, and non-Western perspectives, with lush flora-and-fauna-laced visuals that highlight our region’s rich biodiversity. Highlights include a large-scale, mixed-reality installation with interactive murals at the Third Avenue and Pine Street corner. AMANDA MANITACH
More Stuff We Love
Seattle Waterfront
Seattle’s famous Waterfront Park and boardwalk—which were renovated last year—stretch along the coast of Elliott Bay from the Olympic Sculpture Park to T-Mobile Park and Lumen Field (aka Seattle Stadium). It’s gorgeous down there, but it’s also packed. Just down the hill from Pike Place Market, ferries, cruises, water taxis, and the Victoria Clipper all dock here, and it’s also home to the Seattle Aquarium, the Seattle Great Wheel, a vintage carousel, an arcade, outdoor concerts in the summer, and the kind of knickknack and curio shops you’d expect to find on a boardwalk. There are also plenty of spots to stop off for snacks, and Seattle’s seagulls want them. They want your fries, they want your fish. They want whatever is left of your Ivar’s clam chowder bread bowl, and they are not afraid to snatch it right out of your hand. MEGAN SELING
Lander Street Vintage
SoDo
My idea of a good time is wandering around a warehouse full of antiques until my legs fall off, and Lander Street is the only mall remaining in the city limits that is large enough to satisfy me. The 32,000-square-foot building is just a five-minute drive from the stadium, and it’s filled to the brim with over 130 vendors peddling vintage and antique clothing, furniture, housewares, records, books, art, and so much more. Last time I got lost in the labyrinth of Lander Street, I walked out of there with an armload of treasures, including a 1940s beaded beret, a gorgeous linen circle skirt, and a porcelain Christmas ornament of Tom Kitten. AUDREY VANN
Dockside Cannabis
SoDo
Weed has been legal in Washington State for people 21 and older since 2012, and Dockside Cannabis in SoDo is a great place for folks buying it for the first time. (Plus, it’s just a three-minute drive south from the Seattle Stadium.) The shop is emblematic of the new direction in pot retailing brought on by legalization: big, open floor plans, lots of light, and classy decor. Dockside’s got all that, and a cannabis museum to boot. That’s right: An entire corner of their store is devoted to the history and science of cannabis, including selections from the Wirtshafter collection, Ohio cannabis activist Don Wirtshafter’s hoard of vintage cannabis medicine bottles. It sounds bland when I put it that way, but it’s awesome, a fascinating physical reminder that pot used to be both legal and benign. TOBIAS COUGHLIN-BOGUE
Get on a Boat! Any Boat!
Various locations
It’s not a matter of if you’ll have the opportunity to get on a boat while visiting Seattle, it’s a matter of which kind of boat you’d prefer. We have dozens of different water vessels available to rent, from self-powered paddle boats (Green Lake Boathouse and Coffee Shop) to wooden row boats that will make you feel like Anne of Green Gables (the Center for Wooden Boats) to literal floating hot tubs that you can putter around in on Lake Union for about $450 a pop. Personally, I love the cute little cruisers at the Electric Boat Company. The basic model goes for $139 an hour and seats up to 10 people—that’s just $14 each! It’s outfitted with padded seats and a table with cupholders so you can pack a picnic, and it’s also got a Bluetooth stereo and optional heating for chilly nights. Plus, they’re super easy to drive. Even I, an anxiety-riddled anti-captain, can confidently cruise around at a smooth 6 mph to see a special side of Seattle only visible from the water. MEGAN SELING
But Definitely the Ferries
Various Locations
That said, my favorite view of Seattle is the one you see while standing on the deck of a Washington State Ferry as it pulls away from Colman Dock downtown. Walk, bike, or drive onto a boat headed to Bremerton or Bainbridge Island—both have charming little city centers within walking distance from their respective landings—and grab a spot on the outside deck on the backside. It will be windy, it will probably be cold, but the air is crisp and salty, and the view is incredible. You will see the whole skyline, from the Space Needle to Mount Rainier, stretching out across the horizon. Breathe it in. Then, as the city fades into the distance, warm up inside with a too-hot cup of hot chocolate from a vending machine that looks like it’s been there since the ’80s. (It has.) MEGAN SELING