Bar Exam

A Rob Roy is a version of a manhattan made with Scotch. Rob Roy
(1671–1734), the cocktail’s namesake, was an outlaw-hero,
the Scottish version of Robin Hood. The Rob Roy is a cocktail bar in
Belltown, named after the drink named after the man. The bar used to be
called the Viceroy, until the Viceroy boutique hotel chain—with
hotels around the world, though none in Seattle—took umbrage and
sent Viceroy-the-bar a cease-and-desist letter. (A viceroy is a
governor designated by a king and/or a small-size version of the
monarch butterfly.)

While the Seattle bar the Viceroy had existed happily for five
years, cessation and desistance namewise was unavoidable. The Viceroy
hotels have what look to be limitlessly deep, beautifully
upholstered pockets. (The ones in Palm Springs and Santa Monica
feature contemporized-baroque decor by Kelly Wearstler: the wife of the
hotels’ developer, a judge on the Bravo show Top Design, and
Playboy‘s September 1994 Playmate of the Month. Another
Kelly, at the parent company of the hotels Viceroy, did not return a
call about why they’d care about a tiny bar in Seattle in the
first place.)

The Rob Roy has the same owners as before and the same swankish ’70s
lounge decor—the stacked flagstone behind the bar, the
black-leather-padded wall, the Lucite-stalactite light fixture.
The leaf-and-butterfly wall sculptures came, as it happens, from the
former home of pulp novelist Sidney Sheldon in Palm Springs. The books
on the bookshelves, which also house a decorative-only reel-to-reel
tape player, came from thrift stores: Right now, there’s a hardback
first edition of Shogun by James Clavell (1975), Time/Life’s
The Gunfighters series (1974), a copy of Roots by Alex
Haley (1976). (Haley also conducted the first interview for
Playboy magazine, with Miles Davis.)

The Rob Roy looks like a place Hugh Hefner would fit right
in, and he would doubtless love the Rob Roy’s Rob Roy (so nice,
they named it twice, just like that). It’s made with Dewar’s 12-year
and homemade bitters; instead of a sunken cherry, it’s got a little
island of floating orange peel. (The Rob Roy has a new cocktail
menu of classic favorites—an amaretto sour with egg white, a
dark-and-stormy with house-made ginger beer, a Vieux
Carré—for the relatively old-school price of $7.50
each.)

People steal the books from the Rob Roy with regularity, even
the books no one should want, like old volumes of Funk &
Wagnalls Encyclopedia. Also stolen during the Rob Roy’s years as
the Viceroy: a lamp with a base made out of a taxidermied hoof. No one
knows how someone made off with the lamp; the thief did leave the shade
behind. A replacement hoof-lamp was also stolen. The third
edition of the hoof-lamp is still there, bolted to its table.