Shibuya HiFi is a bar with secrets. From the outside, it looks like an anonymous door on unhip Leary Avenue in Ballard. Open that door, and you step into a dimly lit cocktail bar where jazz is often on the speakers and Japanese-inspired drinks are filling the glasses. Walk back past the bathrooms and open another door, and you’ll find what makes Shibuya unique: the hi-fi room, a tastefully decorated, aggressively insulated space where you can sit down and listen to a record.
By “listen to a record,” I mean just listen to a record. Visitors to the room aren’t allowed to bring drinks back here; they have to take off their shoes, and they have to set their phones to silent. Many of the listening sessions are labeled “deep listening,” which owner Quentin Ertel says is “our polite way of saying no talking.” This “snaps people into a different mind frame,” he says.
Not being able to talk or drink means that guests are essentially forced to give their entire attention to the music, and maybe discover new things about the albums being played, even if they know those albums forward and backward. “We have a purity about the way we approach listening, and I think that makes us really, really different,” says Ertel.
Ertel is a well-known entrepreneur in Seattle circles; he recently closed his famously raucous bar, Havana Social Club. Shibuya HiFi is more chill and introspective. If you’re going to the hi-fi room, it’s not to dance and party but to sit, listen, and think. Soundproof walls mean you don’t get any noise from the bar outside, and the audio setup, which includes a pair of vintage Klipschorn floor-standing speakers, is far beyond what most people have in their homes.
The event calendar is stocked with some of the most famous and audiophile-friendly musical artists of all time: Radiohead, Neil Young, Charles Mingus, Frank Ocean, Pink Floyd, and more. Tickets for these listening sessions — which happen multiple times a night — are typically $21. That’s the price of admission into what’s surely one of the coolest rooms in Seattle.
