Specialty’s Café & Bakery

I generally have the Caesar salad which is fulfilling in quantity and taste is well «okay» nothing fancy but the place does have a long line during lunch.

This place is so slow, it’s just not worth the bother. Too bad, because the food is solid. Just don’t expect your sandwich in less that 30 minutes… Even at 2pm after the lunch rush. Apparently a «big order» of 6 sandwiches caused some delay, then their pager didn’t work and then apparently someone took my sandwich by mistake. I’d forgive that, but I checked in with them multiple times and they assured me it was still coming, and they saw me standing there for over 40 minutes waiting before they finally figured it out. I won’t be going back.

I always use the tablets to order and the items come out relatively quick. A lot of times they’ve forgotten to heat up items or will only let me know they’re out of ingredients as they hand me my sandwich.

Average food fare, though I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat their food. Nice comfy seats and an OK place to hang out but I wish they would stock their Peet’s Jasmine Lime Tea Cooler year-​round. Service can range from super-​friendly and accommodating to non-​existent.

The baked goods are yummy. There is a huge selection and I haven’t been disappointed so far.
The coffee is average-​bad. The espressos are not good, it tastes burnt and too bitter and the drip coffee is just OK.

Great food, coffee, selection, and service. And quick!

Have ordered food here a few times now and each time they made pretty good sandwiches. My favorite is the Chairmain which is a turkey sandwich that is very flavorful. I also like their online ordering, as it lets you customize your order nicely and it remembers your favorites for quick ordering the next time.

The most spacious Specialty’s I have been to yet. They have tons of seating, indoors and outside. The ambiance is great, lots of sunlight if you want to stay awhile to do work. Like all Specialty’s I go for their soups and salads and those awesomely large cookies. Their coffee is good as well and along with a baked good makes the perfect afternoon treat hanging out on their patio.

Food is on par with other Specialty’s but the service is pretty crummy. There are at least 3 people behind the counter at a given time, one managing the register, one making coffee, and one floating. All look continuously perplexed at all times. Ordering an iced coffee and cookie shouldn’t take several minutes to key in and several minutes to dish up.

I have ordered from this place a few times to cater lunch for work. They arrive on time, and the orders have been correct.
The food is average. Not bad, not great. Your regular sandwich place.
I’ve never interacted with a human being with this place. Not once. I order online and the deliveries are dropped off with the reception. They don’t bother waiting for me. I’ve never seen/​spoken to a human.
Food: 3
Service: 3
Ambiance: NA
Parking: NA

The place is one of my frequented lunch options in South Lake Union. The restaurants offers an array of sandwiches both lunch and breakfast., bakery selection like croissants, scones, danishes, cinnamon rolls etc, salads, and soups. They also cater lunches for large events. some of the bakery items are definitely a calorie overload. The restaurant also gives you options to place your orders online. They also have a Peets Coffee bar serving espresso coffee and tea drinks.
The restaurant has plenty of seating both inside and outside. The seating inside is a mix of comfortable couches and tables and chairs.
My favorites on the menu are the oatmeal raisin cookie, the southwestern, the sausage egg and cheese sandwich, the caprese sandwich, the mediterranean sandwich, turkey apple brie and bacon sandwich, turkey and cranberry sandwich, spinach berry and goat cheese salad .
They have got free wifi and the staff is friendly. The place gets really busy from 11:45 to 12:45 due to the lunch crowd.

So I came in just after the lunch rush one day recently to get a cookie. It was about 1:15. There was a bit of a line of people waiting for their food, but only one person at any of the three registers. I waited behind this person, and there were two Specialty’s personnel behind two registers, and one behind the coffee register. Once the customer had finished ordering, the two people helping this guy with his soup and cash didn’t make eye contact, and wandered away.
Ok…Another Specialty’s employee came up to the two registers, made eye contact with me (first eye contact from anyone so far) so I said «Hi!» cheerfully. He sort of grimaced, and said, «I’m just logging out.» Me, «Oh, that must be nice,» as he turns away. Ok… No one of the original two employees has wandered back to the register or made eye contact with me yet, so I walk 5 feet over to the coffee register.
Me, «Hi!» to the coffee lady. She’s not quite behind the register, but as I walk up she walks away from me, into a corner, and picks up a sweatshirt. I’m starting to get really confused and it must show on my face. She tells me «Those people over there can take your order.» But I’d just been ignored for several minutes by this time, and she hadn’t been doing anything at all on her side. Confused and frustrated, at this point, I decided to walk out. No cookie. No likelihood of me coming back after such incredibly, consistently poor service from so many employees at one time.

I was up in Seattle for work and we had breakfast delivered every morning mainly from Specialty’s, as well as some lunches. I really liked the egg and cheese breakfast sandwiches on ciabbatta bread. They were delicious and filling. I also tried the steel cut oatmeal and yogurt/​fruit/​granola cups, which were really good. But the breakfast sandwich definitely takes the cake.
For lunch I’ve tried their vegetarian sandwich, which is very hearty. One half is more than enough food. Lastly, I’ve tried their Southwestern salad, mixed green salad, and Greek goddess salad. I really liked the Southwestern salad and would order that again for sure. And of course, we had plenty of soft and delicious cookies! My favs are peanut butter and chcolate chip :)
Would I come back? Yup!

I’m surprised at some of the reviews here.
I used to work at amazon and realized that there was a Pete’s coffee and tea in the specialtys café on terry. Having just moved back from San Francisco ca this made me super excited!
I walked into this location, and the service was amazing! The managers and baristas are really friendly and welcoming. They have great customer service and it quickly became my morning spot to get coffee and pastries.
I highly recommend this location to anyone in the south lake union area :)

An ordinary cafeteria type restaurant with friendly staff and good food. The ordering system is a bit confusing with both ipads and normal counters. Service was very friendly if not a bit odd, possibly stoned. Still though, prices are decent and the food was pretty good. The BBQ chicken sandwich was very good with lots of sauce and red cabbage which was different, but worked well. Nothing especially stood out, but it was very good overall.

Posting on behalf of my entire team, this location is the most disorganized & slow operating Specialty’s we’ve ever experienced.
If you are going to put a Peet’s & Specialty’s Café in an extremely busy neighborhood with Amazon & Microsoft as your customers, please staff it appropriately to handle high volume requests. Running out of espresso is not acceptable and having one person operating the espresso machine & cash register is just stupid.
Get it together.

This is a hustling and bustling little sandwich place that aims to serve as many business lunches as quickly as it possibly can. They cater a lot, and they share space with a coffee shop to get as much basic caffeine and nutrition into the local office workers as they possibly can. They do a solid job.
You walk in, find a kiosk, and swipe your credit card. Scroll through the menu, pick what you want, add any special orders, and click Submit. Eventually they call your name. It’s not the quickest service in the world, but it’s hard to tell if that’s because they’re making food that would typically come with table service, so you wouldn’t be as bored… or if maybe they’re just slow.
Service is friendly, for the scant few seconds you spend actually interacting with humans. Prices are good – they’re actually exceptional by south lake union standards.
The food that comes out is certainly decent. Solid ingredients, fairly thoughtfully prepared. I had a turkey sandwich that was a little too damp by the time I got it back to my desk, but it tasted good, and the bread held together. I like this place and I would come back, though it doesn’t leap out to proclaim itself as being exceptional for value or quality.

Stopped by Specialty’s quite a few times to either catch up with colleagues or just grab lunch. The last visit my colleague ordered a cobb salad and I ordered a Turkey Pesto Sandwich. I understand that Specialty’s doesn’t really pre-​made and mostly custom makes sandwich as people order, but the wait time was actually ridiculous given they type of food they offer (e.g. convenience food). We probably waited 20 mins just to get our lunch. Even with 20 mins wait, the sandwich/​salad wasn’t that great anyway… so I’d actually hope that this place starts making things faster, half pre-​made, to serve its long lunch line if the taste is going to be just a «meh.ok» anyway?
I have tried their Mexican chocolate (from Peet’s Coffee counter) before, too. I was hoping it could be good (as I have a slightly snobbish habit of choosing some of the more expensive items on the menu if I wasn’t sure what would be good at a particular place and hoping for the best taste) and frankly… it wasn’t that great either… simply taste like regular hot chocolate, if not, a bit sweeter with more calories. In fact, I would probably never order that drink again.
Overall, this is an ok place to go for lunch for practical/​quick catch up. Better than the usual cafeteria scene. but I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat there :)

Specialty’s spicy cole slaw is wicked awesome. And the PB, cranberry, apple, and banana sandwich is shockingly tasty! AND there’s a girl that works here now that is one of the sweetest, friendliest people I’ve ever encountered in customer service. I’m gonna miss this place…

I dropped by to get some dinner to take home with me and the store was pretty empty around 5ish. There were a couple guys chatting and drinking coffee… so pretty much just me placing my order. I ordered a turkey sandwich and an upsized goat cheese salad to go. It took quite a while to make the food but the staff was nice enough and handed me the to-​go bag and I went on my merry way…
Then I got home and went to eat my turkey sandwich… and saw that it was some vegetarian crap and not the turkey sandwich I was craving. Plus, it was a pretty small sandwich that was basically a handful of my salad thrown between two slices of bread. Complete disappointment in the sandwich and my screwed up order. The salad was good.
Oh, and it was $ 20 for this meal. Way overpriced for what it was.
TLDR: $ 20 for a meh meal and they screwed up my order.

I used to be a big fan of Specialty’s when I worked at Amazon back in the ‘old’ days of the Columbia Tower. They were a good source for a quick salad or sandwich or even afternoon fresh baked cookie.
They tend to get slammed during the lunch hours and so they always offered a ‘call ahead’ option which was nice. You would place an order on their website and then it would give you a ETA. They have a shelf where you would grab your bag and go.
This newer location in South Lake Union I hadn’t been to yet and met my husband for lunch on a Friday afternoon. I had been craving one of their Caesar salads and thought it would be a good visit since it was after 1pm on Friday.
This lobby is definitely very pretty and offered up lots of natural light. They had about 5 ipads when you walked in where you could place your order (and pay). I hadn’t seen anything like that in their previous stores but being new, I could see where they were trying to speed up the process and be ‘hip’.
I initially tried to place my order through the ipad but it got really confusing as I wanted to customize and it was giving me all sorts of problems. You couldn’t tell if it was actually accepting your customization or if it was just un-​highlighting what it already included. So just to be on the safe side, I stepped to the counter and placed my order old school. There was no line so it wasn’t like I was backing anyone else up.
The girl seemed to be a little annoyed and kept stopping me to ask all sorts of questions about my order. I felt a little bit taken aback as she was literally standing doing nothing before I stepped up to the counter. My husband ordered a turkey sandwich to go along with my caesar salad.
I sat down to wait and decided to check in via Unilocal and then read all the reviews and tips. Of course the shocker was the low ratings and then reading what the common demoninator was. The wait time. I thought «Well, in fairness, it is SLU and when I worked at AMZ for a year in SLU, every place was slammed during lunch.»
But then I experienced it myself.
Our salad & sandwich (which seems pretty straight forward) took 15 minutes before my husband finally went up and saw it sitting on the counter. No clue how long it had been there, our pager had not gone off and it was just annoying.
They weren’t super slammed and it just seemed the staff was annoyed we were even there.
The food itself was good but I hate places who act as if you are doing them a favor by showing up to their business.
It was $ 23 for lunch including two soda fountains and I gotta say it left a pretty sad taste in my mouth. The food portion on my ‘small’ salad was super large but my husband’s sandwich didn’t seem like it was that great as he ate the whole thing and he’s not the best eater.
I’d say only come if you are taking to go and make sure you do it ahead of time online. I can see this only continuing to get worse as it’s still fairly new.

Really Not That Special…
This location is a huge disappointment. At first glance, you see the glass case filled with fresh baked goods, the huge space, the cool i-​pad ordering devices, and the variety of salads, soups and sandwiches.
However, the customer service is inconsistent. I work very close to this location — so it’s an easy, convenient spot for lunch, coffee, etc. Time and time again, I am perplexed with how disorganized the front of the house staff is. They are young and perhaps a bit in-​experienced, but that is no excuse.
Here are a couple of recent experiences:
1) I stood in line to order soup. However — there were 2 choices that sounded good so I thought I would ask for a sample. Only one register was open — so naturally I went there. The cashier told me that if I wanted to taste it that soup that I would need to speak to the person on the other side of the counter. Fair enough — I walked over. I patiently waited as she sorted through orders, prepared to-​go items. I, however, lost my patience when she walked by me 2x and failed to assist. I decided to walk out and purchase my lunch elsewhere.
2) My friend and I went there for a late lunch (around 3pm) and the place was pretty empty. I ordered a sandwich and he ordered a salad. My sandwich appeared within minutes. However, his salad took 15 minutes to make. More importantly, the order was incorrect and unsatisfying. He ended up purchasing a turkey/​swiss croissant. His disappointment is that his lunch ended up being $ 13+ dollars and he could have had better value elsewhere.
3) Another time I chose to order soup. I waited in line in at an empty register. I waited a while and then tried to catch the attention of the staff. A girl standing by the Peet’s Coffee register waved for me to come over to her. So I went and mentioned that I thought the other girl was going to ring me up. She provided me with the snappy soundbite stating, she was in charge of the register not the other girl.
Now — there are some times when I’ve gone there and the service has been great and the cashiers are super friendly. The fresh, out-​of-​the-​oven cookies, if you get there at the right time, are excellent. I will continue to go out of convenience, but considering all of the food options in the neighborhood, I would think the Specialities folks would want up their ante and treat their clientele a little nicer.