Le Chat Noir - Bellingham

Located on the 3rd floor of a Historic Building , this cozy restaurant has a Cool Vibe. The food was So Good! The Mac n Cheese Epic!! The steamed clams and Crab Cakes cooked to perfection. Our Server Emily was so kind and personable. She was knowledgeable about the menu and had great recommendations.. the crew at the restaurant seemed to work well together and help each other out . That's always nice to see .. Definitely going back.. and bringing Friends.

Went in for HH and had Great drinks, fantastic food, the staff was knowledgeable and friendly.

The Black Cat is a lively bar/restaurant in the heart of historic Fairhaven, WA. The restaurant is warm and inviting, but patrons sit close to each other. The noise level can get high, especially if you're around the bar. The food was okay. Unfortunately, it wasn't worth the hour-long wait for a table, in my opinion. Our waitress also seemed distracted or overwhelmed because it took an unusually long time to be acknowledged once seated, and my order was incorrect when the food arrived. The waitress did correct the problem right away. All in all, I recommend visiting another of the many restaurants in Fairhaven/Bellingham.

It wasn 't bad luck that brought us here on Memorial Day evening; quite the contrary, in fact! We were driving back home to Portland from a long weekend vacation in Canada when, after a frustrating and unreasonably long wait at the border, we were hungry enough to seek out a place to stop for dinner. The hour was growing late, the number of open restaurants dwindling with every passing minute. Fortunately, my wife, a perennial cat lover, pounced on the chance to divert our GPS here; little did she know that I had earmarked this restaurant on Google as a place I wanted to take her, based on its name, absolutely-guaranteed-100%-this-place-is-haunted ambiance, and feline-focused aesthetic. Hell, I didn 't know, either, for that matter...I had completely forgot I 'd tagged the place! After taking the elevator to the third floor, where the restaurant is located (we had our baby son in a stroller), we were seated without delay, and our truly phenomenal server, Brandon, would take an experience we anticipated to be wonderful even further, to the next level. From start to finish, he was a friendly, personable conversationalist; efficient, timely, helpful and accurate, informing us of specials and entrées du jour , suggesting local favorite dishes, steering us away from those less well received, and even engaging us in discussion about ourselves, our travels, and providing insight to our questions about Fairhaven and the greater Bellingham area, of which we were almost entirely ignorant. He could moonlight as a tour guide. My wife ordered the French onion soup, Dungeness crab cakes, and an Empress Gin martini (a bottle of which we 'd just purchased at the Duty Free shop at the border). The soup was amazing; I 've had some uninspired bowls of it before, but this one was prepared perfectly: not too watery, not too much bread, potent, savory flavor, and a rich, almost debaucherous blanket of cheese on top. The crab cakes were sizeable, fresh, delicious, and paired with a sauce that both of us failed to classify, instead resorting to attempting to identify some of its ingredients: mustard, curry...cheese? Whatever it was, it was awesome, and complemented the crab cakes in an extraordinary manner! I had the fish tacos, cod, blackened instead of beer-battered (I wouldn 't have even known that was an option, if Brandon hadn 't offered it). Later, when Brandon returned to check in on us, I informed him that my favorite fish tacos, served at the Island Café in Portland, had just been dethroned. He laughed, and later remarking that he planned on visiting the Island Café, the next time he was in Portland, based on our recommendation. Beyond the ubiquitous cat motifs throughout (for the purposes of our visit, anyway), the atmosphere of the restaurant felt as if it were cloaked in a sexy, sultry, casually-threatening veil of dusk, illuminated by candlelight and the fading rays of the setting sun through paned glass in wrought iron frames. And if the ambiance, our fantastic meal, and the enjoyable conversation weren 't already enough, we we stopped on every floor on the way down to explore the rest of the building, seemingly ripped straight from the 19th century with minimal modernization, complete, I 'm sure, with enough ghosts to fill up a Ghostbuster 's proton pack, and then some. I guess that 's why the cat motif is as prevalent here as it is: the panoptic gaze of multiple feline effigies keeps them at bay until after closing time! Alright, I 've used enough eldritch adjectives to make H. P. Lovecraft turn over in his grave, so I 'll make this summary succinct: If I had nine lives, I would visit the Black Cat in each and every one of them!

This place is amazing. Came for date night and it exceeded expectations. The ambiance and service at the bar was great. Food was excellent!