Artusi's Adam Fortuna Shares His Secret Cocktail Spot

Seattle is home to a lot of restaurants, and among them are hidden gems some Seattleites just aren't unearthing. To help guide us to these potential discoveries, we've enlisted some of our city's many food luminaries to share with us their under the radar recommendations for a weekly feature dubbed Dining Confidential. In honor of Cocktail Week 2014 we're rolling out a special Cocktail Confidential.

Badass bartender Adam Fortuna runs the wine program at Vespolina by day and tends the bar at Artusi on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday nights. Fortuna moved to Seattle in 2009 and has quickly made a name for himself in the bartending world; he  was voted Eater's 2013 Bartender of the Year, so he knows a thing or two about booze.

Fortuna weighed in on this cocktail edition of Dining Confidential with an under-the-radar pick for drinks:

I truly love a dive bar/Chinese restaurant in Wallingford, called Moon Temple. My first home in Seattle was four blocks away and I quickly realized how amazing it is. There's a bartender/mgr who works every day, Johnny, and he is the guy that remembers everyone's name, drink, and what's going on on your life. I've become great friends with him over time and I've actually learned a lot about hospitality from him as well. He is the epitome of what bartending should be, before it became overly pretentious and ego-driven.

Their pours are insane, probably upwards of a triple shot on anything you'd order. It's gotten a little overrun with the UW kids on the weekends, but there's always a fun time to be had (and usually forgotten) during the week. A pour of fernet and an order of five-star crispy tofu cannot be missed.

But sad news: if you want to imbibe at Moon Temple, you've got a small window for doing so. The dive bar will shutter as soon as mid-December to make way for a new development that will house, depressingly, another drugstore.

Moon Temple. 2108 N. 45th Street, Wallingford. (206) 633-4280. M-TH 4 to 11 p.m., FR and SA 4 p.m.-2 a.m.