#BiteOfSeattle is the hashtag for the long-running summer food festival at Seattle Center, launched in July 1982 by Alan Silverman and Festivals Inc. to help pull restaurant traffic through the Reagan-era recession, and now one of the Pacific Northwest’s largest annual food-and-beverage events — over 200 vendors, hundreds of thousands of attendees, one weekend in July. In late July 2026 the tag briefly turned into a national news feed after a gang-related mass shooting inside the festival at Seattle Center killed three people and injured four others, including a toddler.
Quick Facts
- Founded: 1982 at Green Lake Park, Seattle, by Alan Silverman / Festivals Inc.
- Current venue: Seattle Center (since 1986)
- Format: one weekend each July, 200+ restaurants and vendors, tasting-size portions, live music, chef demos, a beer and wine garden, “Alley” restaurant tent
- First-year turnout: ~75,000 (versus ~25,000 expected)
- Founding purpose: encourage the public to dine out again during the early-1980s downturn
- 2026 incident: July 26 mass shooting at Seattle Center inside the festival — 3 dead, 4 wounded
Origin
Alan Silverman, then president of the Seattle-based promoter Festivals Inc., pitched the Bite of Seattle in 1982 as a way to reintroduce Seattleites to their city’s restaurants in an economy where casual dining had cooled off. The debut weekend was staged at Green Lake Park with 25 restaurants and roughly 25,000 expected guests — the festival drew about 75,000, tripling the estimate. Silverman kept the event going, and in 1986 moved it to the Seattle Center campus around the Space Needle, where it has stayed ever since.
What It Is
The Bite of Seattle has settled into a familiar summer format: dozens of Seattle-area restaurants set up walk-up tents around Seattle Center, most selling tasting-size portions (“bites”) of a signature dish, alongside food trucks, breweries, wineries, and cider makers. Programming layers on top include the “Alley” fine-dining tent, live music on multiple stages, chef demonstrations, cook-offs, and a family/kids zone. The festival is free to enter — visitors pay per bite — and typically runs Friday through Sunday on a single mid-July weekend.
Cultural Impact
For four decades the Bite has doubled as an unofficial food-scene tour of the city, giving new restaurants a low-cost way to introduce themselves to a huge audience and giving Seattle its most public annual reminder of a food culture that has grown well beyond its early-’80s reputation. It sits alongside Bumbershoot as one of the two Seattle Center festivals most closely associated with a Seattle summer.
The 2026 Seattle Center Shooting
On Sunday evening, July 26, 2026, gunfire broke out inside the festival grounds at Seattle Center just after 6 p.m., killing three people and wounding four others, including a toddler. Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes said investigators believed the shooting was gang-related, with at least three shooters involved. A 15-year-old was taken into custody on suspicion of first-degree assault and firearms violations; a 19-year-old identified as Junior Cee Niko Semo — himself one of the suspects — died at the scene. Officers recovered a “ghost gun” and continued to search for a third suspect. Among the dead were 44-year-old Carlos Israel Sanchez Villalba and 56-year-old Ashley Whitehead. Festival organisers and Seattle Center closed the grounds for the day and announced additional security review for future events; #BiteOfSeattle briefly became the hashtag around which the incident spread nationally.
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bite_of_Seattle
- https://biteofseattle.com/about
- https://www.seattlecenter.com/events/event-calendar/bite-of-seattle-x47503
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Seattle_Center_shooting
- https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/26/us/seattle-center-shooting-festival
- https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/multiple-people-injured-seattle-center-shooting-police-say-rcna589371