In the heart of Ballard, Cardoon is reimagining what a neighborhood café can be — blending cozy rituals, inventive flavors, and deep community roots. Founded by friends-turned-family Jacilyn, Tiffany, and Alex (from left to right, above), Cardoon is part café, part cocktail bar, and fully a labor of love. Their menu draws from Chinese, German, and Nordic influences, reflecting the trio’s diverse backgrounds and shared creativity. Whether it’s a seaweed latte, a cult-favorite lava cookie, or a Saturday night highball, every offering is designed to surprise and delight — while making you feel right at home.
We sat down with Jacilyn (coffee), Tiffany (food), and Alex (bar) to hear how a casual 4th of July hangout turned into a full-fledged café with Nordic roots, German-Chinese soul, and a whole lot of heart.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
How did you three come together to be business owners? What’s your story?
Alex: It started through friendship. So I moved into Seattle from Chicago in 2017 with a good friend, and that good friend ended up marrying Jacilyn, and shortly after I moved, my wife Tiffany moved out as well. We were running jobs in tech and kind of getting burned out.
Jacilyn: And you had been working just like on your own Amaro projects and stuff like that.
Alex: Yeah, we were having an itch to do something in the food and beverage industry, and also kind of wanted to do something that had a little bit more meaning behind it.
Jacilyn: I was also in-between jobs and we were all hanging out on 4th of July. Tiff and I are kind of the gamblers – like if someone else is like “I’m ready to do this”, she’s like “Okay we’ll make it happen”. After we were joking serious about it on 4th of July, I called like the next day and I was like “I thought of a name” (and that’s not the name we went with) and then I started looking at spaces and it just kept going until we were like “are we doing this?”
Alex: I think we came to a cafe setting because it felt like the thing that resonated the most between the three of us and the thing where we could collectively have the most impact. We knew we wanted to do something in maybe restaurants or kind of bed and breakfast type thing later on.
Tiffany: It felt like what we needed was more daily connection, like making small moments matter again. I really like the idea of something that was a daily ritual, like coffee, which has such a fun template for exploring different flavors and different ways of having that ritual in different parts of the world.
Jacilyn: I’m eight years sober, and so coffee shops are where I’d meet up with other sober fellows and we’d do a lot of emotional work in those spaces. They just became really meaningful and healing spaces And who doesn’t love a cafe? You know I think we’re all just that’s what we do when we travel and things like that so.
Alex: It felt like the best way to kind of infuse kind of each of our own heritage as well as what we wanted to bring into society into one thing.
Tiffany: So it’s a German/Chinese-influenced cafe that also has a lot of non-alcoholic and low ABV beverages.
Jacilyn: Yeah and some secret Scandinavian products in there as well.
What are you serving at Cardoon?
Tiffany: So I feel like any project, especially in food and beverage, is best when you draw from personal experiences. The three of us have a shared love of cafes and coffee culture. Alex and I are married, and so we have this constant fun German-Chinese way of riffing on dishes at home. Oftentimes I’ll cook something and he’ll be like, “Oh that reminds me of this,” and vice versa.
We wanted to bring some of that element into this cafe as well as the surrounding community, which has a lot of Nordic roots. Where we come from and where we are theme of what we want the cafe to offer. So the menu has those elements.
The food is more of a home-style Chinese or German dishes, or it has flavors that sort of draw from either or both, or maybe does a thing in a slightly different way, so that it looks like something you recognize and maybe tastes a little different, or it looks like something you don’t recognize, but then you’re like, “Whoa that’s super nostalgic.” So that sort of vibe.
Alex: People come in, even if they’re not German or Chinese background, they’ll often try something and be surprised by an element of the dish, and be like, “Oh that reminds me of this thing my grandma made,” and that’s the important thing.
Jacilyn: I want to talk about our cookie. It’s actually my favorite story of how the lava chocolate chip cookie. We were all hanging out with some friends of ours from Copenhagen that I’d met through various spaces, and they brought this salty licorice that’s really notorious in Scandinavia. They call it adult candy, because it’s just super salty black licorice. Tiff tried it, and the next week when we got back together she had just made some chocolate chip licorice salty cookies. I knew the lava cookie was gonna be big like back then, and that was like two years before we even like did anything. So yeah, it’s been validating for it to be really popular. I’ve just been like, “I knew it!”
What are some of the most popular favorite dishes? What’s something that a first-time customer should try?
Alex: The most popular specialty drink on our daytime cafe menu is definitely the seaweed latte. It’s basically a latte with a soy sauce caramel. We sprinkle some seaweed flakes on top. It has a fun origin story from our time at the Nordic Museum, before we opened our physical space here. We did kind of a pop-up residency at the Nordic Museum’s cafe, which ended up being an entire year.
They were doing a special exhibit from Jonsi of Sigur Rós. And the exhibit incorporated a lot of seaweed scents and things from the ocean including seaweed smells.
Tiffany: So we were like, we’ll provide the taste experience. It was a sensory, it was audio, visual, and smell – olfactory. So we were like, taste buds – we can do all of that in one drink.
Jacilyn: Tiff was like, “Seaweed, I can do seaweed!”
Tiffany: I wanted to join the seaweed party.
Jacilyn: The kind of secret I feel like people haven’t realized how good it is, is our tomato egg rice, which is everyone on staff’s lunch during the day.
Tell me about your cocktails!
Alex: We always wanted to have the kind of space that can be important for people that might want to have a cocktail, but don’t drink. So non-alcoholic program was a major part of kind of our founding. Since then, we’ve moved to low ABV and full ABV cocktails as well. On Saturday evenings now, you can come from 4pm to 8pm and we extend our time and kind of emphasize the bar program a little bit more. So there’s an expanded cocktail menu, a couple more items on the food side that you can’t see during the day.
Some highlights are making use of the great wealth of really, really fun and interesting non-alcoholic spirit options that have hit the market recently. One of our cocktails that kind of showcases our story is the Sour Plum Highball, which has a couple different spirits – one Chinese yellow rice wine and then German Kirschwasser, which is like a cherry brandy, coming together to make like this fun sour plum syrup added cocktail that I don’t think many people have had that combination of flavors before.
Tiffany: Yeah, I think it’s fun because you can find, again, like a starting point, like cherries or Kirschwasser, and then it’s like it reminds you of something else and then you just bring in other aspects of it. And then, you know, because I forget if we tried the Kirschwasser or made like a sour plum syrup first which. But either way, it was like that’s the connection. It’s got to be together.
Jacilyn: I think it’s really beautiful because the two of you really work together on those projects of like Tiff doing more like some homemade syrups of five spice syrup and some tea infusions. And then Alex is like deeply researched on all these NA products and just cocktails in general to really like bring it all together. And it’s really cute to see them work together on that.
Who are your regular customers? What do you like about being here in Ballard?
Alex: We get regulars from the time when we were at the museum. Our space is very small. You can see the back of house kind of working and the front of house, and I think the full expression of what we’re doing incorporates the staff interactions amongst themselves as well as the customer interactions. It’s a really great sign that we get people that come in regularly just to kind of sit and experience. They’re working. They’re doing their own thing, but they’re also in this environment that is just like comforting and wholesome.
Jacilyn: We’ve even had some, you know, people that regularly come in from the neighborhood or the building that have been like met each other and become friends, and that’s like the best. That’s what we want, you know, that little community spot, and I felt this when I was maybe like single or just like new to the city, like having a spot where you’re just acknowledged as a person and greeted with warmth is so important, so important, and we just have so many like quirky regulars. Like one of our favorites, she has two wild dogs that she lets sit outside, and she’ll sit outside, and they’re amazing, and then she’ll bring in like a crossword puzzle on Sundays, and we’ll all do it as staff kind of together as we’re working, and that’s a blast.
What are some neighborhood businesses that you want to give a shout out to?
Jacilyn: Hildegard is someone that we’ve been working with. They’re just down the street, roughly, near Trader Joe’s.
Alex: They’re a very small husband-wife duo brewery, microbrewery. We have their hot water here, as well as their beers. Yeah, that’s a good call out.
Tiffany: S.T. Hooligans has such a good value and really great environment. Really great fried chicken and sort Cajun dishes, as well as a really good lumpia. It’s also just fun.
Jacilyn: I feel like Rachel’s Bagels has been a support – even when we’ve done pop-ups, they’ve come to some of ours and things like that. Ballard Alliance incorporates a lot of other businesses around, and it’s just been really positive to have that community, and I feel like a lot of business owners have been willing to chat, because they know what it’s like, how intense it can be.
Alex: We’re buds with Petit Bottle Shop just down the street in Old Ballard. We were doing pop-ups with them in our time between the museum and here. They just turned two, which is fun. They’re a little bit older than us.
Intentionalist is all about helping people find, discover, and support small businesses in their local communities. Could you talk a little bit about why small businesses are important and why it’s important that we, as customers, are supporting them?
Tiffany: I feel like the on-the-ground nature of small businesses, because you kind of have to be like really super hyper-present in the space and what you’re doing, means that you’re just already more connected to the fabric of the neighborhood that you’re in and the surrounding community. And I feel like that’s just what matters. If you want your businesses to also be intentional with how they’re helping weave the fabric of the community, then putting your money where those operators are more intentional as well is just a nice feedback cycle. I think it’s cool too, to the point of intention, to find businesses that match the intentions that you care about. Our values are all about meet you where you are, surprisingly delightful, all these things that I feel like a community is just better by. So it’s not just having an excellent product, it’s the connection that really matters.
Alex: Yeah. By supporting businesses, it’s a statement of your values. And I’m really proud of what we’re able to accomplish in this very small space by this very small team of passionate individuals. And I think it’s really stand out that a lot of our reviews and we have a little comment box that people leave like handwritten notes in. And the most common thing is the environment, the staff being very friendly. And I think that showcasing that and putting your money to those businesses that literally help you have a smile when you walk out is actually very important.
Jacilyn: One of the reasons to open up a small business or be a business owner for me was negative experiences of, you know, bosses and a lot of, you know, taking advantage and oppression and just disrespect, all the isms, you know, as well. And so being a, being a boss, being able to be in touch, like actually talking with the person who’s asking time off and why and like, or just whatever they’re going through in their life. And they can still show up and be whoever they are, wherever they are that day. That’s one of our values is “Meet you where you are.” And we just haven’t really, we only have like what, six or seven people, including us on the team. And there’s really a beautiful, friendship amongst people and even keeping in touch.
And even, you know, two of our staff members yesterday, came in on their days off just to hang. And that’s super cool. And so that kind of thing I feel like is really important to show that that can be done. Even if it’s just those few people getting better treatment, that’s so worth it to me. And I think that anytime you’re paying something expensive price or whatever, think about that. That’s, why, because it’s like a human interaction and employment.
What else do you want people to know about Cardoon and why should people come in?
Jacilyn: We do events and they’re really high effort. People are extremely surprised because we do a lot of things that’s just a different side of community. For example, we have a Ukrainian baker and she does these delicious vareniki pop-ups. She does our honey cake every weekend, and we get people from the Ukrainian community coming out for that. It’s always really exciting.
Alex: We try to target like a pop-up or an event about once a month. It’s a great avenue for exploring more richness and more of the kind of creative things that we can provide.
Tiffany: I think what I hope happens and what we like, you know, invest our efforts in is that people will over time come to just trust that the experience they will have here is great. Cause I feel like there’s a lot of that kind of experience in fine dining. And it’s like, well, I feel like we can provide that at a lower price point at a more daily, like that small ritual, you know? And so, but anyways, like building that through our consistency of experience and product quality. And then hopefully people will just trust us for more of the events and things that we’re doing too. And just come out to see what’s what, you know, like Saturday night, they’re like, I don’t know, like, but I’m sure it’ll be good.
Alex: Let’s not forget our amazing coffee program that Jacqueline runs.
Jacilyn: We work with about seven roasters, which we’ve acquired over time. First one being Kuma was local – they’re such a fun and amazing team. Then we started to get some Scandinavian roasters when we were at the museum, Tim Wendelboe and La Cabra.
We’ve just started acquiring some East Asian roasters and some of the roasters we have have Chinese, Chinese beans, Chinese sourced coffee. We just got Stamp Act and Proud Mary. Those are really intentional selections to be able to offer.
If you’re like, “I don’t really know what I’m getting into with coffee, but I want to try a Cortado or something” – that’s where you will taste the espresso, so it should be good. We also have a really unique brewer that grinds and brews beans almost like an AeroPress but on demand. So you’ll get a really speedy cup of coffee.
Tiffany: Basically nothing we do here is an afterthought, is what I hope people come to appreciate.
What’s behind the name, Cardoon?
Jacilyn: It’s actually a variety of an artichoke. It’s actually a weed. I think it’s Mediterranean in origin. But it’s all over Seattle and and it’s enormous. They’re like sizes of baby heads with beautiful, vibrant purple plumes. So you’ll kind of see some purpleness around us.
Tiffany: And big, frilly, sage-colored fern leaves – it’s edible, the whole thing.
Jacilyn: I love a quote called, “A weed is but an unloved flower.” I just love weeds, I think that’s really cute.
Tiffany: It’s kind of like a transplant, which we all are moving around. And so setting roots. Like the whole analogy of plants and being a showy, but also stalwart plant in a garden is very nice.
Jacilyn: One of our other values is “delightfully surprising”. We want it to be a cafe where you walk in and you feel like you could kind of be anywhere in the world.
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