Box Cafe

Box Cafe is a drive through on 4th Avenue West in the southern part of Everett, well away from the downtown cluster on Colby and Wetmore. There is no room to sit in and that is the point: this is a stop on the way past rather than somewhere to spend a morning, which suits the stretch of south Everett it serves.

What makes it worth knowing is the coffee in the cup. Box pours Zoka, the Seattle roaster, and that is not a common thing to find at a drive through window in Snohomish County. Every other place in this directory serving Zoka is a sit down cafe, three of them in Seattle and one in Kirkland, so if you want that coffee without the drive south or the parking, this is the one.

Beyond the roaster, the shop keeps a low profile. It takes delivery orders as well as drive up ones, so the menu reaches beyond the lane, and it holds a steady run of reviews without ever having been written about by a publication.

That absence is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up. No outlet has covered Box Cafe, it is not in the one reader poll Live in Everett ever ran for the city's coffee, and it has no website. The roaster came from a visit rather than a search, and the hours still need a phone call.