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Capitol Hill food+drink | Dino’s Tomato Pie serving pizza ’round or square’ since March 2016

Screen Shot 2016-02-03 at 2.04.22 PMpizza-squareAs an experienced restaurateur battling with Seattle’s permitting backlog and booked-up contractors, Brandon Pettit says he feels fortunate to be nearly ready to take his newest creation out of the oven just in time to be part of CHS’s pizza spring.

“We’re starting to brick the ovens. Getting the bar finished up. Recipe testing right after Valentine’s Day,” Pettit said, running through his mental checklist for CHS. “Still anything can go wrong,” he said.

If all that works out, come March 1st, nostalgia-drenched Dino’s Tomato Pie will be open for business at the corner of E Olive Way and Denny — serving pizzas “round or square.”

That’s March 1st, 2016, by the way. Pettit and crew had some fun with the Dino’s marketing, rolling out a black star field-background-ed, animated pizza gif-ed, Netscape-friendly website for the restaurant billed with tongue in cheek as “Seattle’s oldest pizzeria.”

“We wanted to have a site that looked like a random Jersey pizza tavern,” Pettit said. There’s no telling if the circa-2000 site’s promises of “Real Cocktails, Garlic Knots, Jersey Salad, Calzone, Brownie or Blondies,” and  “Watermelon Popsicles” are real or creative teases. The new joint will be open “4ish to 2ish,” the site promises.

We first reported on the Capitol Hill addition to Pettit’s Ballard-based Delancey family last May as the project was taking over the former Money Mart space to create a neighborhood focused pizza joint and bar. Pettit told CHS he was looking forward to being part of the densely populated neighborhood around E Olive Way and part of a group of businesses focused on serving the nearby blocks. Pettit described Dino’s as a “walkable bar” with a pizza counter and lounge and plans to do “a lot of takeout and delivery.”

Dino’s signature will be its square pies. “Where I was from they usually called it Sicilian. Baked two or three times with a lot of burnt cheese around the corners — good drinking pizza,” Pettit told us last year.

In the meantime, Dino’s is hiring pizza cooks and focusing on the last construction elements. The buildout from Heliotrope Architects and Metis still has some work left to complete and Pettit said Dino’s might debut with a limited offerings — “might have square pizza, might have round” — as logistics around the ovens gets worked out.

You can keep track of opening plans and enjoy some old-school web surfing at dinostomatopie.com.Screen Shot 2016-02-03 at 2.04.44 PM

Capitol Hill food+drink notes

We like the logo

We like the logo

  • In September, CHS told you about the closure of The Byzantion after 30 years on Broadway to make way for new cocktail bar, Spirit Animal. Seattle Mag reports Paul Berryman and Izzy Guymon are preparing their new bar for a spring opening.
  • Frankie & Jo’s, the “plant based” ice cream shop from the owners of Juicebox and Hot Cakes CHS featured last week, has now raised $9,500 of the goal for its $50,000 community loan.
  • Off Hill: Down Denny, the Kremwerk club’s owner Nicole Stone is undertaking an expensive proposition. The paperwork for the Minor Ave club’s $200,000 “change of use” to permit for use of the space as a dance club and restaurant has been approved by the city.
  • MTM Storefront 1Now open down in Leschi: Barrio sibling Meet the Moon:
    Meet the Moon gets started early in the morning, offering espresso and coffee from local Olympia Coffee Roasting Company as well as a nice selection of housemade pastries and breakfast items – all available to take away. If you’re looking for a more relaxed morning, dine-in and order the Crispy French Toast, Breakfast Burrito, or one of our many other full breakfast plates…all complemented nicely by a morning cocktail or mimosa. As the day progresses, we add soup, salads, snacks, and sandwiches to the mix as well as additional drink offerings that feature craft distilleries and breweries and wine options. The dinner hour brings a more expanded menu with everything from additional housemade snacks such as the Bucheron Goat Cheese and Lotus Chips with Wasabi Guacamole to entrees such as a Mushroom Pot Pie and Chicken Bolognese.
  • Construction is picking up on the project from the Black Bottle folks in the old 22 Doors space on 15th Ave E. Still no announcement about the details of the project.
  • Now open: Revolution Wine, the “anti-wine store, wine store” on E Pike.
  • Born this week in 2015: Sur 16.
  • Happy Year of the Monkey and 6th birthday to Chungee’s.
  • Josh Henderson just opened the first of a planned 10 Great State Burger joints. Odds on there not being one on Capitol Hill?
  • It’s time for Seattle Burger Month at Li’l Woody’s:

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10 Comments
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fluffy
8 years ago

Heh, if you check the page source, as a nice touch they have a (thankfully commented-out) autoplaying audio file that you can hear at http://www.dinostomatopie.com/topgun.mp3 should you care.

fluffy
8 years ago
Reply to  fluffy

Just for the hell of it I decided to try out the helpfully-provided version of Netscape 4.72 (in a VM). It’s actually Netscape Communicator 4.73. The modern Internet works about as well as one would expect.

Ironically, their own site is completely broken in it.

WebRing
WebRing
8 years ago
Reply to  fluffy

Yeah, there’s so much modern HTML in there there’s no way that is gonna render correctly. I think Communicator did CSS1? Still funny though.

fluffy
8 years ago
Reply to  WebRing

Netscape 4 didn’t even support CSS1 – instead it supported its own crappy not-quite-stylesheets that got interpreted via JavaScript or something. Back in those days I always turned stylesheets off because they usually made things worse, not better, and I know of a lot of people who just plain did not trust CSS because of how janky Netscape’s implementation was. (Not that IE’s was much better, but at least it didn’t cause your computer to hang… usually…)

Sam Schick
8 years ago
Reply to  fluffy

Completely right, Fluffy. This new old horse would never actually work in Navigator, though that’s a possibility going down the road. The real fun of the website (in addition to simply being an homage to the golden age of Geocities websites / the ridiculous websites of the small-town joints B.P. and I both grew up around) is that we’re adding to it anew every few days. Or once every ten years. We’ll see!

Love that you saw the midi file, though!

cougguy
cougguy
8 years ago

Is there any news on what happened to Bleu Bistro? They have had a sign up for a while saying they are closed for an emergency. However, a “for lease” sign appeared a week or so ago on the window as well, which seems to not be good news.

dc
dc
8 years ago

Apparently it’s named after another pizzeria out east that Pettit liked. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be regular pizza.

And none of that deep dish garbage either

Dino
Dino
8 years ago

Tomato pie has many definitions….

To some people (including people I grew up with in nj) , Tomato pie is just another name for pizza of any style.

To some it is pizza (round or square) that has the sauce on top of the cheese (my own (jersey-born and raised) mother follows this definition).

To some it has to do with texture, a crispy square pizza (like Difara in Brooklyn) may be called Sicilian ( or simply square) and a softer chewier one (like l &b Spumoni gardens) is called tomato pie.

To some it has to do with thickness. Grandma pie is thin, sicilian is thicker, and tomato pie is even thicker (or thinner depending on who you talk to).

To some there is a difference between Tomato Pie and Tomato Pies. There are many regional definitions of tomato pie even within New Jersey (not to mention ny and pa) as well as disagreements between different families about the definitions, as well as disagreements among individual families about the definitions of tomato pie. (My sister and mother and I disagree about this one).

Apizza by any other name would small as sweet.

GregoryH
GregoryH
8 years ago

I grew up just north of NYC, and square pizza with a thicker crust that was usually very crispy on the bottom was called “Sicilian”. I’ve eaten at Difara in Brooklyn, but never had their square pizza. Their round pizza is transcendent, and the old man, a maestro of the Pizzaioli.

I’m no fan of amanti, but really? a pizza shop right across the street from a pizza shop? one of them is not gonna make it.

Kim
Kim
8 years ago

What’s the scoop with the Amante racket across the street? I noticed they’ve turned off that screaming bright animated sign. I’m still unsure how that location has stayed in business for 10+ years.