Tag Archives: popups

For the holiday party season, Capitol Hill is getting a Christmas Dive Bar

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(Image: CHS)

The neighbors have their Christmas decorations up already.

The Christmas Dive Bar will be popping up in Pike/Pine through New Year’s starting Thursday — a week before Thanksgiving.

“Hanging from the ceiling of the main area of CDB, there’s kitschy decorations, overscale ornaments, and enough colored light strings wrapped in tinselly-garland to make Mrs. Claus happy,” Murf Hall of the Burgess/Hall family of Capitol Hill businesses — and “huge Christmas buff,” according to the press release — says about the new project temporarily replacing 11th Ave’s The Woods dance club.

“We’ll be shaking up Christmas cocktails like Cranberry Collins and Eggnog Espresso Martinis and serving up snacks such as Crockpot Little Smokies and Cherry’s Xmas Chex Mix,” Hall’s business partner, husband, and presumed favorite secret Santa Joey Burgess says in the release. “We’re a dive bar with a festive twist ready to make the holiday season a little brighter, one drink at a time.”

The new setup in the club on 11th Ave between Pike and Pine includes “jingle bells, classic blow molds, and vintage décor” where elves will be mixing “festive cocktails” below “vintage chandeliers hung with ornaments and dozens of rolls of wrapping paper covering the walls create the perfect vibe for the holiday season.”

The pop-up announced this week hasn’t been a secret to anybody walking 11th Ave where small town shopping district-worthy window painting has advertised the changeover. It comes in a time when venues giving themselves over to temporary and seasonal pop-ups has become an alternative source of revenue for bars and restaurants but the twist here is a local business taking the reindeer reins and running the show themselves. Continue reading →

Tio Baby’s nachos and wings to take up ‘permanent residency’ at E Olive Way’s Rose Temple Bar

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Try the nachos (Image: Tio Baby’s)

Up and coming chefs hosting pop-ups at your favorite Capitol Hill bar is so pre-pandemic. 2021 is all about permanent residency.

Chef Will Gordon, previously the executive chef at Westward and an alum of How to Cook a Wolf, is taking his Tio Baby’s pop-up to the next level with a long-term, nightly engagement at E Olive Way’s Rose Temple Bar.

“I’m really excited to have the chance to serve some of my favorite foods in one of my favorite bars,” Gordon said in his announcement of the deal to become a nightly part of Rose Temple’s offerings. “Throughout my culinary journey, nachos and wings have been a constant for me.” Continue reading →

Lobster Daddy nets Vermillion’s kitchen for Capitol Hill pop-up

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Lobster Daddy’s UwU Roll (Image: Lobster Daddy)

Vermillion’s mix of booze, community, and art has survived more than a decade of changes in Pike/Pine. It is adding an ambitious new partner to add good eats to its menu for Seattle’s COVID-19 reopening era.

Lobster Daddy will bring lobster rolls, seafood chowder and creations, plus some witty merchandise and marketing to be part of the offerings at the 11th Ave art bar:

Lobster Daddy (LD) is throwing their first soft-open event at Vermillion on April 2nd and 3rd from 3pm-9pm. LD will be featuring crab rolls and lobster rolls with a variety of amazing ingredients from Asia. You also won’t want to miss their beautiful octopus carpaccio dish (Akkorokamui) named after a giant octopus-like monster from Japanese Ainu folklore.

Owner Kodey Currier says the plan is for Lobster Daddy to continue the pop-up as Vermillion’s kitchen, first as takeout only and, hopefully, with sit-down service as the city and the bar fully reopens in May or June. Continue reading →

In a temporary tribute to Friends, Seattle now has a Central Perk coffee house on Capitol Hill

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Thanks to a CHS reader for the pictures!

With big brands joining the carnival of all things weird and wonderful about Broadway and Capitol Hill, there are moments when it is gets harder and harder to believe your eyes. For example, this morning along E Thomas just off Broadway, you will now find the Central Perk coffee house and the famous orange couch that was a central setting for the ultimate saccharine sitcom of the 90s — Friends.

In a promotion for the 25th anniversary of the show’s first episode in what would become a decade-long run of pre-streaming cultural dominance, a work crew spent Monday night transforming The Lounge by AT&T and its Ada’s Discovery Cafe into “a full-size replica of the famous Friends’ coffee shop” that will reportedly be in place for “months.”

“Designed to capture the excitement and nostalgia of the show’s milestone anniversary celebration, visitors will be immediately immersed in a world they had only ever seen through their screens,” AT&T promises. Continue reading →

Japanese rice balls and natural wine at Sankaku and Marseille a match made in Melrose Market

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Brandin Myett and Rie Otsuka at Melrose Market (Image: Margo Vansynghel)

Strings of red paper lanterns, some emblazoned with golden Chinese characters, hang from the ceiling. In the distance, a harmonica tune floats through the late-lunch atmosphere at Melrose Market, the indoor food and design mart also home to Sitka and Spruce and Glasswing. On the white marble countertop of Marseille, a wine bar and eatery named after the French port city, three carefully crafted onigiri Japanese rice balls sit under a bell glass.

Sure, we’ve heard of fusion before, but what is going on here?

“A coincidence,” says Brandin Myett, owner of Marseille. “A Lunar New Year office party planned for February 5th got rescheduled because of the snow. We decided to leave the lanterns up in the meantime.”

Myett opened his new natural wine bar and eatery last spring. The name, he says, is just a reference to something beautiful but rough-around-the-edges, like Marseille. “The French connection is not that important.” Continue reading →

Tired of baking French pastries on the Hill, Mariela Camacho brings pan dulce to the people

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“It’s also about food justice,” Mariela Camacho says. “I want to give this to a community that doesn’t have a lot of food that is healthy and accessible to them.” (Image: Margo Vansynghel for CHS)

The sky is invariably dark, the atmosphere eerily quiet when Mariela Camacho gets to the commissary kitchen at 3 AM. No buzzing of mixers yet. No butter sizzling in pans, radio in the background, or cooks chopping onions, or bakers kneading dough. Usually, it’s just her and her diablitos (smoked paprika croissants), conchas (sweet bread rolls with crunchy toppings) and roles de canela (cinnamon rolls). One by one, Camacho loads them onto trays that go on top of the warm oven for proofing, the final rise before the final bake.

While the pastries rise, Camacho mixes the dough for sweet buns and bread, assembles pink cakes and alfajores, and chops up queso oaxaca for empanadas.

“And that’s just a regular day,” Camacho says. It’s 11 AM, and she’s worn out after a Sunday morning of baking. Her cheeks rosy from the work and oven heat, she’s loading up big boxes with bread, sweet buns and pastries to be whisked off to her wholesalers across the city: La Marzocco Cafe, Elm Coffee Roasters, Resistencia, Little Neon Taco, Addo, Bait Shop and Damn The Weather. Her wholesaler’s list has been growing quickly since she started her on-demand and pop-up bakery Comadre Panadería last spring.

Her pastry pop-ups, at Little Neon Taco, Dorothea Coffee or Broadcast Coffee, are increasingly popular as well. During her next pop-up, planned for Sunday, January 27th at Broadcast Coffee’s Jackson roasting house, Camacho will be selling cardamom orange conchas and a raspberry/beet niño envueltos.

Comadre Panaderia Pop-up

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Rocker’s New Mexican comfort food popping up at Pike/Pine’s Pettirosso

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Let’s see if we can keep this straight. Dave Hernandez is a rock and roll guitarist of some renown. See also: The Shins, The Intelligence. He has Albuquerque roots. He now calls Seattle home. And he makes sopapillas, New Mexican comfort food stuffed with “Green chile shredded chicken verde,” “slow roasted pork marinated in NM red chile,” or the “the more traditional beans/cheese/chile” veggie option. You missed his first Barelas Sopapillas pop-up a few weeks back in Ballard, of all places. You don’t have to miss his second.

Monday, 11th and Pike’s Cafe Pettirosso will host a night with Hernandez’s New Mexico-flavored creations and Miki Sodos’s specialty margaritas.

“Dave Hernandez, known most famously for his involvement in the band The Shins and for his part in the thriving Albuquerque independent rock scene, is now churning out sopapillas you wouldn’t believe,” Cafe Pettirosso’s announcement reads. “The New Mexican staple will be stuffed with carne adovada as well as a stuffed vegetarian option with New Mexican green chiles. The stuffed sopapillas will be served with homemade beans and rice.”

Sisters Miki and Yuki Sodos reopened Cafe Pettirosso in 2012 after longtime owner Robin Wright closed the original in 2011. It will celebrate its five-year anniversary in its new incarnation in 2017.

Capitol Hill food+drink | A Hill homecoming for Manu’s Bodegita

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With the amount of talent at work across the kitchens of Capitol Hill food and drink, we’re bound to have more and more homecomings featuring recent neighborhood graduates.

“I always thought it would be nice to get back on Capitol Hill with all those fans who appreciated the flavors of that little pop-up way back when in front of Montana,” Manu Alfau tells CHS.

Now, three years and a lot of Manu’s Bodega success later, Alfau is ready to return to Capitol Hill with Manu’s Bodegita. Continue reading →