Coastal Kitchen is getting ready to welcome customers again on a Capitol Hill business strip that could use some good news after its retail core was washed away during the COVID-19 crisis.

The restaurant, serving 15th Ave E for nearly 30 years, has taken a different path to reopening with no rush to reinvent itself as a mercantile, or surviving on takeout alone.

Coastal Kitchen sat the pandemic out. Now, it is one of the first Capitol Hill food and drink venues to go completely dark for the past year to make a comeback. The planned reopening is Wednesday.

“We’re lucky in our ability to do that,” Coastal’s Jonathan Tweten tells CHS. “For us, it was about trying to be safe.”

For fellow business owners and the communities living around 15th Ave E, the reopening will bring new activity after last month’s closure of the street’s QFC grocery over the company’s issues with Seattle’s $4 per hour COVID-19 hazard pay requirements.

CHS reported here on challenges in keeping the grocery space and surface parking lot active after the shuttering.

Now, at least, there will be more life and activity across the street from the locked-up market.

Tweten purchased Coastal Kitchen five years ago and now operates it as part of a group of seven neighborhood-focused restaurants across the region. The company also purchased the building Coastal calls home for $2 million.

Last year as the pandemic took hold, owning its building helped Tweten to put Coastal into virtual drydock away from the sea of uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. He said the full closure also made the most sense for how he saw the pandemic playing out in Seattle and for his workers who could get better support from the period’s enhanced unemployment.

Tweten says it has been hard to keep a place closed for 15 months and that laying off staff brought tears even though he believed he was doing the best thing for Coastal’s employees.

“You have to trust yourself and trust your instincts,” Tweten said. “Restaurants are being asked to be public health.”

Last April, Tweten and Coastal received a $342,332 loan from the federal Paycheck Protection Program for 41 employees but he says they ended up using only a portion of it and ended up paying some of the forgivable loan back.

More useful, he hopes, will be the Restaurant Revitalization Fund with awards that can be used for everything from payroll and health care, rent and mortgages, utilities, construction costs, supplier costs, operational expenses, paid sick leave, and more for restaurants, food stands, bars and taverns, bakeries, and brewpubs, wineries, and distilleries that have managed to stay in business. But the expectation is that the federal bailout program’s $28.6 billion won’t be nearly enough to help everyone.

Because it can only be used by restaurants that have remained in business even if temporarily shuttered, the arrival of the new fund’s application process for Capitol Hill restaurants and bars will also reveal just exactly how many of the neighborhood’s venues that have yet to reopen never will.

But Tweten’s instincts say now is the time for his Capitol Hill restaurant to reemerge. With vaccination prevalence nearing 50% of adults in King County and the neighborhood around 15th Ave E being more open to eating out in person again, Tweten is ready to put Coastal Kitchen back into motion.

Coastal’s sibling restaurants also shuttered at times during the pandemic have already moved forward but Tweten said the appetite for reopening varied by community. Outside Seattle, the willingness to dine out in person was stronger.

Finding employees has also taken longer in Seattle but Tweten said the debate over whether too much or not enough federal stimulus has impacted the job market doesn’t seem as applicable in the city.

“Hiring has always been an issue in Seattle,” Tweten says of the competitive job market here.

As for 15th Ave E, a major part of its business core will be restored starting Wednesday. And, while it’s not at the scale of a national chain grocer, new growth is coming.

The street might have also lost bakery and cafe The Wandering Goose to the pandemic but the tiny space won’t stay empty much longer. A new Capitol Hill expansion of Rubinstein Bagels is set to open soon.

Coastal Kitchen is planning to reopen Wednesday at 427 15th Ave E. You can learn more at coastalkitchenseattle.com.

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