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After a decade of Capitol Hill drink, Bait Shop sails forward on Broadway while Speckled and Drake ducks out on E Olive Way

 

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Goodbye from Speckled and Drake (Image: Speckled and Drake)

Tuesday night, Broadway Linda Derschang progeny Bait Shop will celebrate a decade as a nautical North Broadway dive bar. Beyond the sea on E Olive Way, Speckled and Drake is also marking ten years on Capitol Hill but preparing to say goodbye after losing its lease on E Olive Way.

“After 10 cool as duck years, we will soon be closing our little glass door for the last time,” the bar’s ownership announced last week. “The whole staff at Speckled & Drake want to share their love and appreciation for keeping us around this long. Unfortunately we were just not able to make a new lease work out with the current management, so it is time for us to waddle into the sunset.”

“We love you all,” the bar’s goodbye message concludes. “And we will miss having y’all drink with us at our favorite duck pond.”

A “Good Night and Good Duck” party is planned for Sunday.

Speckled and Drake debuted in late 2012 as Justin “JD” Martinsen returned from Brooklyn where he had opened a Seattle-styled tavern called duckduck just as the Williamsburg food and drink scene was taking off. S&D filled the former home of the Living Room near E Olive Way and Melrose and settled in for ten years of neighborhood drinking, outliving neighboring John John’s Gameroom. Today, the Glasswing Greenhouse does business next door and there is already a new tenant lined up to take the two-level bar space in a new direction. We’ll have more details on that new project soon.

Martinsen has not responded to CHS’s inquiries about the closure.

Meanwhile on Broadway, Bait Shop isn’t going anywhere. Started 10 years ago by prolific nightlife and food and drink entrepreneur Derschang, the bar was reinvigorated in 2016 as Derschang Group admirals Mike Leifur and Jonah Bergman took over the North Broadway bar.

Bait Shop opened in late 2012 and helped boost the nightlife and bar scene on northern Broadway with fried food and fishing village tavern vibes. It’s a “Northwest nautical” thing, Derschang said at the time — the kind of place you’d wander into after a day downing Bromine, drinking Rainier for breakfast, and chasing coho on the SS Hipster, we said back then.

Since 2016, Derschang has continued to unwind her Capitol Hill holdings including the sale of her popular Oddfellows Cafe this summer to the business family behind Queer/Bar and Elliott Bay Book Company. That Pike/Pine-focused company’s Gemini Room, by the way, will put the former Pettirosso space on 11th Ave back into motion this week when the new food and drink project is planned to open Friday.

Back in the extended Derschang family, there are also changes underway at 2019 Linda spinoff Smith. We’ll also have more on that, soon.

 

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Hillery
Hillery
1 year ago

How excited everyone must be for a yoga place to take over S&D!