(Image: Witness)

Beginning with a summer sermon on Broadway just shy of ten years ago, Southern spirited cocktail bar Witness served its final Capitol Hill congregation Sunday night. Let us pray.

“We’re honored to have been able to serve the Capitol Hill community for almost 10 years alongside amazing staff who’ve graced Witness with their brilliance and given it its character,” owners Gregg Holcomb and Alison Holcomb said in their goodbye message for the bar on social media. “It’s meant so much to us to be able to raise a child in the light of Witness and stitch a family and small business into the fabric of a neighborhood we’ve loved since first calling it home in 2000, back before Gregg’s first bartending gig.”

Gregg Holcomb tells CHS he will remain in the food and drink business on Broadway. In 2019, Holcomb opened Olmstead chef Jesse Elliott, bringing the old Broadway Grill space back to life.

In 2020, CHS talked with Holcomb about Olmstead and Witness’s paths through the pandemic. “If I had to put a silver lining on it, when you open a new restaurant, you make your best shot,” Holcomb said. “This kind of gave us a breath to see what was working.”

CHS reported on the hot and sweaty Seattle August 2013 opening of Witness and wrote that the bar felt like a small church with booze and chicken and waffles plus honest-to-goodness pews.

The full message from the Holcomb family is below:

Dear Flock,

Witness closed for good last night, its final Sunday.

The Holcomb family is grieving this loss, but no more than the many other neighborhood restaurant, bar, and coffee shop owners who’ve struggled to navigate the past 3+ years and had to make hard decisions of their own.

Mainly what we feel is gratitude. We’ve always appreciated how lucky we were to have the opportunity to create a place that served delicious food and cocktails but stood out for its warmth and hospitality. We’ve never lost sight of the fact that people who cross your threshold are placing some trust in you. That moment is a chance to build community — to give people an experience that reinforces how easy and extraordinary it can be to make new friends with a kind word, a little eye contact, and maybe a joke or two.

We’re honored to have been able to serve the Capitol Hill community for almost 10 years alongside amazing staff who’ve graced Witness with their brilliance and given it its character. It’s meant so much to us to be able to raise a child in the light of Witness and stitch a family and small business into the fabric of a neighborhood we’ve loved since first calling it home in 2000, back before Gregg’s first bartending gig.

Thank you all for letting Witness be a part of your lives. We have appreciated it dearly.

With all our hearts,
Gregg, Alison & Dashiell

PLEASE HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE!
Subscribe to CHS to help us pay writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for as little as $5 a month.