Seasmith will have a lot in common with its Beacon Ave sibling Fable (Image: Fable)
Capitol Hill Station’s crowds of light rail passengers are back to pre-pandemic levels — and then some. The mix of apartments and new residents above the stations has created a busy new Broadway neighborhood. Now the hopes of new businesses above the nearly eight-year-old Seattle subway stop are also returning to pre-pandemic levels.
“I don’t think I could have imagined that a project could take us that long but back then,” Mathew Wendland, owner of Seasmith said. “But I also couldn’t have imagined any of the things we were all going to go through within COVID.”
Seasmith is the happily anticipated, long awaited coffee shop and casual hangout from the Burien Press family of businesses. It will have been in the works to join Capitol Hill Station’s new development at the corner of Broadway and E. Barbara Bailey Way for five years when it finally opens in 2024 joining the expanded Glo’s Diner (May 2023), and H Mart’s M2M grocery market (April 2022) as the development’s commercial tenants finally reach critical mass.
Seasmith will be “all day cafe, really looking at how do we create something that is activating every part of the day — coffee, fresh food in morning, full kitchen, lunch, dinner, beer, natural wine,” Wendland said about the project when we first spoke to him about it in 2021.
When it finally opens next year, Seasmith’s story will be one of pandemic challenges, transit oriented development bureaucracy, and creative perseverance.
Wendland, owner of Burien Press, Moonshot Coffee, Fable, and the online-only beverage shop Plants & Animals says he first applied in 2019 for a retail space above Capitol Hill Station. The Capitol Hill Station construction development began in 2009, opening for service in 2016. The above-station development including hundreds of new market rate and affordable apartments plus space for new businesses has faced delays and new challenges in emerging from the pandemic. The original targeted date for opening Seasmith was set for the beginning of 2022. But when COVID hit, the project delays began to “snowball,” as Wendland put it.
“I didn’t want to walk away from it,” Wendland said. “It just wasn’t going to be possible for us. We’d put everything we had into making sure we could keep every person on our team employed during COVID. It was more of a matter of if we can continue to pursue developing this?”
Wendland said COVID hit close to the project from the start as parts of their shipment for construction were even held up in Wuhan when the lockdowns first began. Permitting was also a large delay in development for Seasmith.
(Image: Burien Press)
“We were trapped in just one part of the permitting review process for eight to 10 months,” Wendland said.
The permitting process was difficult because of the issue between public-private partnership and the eminent domain process within the property. Capitol Hill Station is public property, but the retail space above is leased for 99 years and private, despite being owned by Sound Transit. The extra layer made an already slowed permitting process with a backlogged city department even slower.
Seasmith and the rest of the retail spaces in Capitol Hill Station also routinely changed developing managers under BentallGreenOak, but Wendland said that relationship Seasmith has had with the management team changed drastically for the better last year.
“We’re in regular communication,” Wendland said. “I’m talking to someone related to this project at least every day. Sometimes I’m talking to multiple people in a day. Whether it’s the contractor or the building’s consultants, project managers, or the folks overing the entire project themselves.”
Progress is finally happening. Seasmith applied for its liquor license last week, and Wendland said this means the cafe is on the final stretch before opening.
“The space is nearly finished with construction,” Wendland said. “Most of the equipment is on-site and ready to be installed. Really we’re just working on the fine details before the final inspections. It’s really right there.”
The extra time has allowed the team around Seasmith’s business family to grow and learn while shaping its menus from their own production kitchen. The team has sharpened its skills hosting pop-ups and as it began making food in-house.
“How we approach the project has fundamentally changed,” Wendland said. “In 2020 it was less attached to what we actually do as a team with our food, natural wine, and beer programs and now Seasmith is taking shape as a reflection of what we do and the hospitality we offer as a team.”
The cafe will mimic the hours of its Beacon Ave sibling Fable — an “all day” cafe, serving specialty coffee, pastries, a full breakfast brunch menu which updates for the time of day and then offering table service and a full dinner menu in the evening.
“It’s hard to put into words the wide range of feelings I have towards the project,” Wendland. “I can’t imagine opening what we had planned in 2019 now, and I don’t think I could have ever envisioned what we’ve created and will be overing now back in 2019. After all this time, it’s hard to accept this is really happening and we’re about to open. But I’m really excited and really proud of what we’ve overcome and what we’ve created.”
Seasmith will open next year at 118 Broadway E. Watch for updates on @seasmith.coffee on instagram.
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Are they pro union or anti union?
Do they make good coffee and are the employees happy are probably more important questions.
Exactly
No the union question is far more important, don’t troll
I hope neither. It doesn’t matter. You are obsessed with unions. Stop already. They are not big corporations, they are small or average size businesses with own difficulties, trying to survive in this difficult time. You don’t want to work there, don’t. I’m not surprised by newly published statistics that the parents in WA state are number one among others states, who supporting their children financially. I can understand if some emotional, medical issues, but in general, many young people just don’t want to work, but they have plenty of time to go outside protesting some nonsense. Go to work and stop asking those questions. I was born and raised in Soviet Union. Nothing is free in this world, not even in the communist/socialist countries.)) Just be happy, that the business is taking a risk to open in this area, where is every day businesses are vandalizing or getting robbed.
The average financial support is $700. Is that enough for young people to not work and just “go outside protesting some nonsense” or is this capitalist world making it more and more difficult to live comfortably even with a job? If you like authoritarian regime, false imprisonment, and police killings, you should go back to Russia.
You misread my post. I mentioned Soviet Union with the one purpose, that many young people are on the wrong path of thinking. They think like the real commies, who had the ideas of justice for all, which ended up with disastrous results, since it doesn’t work.))
About financial support, I meant parents support, which is probably enough to live comfortably, if they live at home with them.)
Margins are razor thin at restaurants as it is. Unions have a time and a place. This is probably not one of them.
Totally agree.
…is the last thing I would ever be considering when deciding where to eat or shop.
Cool, publicly saying you don’t care about workers is really neat!!! thumbs up!
Life must be difficult if you only shop for goods and services that are union based. It also means that you don’t support about 90% of small, local businesses, but instead rely on major chains where it does make sense for workers to organize. Shame on you!
It’s pretty easy to shop as ethically as possible.
Anytime! Also, I run a small business. I treat people who work for/with me pretty well, and have decades-long relationships with them. Treating people well doesn’t need a union.
A very small business isn’t really the focus of unions in most cases.
I work in a field where a lot of our staff are union members, and I have managed unionized staff. While it makes sense in my profession to have a union, I don’t see how restaurant owners could unionize without that being detrimental to their business. The main reason is that unionized staff are difficult to fire, and it can be a long, drawn out process to fire problem employees. While this works in my profession, as problem staff can be re-assigned to other duties which do not involve interacting with customers, I don’t see how a restaurant owner would feasibly be able to do so.
I worked in restaurants for most of my teens and more than half of my 20s. I was unfairly (in my opinion) fired from a couple. But restaurant jobs are a dime a dozen. If you don’t like your working conditions at one job, it’s REALLY not difficult in the city to find another one. It’s not like you live in a small town. Most of the time, staff who work restaurant jobs are working their first real jobs, so of course, the odds of having problem employees is extremely high. And in restaurants, all it takes is a few bad Yelp reviews to tank your business. Unionizing neither seems necessary for these workers nor feasible for the employer.
Do not own a business if you can’t afford to pay union wages. It’s part of the deal. Move onto another profession. Pay the piper or else. It’s not difficult.
Business owners are not entitled to cheap labor.
How are either of your statements relevant to my post?
It’s sad that one commenter can come into to any coffee shop or restaurant post on this site and move all the focus from something new in the neighborhood toward drama w/ a pointed rhetorical question about unionization.
The purity spiral here is senseless as there are zero other independent, unionized business on the Hill. It’s negativity for the sake of it w/ the sheen of drive-by, no-stakes activism.
Indeed, this is a nonsensical discussion. If Seasmith’s employees ever decide they need to organize, and they encounter management resistance in doing so, we’ll hear about it — guaranteed. Unless and until that happens, it’s not something any of us needs to be concerned with. I look forward to this opening and hope it succeeds.
Now does anyone know when the M2M food court is opening? (If the answer is never, they should take the signs down and stop teasing us about it.)
I wonder if there are any updates on this place, I walk by it often and it seems like some progress is being made, but the Instagram account linked does not seem to work. Would love to see that empty spot finally open.