(Image: Kitchen & Market)
The corner grocery store isn’t dead yet in Seattle but you might have to pay a little more for your chips. A small neighborhood grocery in Madison Valley is set to reopen as part of the Kitchen & Market “boutique grocery chain” that says it is “chef- driven” and “primarily focused on bringing fresh products and meal kits to market.”
“I am so excited that we are opening a store in Madison Valley,” Stephanie King, Kitchen & Market’s founder and CEO, said in the announcement of the store’s opening. “Madison Valley has long been a neighborhood of fabulous customers of Kitchen & Market via our delivery service and now they can visit us in person.”
The change for the market across the street from neighborhood anchor Cafe Flora is another burst of life for the neighborhood’s struggling business community as it has asked for more support to make it through this final year of construction to create the new RapidRide G rapid bus line to connect the waterfront to Madison Valley via First Hill and Capitol Hill along E Madison.
The 2,200-square-foot market will also be working to restore its place in neighborhood shopping habits before the biggest retail change the area has seen in years finally opens. CHS first reported on plans for a new store from PCC Natural Markets to be part of a mixed-use development replacing the neighborhood’s City People’s Garden Store in April of 2016. Work is finally underway at the site after a protracted land use battle.
A previous family-run bodega in the new Kitchen & Market location closed last year and brought this eulogy from Vanishing Seattle extolling its virtues and lamenting the lost lease for owners Moo Sook and Tae Jin Kim. The previously city-owned property remains held by an ownership involving the Henry H. Ketcham Lumber company.
Kitchen & Market’s “European-style corner grocery model offers meal kits, grab-and-go lunches, pantry staples, and produce” concept first debuted at its Pike Place Market flagship in 2021. It expanded to Mercer Island and Medina but lost the Mercer Island location to a December 2023 fire. The Madison Valley expansion will soon be joined by new stores in Yarrow Bay this summer and in Eastlake this fall, the company says.
The Madison Valley location has a rare amenity for the central Seattle area — a small, surface parking lot.
Kitchen & Market’s building neighbors, meanwhile, include the office for the Save Madison Valley community group that made a multi-year stand against the PCC development.
Kitchen & Market’s expansion comes amid the growth of a new generation of boutique groceries in Seattle even as more traditional mom and pop stores fade away. Capitol Hill-born Cone and Steiner marked a decade in the city late last year. Seattle’s next 20-year growth plan, meanwhile, may include new zoning rules to allow more neighborhood commercial opportunities in more residential areas of the city.
As for Madison Valley, its challenged business community is showing signs of life. It will also gain a new sweet treat destination as the Fainting Goat family of gelato shops is adding a new E Madison location.
It will also have a new corner grocery replacing the old corner grocery at 2811 E Madison. The Kitchen & Market grand opening is planned for Thursday, March 21st. Learn more at kitchenandmarket.com.
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How is this economy sustaining lol
Have you seen the prices at this store?
For the time being, MV can remain blissfully unaware.
Fainting Goat opened on Friday.
Thanks!
I hope they didn’t sign a long term lease.
They’ll do ok for now, but they must have missed the giant construction site 1/2 a block away where PCC is opening a store.
This was once a city-owned property?! Would love to know more of the story there and why and how the city sold to a for-profit landlord.
In this story ‘City’ is being used as an abbreviated term for ‘City People’s Mercantile’
Different location, Bowerbird. County property records show the city as past owner of the building where the new market is opening. We’ll check in on the history there.
A quick shout-out to the little guy without the sleek marketing bucks: Just recently opened in old Essential Bakery cafe space at the SW corner of MLK and Madison (only a block west of Kitchen & Market) is Corner Delights. Coffee, tea, pastries, bread, cakes, sandwiches, and lots of nice windows & tables w/ wi-fi. With the street construction it might be a little hard to spot, but they’re good folk who could use some cafe love.
After poorly-planned boba tea place made a half-hearted run in there last year and quickly folded, we’re rooting for Corner Delights to stick around.
Thanks. We’ll be checking in there soon. No marketing bucks required to get CHS’s attention
Also would love to know what’s happening to the old Aglio e Olio and that building? And the Bar Cantinetta space? So much seems to be in motion on that block.
After many months as a burned-out, boarded-up hulk, the Alglio e Olio/cleaners/teriyaki strip is finally being redone, though the work seems to be happening in spurts with a lot of inactivity in between. The Bar Cantinetta space is being redone right now, though there are no permit signs or anything to give a clue what it’ll be. (Rumor was that it is the other half of Market & Kitchen, but who knows? It was a tricky space with few tables, small bar, and postage-stamp-sized kitchen.) Also, on the other side of the street, long-time fabric dealer Red Ticking just closed and is already being remodeled.
Red Ticking will be reopening a few doors north, at 2816 E Madison, the former site of Madeline’s The Shop.