(Image: Fire Tacos & Cantina)
The 15th Ave E building formerly home to longtime Capitol Hill favorite Coastal Kitchen turned 100 years old this year. It will end 2024 with a new owner — and a new restaurant set to join the neighborhood.
The 4,000 or so-square-foot restaurant has sold for $2.1 million to real estate investor Thomas Lin, according to county records. A Capitol Hill expansion of food truck and Alki Beach-born Fire Tacos & Cantina is set to move in, city permits indicate.
The Puget Sound Business Journal first reported the deal last week. The PSBJ says Fire could open as early as November given the restaurant’s turn-key status — though other permitting and things like a liquor license might require a longer timeline
The restaurant has been empty in the heart of 15th Ave E since February when Coastal closed after 30 years of business and weekend brunch lines.
The Sound Restaurant Family company that includes the Mioposto pizza chain as well as a roster of South Sound venues including The Poodle Dog in Fife had operated Coastal since purchasing the property and the business in 2016.
Sound had announced an agreement on a sale of the $2.5 million-listed property. But, by March, the deal had fallen through and the property went back on the market.
(Image: Fire Tacos & Cantina)
The new deal is done. Records show the $2.125 million transaction closed earlier this month, putting the 100-year-old restaurant building rehabbed by the Sound Restaurant group in the hands of new owner and restaurant veteran Lin. Lin is the former owner of West Seattle’s Alki Homestead.
Now, Fire Tacos & Cantina is getting ready to move in. Owners Erika Torres and Jorge Gonzalez built the business first as a tacos de birria-focused food truck before opening their first location on Alki in 2022.
Fire arrives on a 15th Ave E adding hundreds of new homes. Earlier this year, the five-story, nearly 70-unit mixed-use Capitol Hilltop Apartments from neighborhood developer Hunters Capital opened just up the street. Last month, the design review board signed off on the Hunters plan for a new six-story, 172-unit mixed-use development on the street’s old QFC block.
Fire’s arrival on Capitol Hill also comes amid big changes in the neighborhood’s Mexican restaurant mix. CHS reported here on the August closure of 12th Ave’s Barrio from the Heavy Restaurant Group family of businesses and E Pine’s Mezcaleria Oaxaca is slated to have its final night of service this week. Both had long runs on Capitol Hill and leave veterans like Fogon and Poquitos to carry on as well as new expansions like Carmelo’s which really is expanding soon to Broadway. Seabrook-born Koko’s has also quickly grown into a major Mexican food and drink player on the backside of Pike/Pine.
On 15th Ave E, a possible Mexican project set to take over the former Canterbury space appears to be not happening. A spokesperson for Ethan Stowell denied the restaurateur was working on the reported project.
Meanwhile, around the corner from the coming soon Fire Tacos, longtime neighborhood Mexican joint El Farol from the Arias family has kept customers well fed with platters piled with rice and beans since 2008. A few blocks east, Whidbey Island-launched Rocket Taco has been part of the 19th Ave E restaurant scene since 2018 in the former Kingfish Cafe space.
For Fire Tacos & Cantina, there is opportunity on 15th Ave E to grow their business in a proven restaurant in the middle of a neighborhood again growing with new residents along with memories of those old Coastal Kitchen brunch lines.
Fire Tacos & Cantina will open at 427 15th Ave E soon. Learn more at firetacosbirria.com.
$5 A MONTH TO HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE
🌈🐣🌼🌷🌱🌳🌾🍀🍃🦔🐇🐝🐑🌞🌻
Subscribe to CHS to help us hire writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. To stay that way, we need you.
Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for $5 a month -- or choose your level of support 👍
Building should have been demolished for housing. It’s such a waste of space considering restaurant could open on bottom floor of a multi story high rise. Seattle is so whack with priorities.
Ah we gotta give that a rest. There will be a massive structure just across the street once the QFC is demolished—we don’t need another “urban canyon” like what we have on Broadway. I have to wonder if so many new businesses are starting (and seem to be doing well) on 15th because…it hasn’t changed much??? Wild thought for the urbanist crowd.
if you think “change” is what drives customers away and not affordability, you aren’t approaching this problem from a real perspective. We need more housing all across the city, if 15th is already a thriving place for businesses, it will only become better with more customers living in a walkable distance. Not everything needs to be a superstructure either. We could solve a lot of the housing problems we have if it were possible to add 3 or 4 stories of housing to places like these when they get rebuilt… and it wouldn’t have to change the neighborhood much… Wild thought for the anti-urbanist crowd
I absolutely subscribed to that argument a few years ago, but I generally do not think the type of highly financialized development that happens to occur in this city (and Captiol Hill specifically) is really conducive to streets full of happy shoppers and any real sense of community. And obviously our onerous design review process isn’t helping either.
Perhaps it will take time, but as a business owner on the street in question, I absolutely could not survive in one of these massive spaces you tend to find in the ground floors of new structures. These spaces often have nearly opaque windows, require extensive build outs (which the developer is happy to see their awful architects help you with—a good reason why most new businesses in Seattle feel horrifically over-designed inside) and the facades are almost always pretty off putting. We can take 19th Ave E as a bit of an exception, but those are also pretty fancy developments down there.
I’m certainly not “anti-urbanist”. I dearly wish Seattle would accept the reality that it is, indeed, a city. But the concept of “more housing more people more prosperous business” doesn’t always play out as neatly as the pro-development crowd seem to believe. Starting a business on a relic of a street like 15th Ave E is a hell of a lot easier than trying to move into the ground floor of the Chloe on Madison, which has been conspicuously empty since its completion…
YES, thank you. We need housing, but bulldozing existing business spaces isn’t *always* going to be the answer to that if we want to keep the city a halfway feasible option for someone starting a business without millions and millions of dollars behind them already. If we want family-owned businesses to have a shot, bulldozing the spaces that exist and are affordable for them to rent is not a great idea. We wouldn’t be getting a local family-owned restaurant, we’d be getting an Orangetheory and a Starbucks. I’d much rather see one or two of the hundreds of single-family houses with big setbacks in the surrounding neighborhoods go in lieu of more housing.
I see the building on the east side of 15th, south of Harrison (with Palermo, Shop Agora) as the perfect example of reasonable-scale inceased density, with small retail spaces that are sized appropriately for small locally-owned businesses. I remember when it was built (maybe 20 years ago?) and thinking “we need more buildings like that in our neighborhoods!”
Unfortunately, just adding stories on top of existing buildings isn’t actually that easy; it basically costs as much (if not MORE) than building a brand-new structure from scratch. The businesses that can afford to operate in those (essentially brand-new) spaces are going to be way less affordable because they’ll have significantly higher rents to contend with.
There are a ton of single-family lots in the neighborhood that would be better candidates for new housing, IMO.
The opposition to housing are who need to give things a rest. 15th needs upzoning big time due to how walkable it is and how close to transit it is.
Ah, more of that development-oriented transportation.
If it’s not entirely owned by large corporations, it’s not a real city.
Those who favor “more and more housing,” like you, at any cost, might consider that a more balanced approach is best for the health of our neighborhood and city. To insist on razing just about EVERY long-established building for development of 5 or 6 story apartments ignores the fact that many such buildings are going up. In that block alone, large apartment buildings are either already built (Hilltop site) or about to be built (QFC site). Can’t you please be satisfied with that?
“Those who favor “more and more housing,” like you, at any cost”
NOBODY said that. Nobody. “At any cost”…Gimme a break.
People living on the streets and couches are not satisfied. We need 10’s of thousands of units. The faster we do it? The less inflation on projects. The sooner our city becomes more livable.
Generally agree w/ your comment about the city needing to get its priorities straight but I don’t think the relatively small footprint of the former Coastal Kitchen building would have been a viable candidate for a multifamily project…
Bingo. They’d have to buy & bulldoze an adjacent building too. The city isn’t growing at the same rate it was 5-10 years ago & the existing buildings are structurally sound, so It would be surprising if a developer found that worth their time/cash at the current moment.
So completely wrong. Have nothing but housing and nowhere to go? Destroy what’s left of a beautiful neighborhood before Amazon invasion and druggies took over? Just another six story apartment house should destroy what’s left of the great livability we had.
El Farol will still be much better than any of these foo foo Michelin star places trying to come in and charge $30 for nachos. Ugh. Well better than a vacancy at least.
100%. El Farol is amazing and run by great people.
Part of the reason the old Canterbury space has been so challenging for restaurants is the size. It is difficult to get enough turns on tables to make a profit when their rent must be super high. The old Coastal Kitchen space has the same problem. Of course we don’t know the financials of the place but it will be an up-hill battle for any new tenant. I wish new businesses well but I’ll stick with the super friendly staff and yummy food at El Farol.
We’ve seen the experiment already: Coastal Kitchen chose to take the diner out of its nature, making the place fancier, and failed.
Sounds good. I like tacos.
El Farol has been right around the corner for years. Your money would be better going to a local family restaurant than to some millionaire real estate developer.
I think you’re confusing the owner of the building/space with the owners of the restaurant moving in. Fire is a local couple who started a food truck in Kent, then made a big jump to try a restaurant on Alki. It’s a local success story and worth your grumpy support. Check em out in the beach to see for yourself, it’s a family affair.
I like El Farol too. There’s room for more than one Mexican place on 15th.
Great news – looking fw to it!!!
Too bad. Coastal Kitchen in it’s heydey was the perfect asset to 15th Ave E. Won’t be frequenting the new restaurant…. I always love El Farol and they deserve the business.