(Image: Foreign National)

(Image: @foreign.national)

Capitol Hill French Vietnamese restaurant Stateside is shuttering its neighboring bar Foreign National after seven years of business on E Pike.

The lower Pike lounge announced the planned closure Thursday:

Thank you Seattle!!! It’s been a great run, one that ends tonight. Drop by if you can.

Stateside arrived on Capitol Hill in late 2014 as chef and owner Eric Johnson was excited to debut his first food and drink venture amid “the best concentration of restaurants in Seattle.”

Foreign National followed two years later in the summer of 2016 as Johnson tried to downplay the hype. “We’re really surprised and grateful for what seems to be a great deal of interest,” Johnson told CHS at the time. “But it’s tiny. And we’re a little bit scared.”

The 28 seat lounge became a cool, cave-like extension of the bustling Stateside in the era of Capitol Hill food and drink complexes that stretched out to fill new preservation-friendly development and adaptive reuse overhauls opened up old auto row structures to new life. A decade later, the complexes like E Union’s Bateau, one of the biggest 2015 ideas in Capitol Hill food and drink, are shifting and restarting.

There are still fun small additions hidden away around Capitol Hill, of course. CHS shared about one here this week in the Paper Fan Cocktail Bar “secreted” away inside E Pike’s Biang Biang Noodles just a few blocks up from Stateside.

It is not clear what is next for the Foreign National space. Johnson and Stateside partner Seth Hammond haven’t responded to CHS’s inquiries. Business and construction permits have so far yielded no clues.

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