(Image: Mamnoon)
A Capitol Hill “window” into the world and flavors of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine is closing. Mamnoon has announced its final day of service on Melrose will be Sunday, September 14th.
“Mamnoon was also your window into our world. It was important for us to connect Seattleites to the struggles of people in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, and connect our global communities to Seattle. And to be a part of a first wave of forward thinking Levantine restaurants that allowed the world to understand our people as resilient, culturally proud, and creative people,” owners Wassef and Racha Haroun said in the announcement.
CHS reported here on the November 2012 debut of the “modern union of Middle Eastern cuisines” born in a beautifully renovated 1928 automotive garage at 1510 Melrose Ave across the street from the then-booming Melrose Market complex. Wassef was a local tech entrepreneur who served as chief technology officer in creating then Odd Fellows building-headquartered King of the Web.
The Graham Baba-designed project overhauled the building, creating a new restaurant below 2,800 square feet of office space and a 1,800 square foot residential component. Eric Cobb of Cobb Architects designed the restaurant component after working with the Harouns on their award-winning Leschi home.
In 2022, CHS talked with the Harouns as Mamnoon marked ten years of business and had grown into a food and drink families with multiple locations. “Every parent feels that their kids are very special — same exact here,” Wassef Haroun said of the Nadi Mama family of businesses.
The last few years brought changes including growth of its fine foods mezze product lines and a winding down of its restaurants. Earlier this year, the group closed down the Hanoon restaurant in Kirkland’s Totem Lake.
In its announcement, Mamnoon says its Mamnoon Street concept will live on including its current 6th Ave location. Its rooftop mbar will also continue though the group says changes will include “a different view, one where we can sit together again and look out at what once was, and what could be, over Seattle’s ever-changing skyline.”
UPDATE: The closure will create a second hole in the nearby area’s dining scene and marks the second departure in weeks of one of the most popular restaurants on Capitol Hill. CHS reported here on the sudden late summer closure of Stateside just around the corner from Mamnoon after a decade of Vietnamese fine dining on E Pike.
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I’m confused about which architect designed the restaurant.
I’ve updated to clarify Graham Baba led on the full building overhaul while Cobb was focused on the restaurant component
Cobb had the help of a local interior designer too
I’m on their mailing list and they stated several times, including in the email about theirp culinary influences were Syrian, Lebanese and Persian. Maybe a Freudian slip on your part?
From the announcement on the Mamnoon Instagram page linked here: “Mamnoon was also your window into our world. It was important for us to connect Seattleites to the struggles of people in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, and connect our global communities to Seattle. And to be a part of a first wave of forward-thinking Levantine restaurants that allowed the world to understand our people as resilient, culturally proud, and creative people.”
Maybe a Freudian slip on your part?
Maybe Palestine gets attention in Seattle and sounds like good marketing. They didn’t use to claim Palestine.
This is the answer.
Or it could be a cause they support 🙄
https://seattle.eater.com/2024/2/6/24064046/a-fundraiser-for-palestinian-children-gazan-cuisine-mama-restaurant-group-seattle
No, the email I received titled “A final Mamnoon to you, Seattle” states “By the summer of 2012, we were feverishly deep in the process of asking ourselves an existential question about Lebanese, Syrian and Persian cuisines tied to their futures in Seattle.” It then describes the owners Iranian, Syrian and Lebanese backgrounds several times. Nothing about Palestine.
Although it looks like from what you quoted they were referring to conflicts (I know they held fundraisers for Palestine). The email I received referred only to culinary influences and the ancestry of those who created the restaurant.
So it was a Freudian slip, the article has a direct quote from them on it and mentions more than cuisine each time. Rather than check the announcement linked here or trust the quotes you assumed that the author made a mistake because for some reason mentioning Palestine seems to bother you in some way. Otherwise you would have taken the time you put here to baselessly accuse them of journalist malpractice to just go to their website and see if the statement mentioned Palestine.
I assumed that CHS was quoting from the same email that I had received. That’s why I assumed it was a typo. When I was told that CHS was probably quoting from one of the posts on IG that didn’t mention Palestine I accepted that. There is no bad guy here.
Again, the article directly quotes them saying Palestine, not just the opening sentence. Rather than defer to the reporting or looking at the link or their website which has those mentions of Palestine. You jumping to false accusations of a Freudian slip by the author is in itself a Freudian slip on your part, overlooking the more likely truth that a levantine restaurant that has held fundraisers for Gazan children mentioned Palestine for your assumption that the author made a mistake.
I’m not saying you’re a bad guy, but there’s some cognitive distortions in your reasoning that you should evaluate.
It looks like a direct quote from page six in their instagram post.
Exactly!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It’s literally cut and pasted directly from their instagram post. God I hate the internet.
I quoted the email I received above. I had assumed JSeattle had made a mistake. But now I realize they stated two different things in two different messages (one an email the other a IG post). Not a big deal.
You really, really wanted it to be, though.
And with that, another great independent restaurant bites the dust. One could almost come to the conclusion that this city has been failing its small, immigrant-run businesses while making it prohibitively expensive to stay afloat.
blame the labor unions for strong arming the SCC into raising minimum wage and pressuring the Lisa Herbold-era Seattle City Council into passing the Pay Up Ordinance
Uh huh, how dare the permanent underclass try not to be that.
Voltaire’s quote on the “abundance” of the poor is: “The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor“.
if the permanent underclass wants to ruin the restaurant industry in Seattle, then let them do so. they’ll basically be without jobs and no longer able to afford rent.
“They’ll really regret pulling the curtain back on the charade of The America Way of Life” is quite the notion.
50 years flat wages is good? So you can dine cheap?
Have you looked in the mirror? I’d look for all of America’s problems there first.
…but, but, $15 min wage allow(ed) us to live closer to where we work. Everyone deserves to not have to commute.
No one is willing to do the post-mortem on that project gone sideways because it is impossible to parse out the causality.
“…but, but, $15 min wage allow(ed) us to live closer to where we work.”
Naw..It was to raise people out of poverty. Not completely. But yes. It had nothing to do with moving to a better zip code.
Will someone please do the analysis. First Stateside and now Mamnoon. The amazing restaurants that breathed new life into Capitol Hill 10+ years ago are closing shop. This makes me so sad two of my top recommendations are gone. What next?
Maybe they hit their lease-renewal period and the discounted rent that they were originally offered wasn’t extended. The owners of Mamnoon also have two other establishments, Mbar and Mamnoon street. I wouldn’t be surprised if they did the forecasts after getting a new lease agreement offered to them and realized that the proposed higher rent wasn’t worth risking losses during the slow months. Those forecast probably took into account the higher cost of ingredients, most of which are imported and have higher fees due to Trump’s disastrous tariffs, and the wages that they pay their staff. Whereas with their original lower rent, the profits made during high season had helped sustain them during the slow months.
Maybe Mamnoon Street and Mbar’s menu will change to offer more to accommodate for Mamnoon’s departure.
I really wonder if that vacant lot with the homeless encampments next to them was a major factor in them deciding to close that location. Or did their lease on the space significantly increase in addition to rising costs associated with food, importing ingredients and supplies, and the increase in the minimum wage for Seattle?
For those who are thinking “well they ran a crappy business model and blah blah blah”, Mamnoon was very well liked, had good service, amazing menu, delicious food, well crafted drinks, and was well visited by locals and tourists, foodie and non-foodies alike.
Have you eaten out lately? Foot traffic has cratered. Everyone’s running more and larger happy hour specials right now in an attempt to drive traffic. I’ve gone to more than one restaurant this past month where my party is the only one occupying a table, and that’s only slightly because one of us insists on eating absurdly early. People are keeping an eye on their wallets because the future feels precarious and unaffordable. We’re going to lose more restaurants we like, and those spaces will probably sit empty for years because the companies that hold them don’t consider filling them a priority.
The cost with the least amount of impact was the last one you mentioned. As a business owner who had a space on the Hill, I can tell you the biggest cost by far is rent. I would not resign a lease for 5 -10 years in this climate, so I didn’t, despite doing very well. And for restaurants, it’s usually a ten year – I’m guessing people are wising up to what is coming down the pipeline and getting out while the getting is good, so expect to see a lot more closures. And yes, the property owners keep increasing rent per sq ft, because we are in a massive commercial real estate bubble that no one wants to acknowledge, so everyone is playing chicken with renters and the banks. The landlords here are notoriously corrupt, and commercial leases are written in such a way that ensure the renters, not the property owner (all of whom are multi-millionaires), take on a crazy amount of additional costs, like a triple net. It’s a failure of our city and state government, who could do a lot to prevent these vacant spaces, failed businesses, etc., but the biggest lobbying group in the United States is the National Realtors Association. Corruption and greed from the top down is what is killing these businesses, not paying the people – who actually work with your customers – enough money to live. The world doesn’t owe you a permanent, exploited underclass just because you’re wealthy enough to look down on them. If the job is worth doing, then it’s worth paying for. If it isn’t, then all the places slinging your coffee and bistro food and burritos will close, and everyone can become a finance or tech worker. Of course, then you’ll have a city of coders and nowhere to get coffee, but it seems that is what the people who spout things like, “If you wanted to make more money you should have gotten a better degree,” are going for. So, yes. The underclass is wising up and taking gig jobs, living poorer, etc., and the merchant class is protecting their assets by leaving. This isn’t just Seattle, it’s all over the place, because it starts with national policy – and it is about to get much, much worse. These insane levels of wealth inequality are, academically, a pretty good marker of civilizational decline, along with shortening life spans (check) increasing maternal and infant mortality (check) and a ruling class that becomes so disconnected that they fail to respond to collective crisis like climate disasters and class violence (check).
We won’t get anywhere until we stop looking at problems so granularly.
On thee money!
The street venders are killing it.
You might wanna downsize and focus on the street fri-sun.
No…it’s the business. Whether rent costs or food costs or labor costs. It’s a perfect storm. Wages were flat 50 years vs. inflation. So the increase is fine. The rest? It’s just corporate greed. The tax codes etc.
The places doing well? The street venders. Great food. Great Price. Convenient.
I walk across the street from my front door literally and get the best Mexican on the hill. And just 60″ to the left is camp drugs HQ at the bus stop. Then 20-40′ to the right in the dark on the stairs and down the block.
The line is looong for it. There’s all kinds of stuff going on right there. Fencing. You name it. Every weekend. The cops do nothing. In the SODA too BTW.
So what does that tell you?
Why does this article not mention their own statement about the perception of crime in Seattle?
probably b/c it’ll trigger the SJWs on here into arguing about how the encampment that was squatting on the empty lot next to them should have had every right to exist and wasn’t causing problems…