Chef José Garzón is more than just a culinary master; he’s a storyteller whose dishes weave tales of culture, tradition, and personal history. As the concept generator of Garzon, Chifa Baby, Lola Supperclub, and, now, Bad Chancla on E Olive Way below The Reef pot shop, Garzón’s journey from musician to well loved chef is a testament to his passion for food and community.
Having played in bands from Sunset Lily to MxPx, Garzón has traveled around the world playing music and eating street food. Each of Chef Garzón’s culinary ventures offers a unique dining experience that reflects his diverse background and culinary influences. From his celebration of Latin American street food to Lola Supperclub’s homage to his beloved caretaker in Ecuador, Garzón’s menus are a fusion of flavors and narratives.
Joining with other local chefs, Garzon is hoping to be a part of the change in Seattle’s kitchen culture “the kitchen scene or whatever you want to call it. It’s so different these days. And a lot of people will tell you, it’s bad, but I think it’s great. It’s growing and it’s healthier. You know, chefs and management now care about days off. We care about your well being.” Continue reading →
Not every culinary success story begins at age 7, but for Roan Hartzog, his story does. Hartzog has been “bread adjacent” for most of his life.
Mt. Bagel, surprisingly located amid the homes of Madison Valley on 26th Ave E, is the current iteration of Hartzog’s baking.
In 2019, Roan took a trip to the “bagel homeland” of New York City. Wanting to start his own project, but unsure of what that was, he let his travel be his inspiration. After returning home, he worked his bread bakery job and on his off time, experimented with bagels.
It took a year of playing with dough to get the recipe right, but after an instagram account became his storefront, and family and friends got their share, more than just friends got to sample his rounded carbs.
“Soon it became friends of friends, then people I didn’t know started DMing me for bagels and I was like. oh, this is becoming something a little bigger than expected.” Working out of a friend’s commercial bakery, he eventually quit his bread job and focused on his bagel empire. When his friend moved to Edmonds in 2023, Hartzog took over the space. Continue reading →
Linda’s Tavern, the kind of place they really mean when they talk about an icon of Capitol Hill, celebrates three decades of memories, music, and moments Tuesday night. Founded in 1994 by Linda Derschang and two dudes from Sub Pop, the bar has survived as a cherished, grunge-y gathering place for locals and visitors alike.
“When we opened Linda’s 30 years ago, it was simply because we thought it would be really fun to open a bar on Capitol Hill,” Derschang tells CHS from New York City where the onetime “Seattle queen of clubs” now calls home.
“It was my first bar venture, following my experience opening a punk rock and rock ‘n’ roll clothing store in Denver in 1984.”
Capitol Hill was the natural choice for Derschang who had already established roots in the neighborhood with a clothing shop on Broadway. “What other neighborhood would I have wanted to open a bar in? That was the place, and that’s where I lived,” she says.
Reflecting on the changes in Capitol Hill over the years, Derschang highlights both the positive and negative. “One of the best things about the change was when Elliott Bay Books moved to Pike Pine about 15 years ago,” she reflects. “It helped solidify the neighborhood as both a daytime and nighttime destination.” Continue reading →
Celebrating its 10th anniversary, Capitol Hill-born Hello Robin stands as a testament to the sweet success of a community focus.
The 19th Ave E cookie shop will celebrate this weekend with a cookie making party co-hosted with its neighbor at Cone and Steiner, the throwback neighborhood grocery it debuted with on the newly redeveloped block back in 2013. Dani Cone’s Cone and Steiner has grown into a two-location grocery chain after its 19th Ave E start. Hello Robin has also grown. You can visit a sibling Hello Robin cookie shop at U Village.
At Hello Robin’s original 19th Ave E home, owner Robin Wehl recently took a trip down memory lane with CHS, sharing insights into the shop’s journey, community bonds, and her secret ingredients.
“I feel very, very lucky,” Wehl says with gratitude about how the shop has thrived and grown. The 19th Ave E neighborhood’s support has been a backbone of Hello Robin’s success. She recalled with joy the myriad of life events witnessed within the shop, from serving pregnant customers to seeing them return with their now 10-year-olds. Continue reading →
In an effort to bolster community resilience and preparedness, residents of Capitol Hill gathered for a neighborhood emergency drill Sunday organized by the North Capitol Hill Emergency Hub.
The event is part of volunteer-run efforts across the city trying to form a patchwork but still strong network of community plans and resources for how to keep neighborhoods safe and working when natural disasters and emergencies strike and people need to depend on each other.
The event, held in a Seventh Day Adventist Church’s parking lot at 13th and E Aloha, aimed to simulate the response to a major disaster when conventional communication channels might be down. Jessica Closson is the volunteer manager for the North Capitol Hill Hub.
“We are a group of neighbor volunteers who set up at our hub location and we practice how we would respond if there was a major disaster when all communications are down,” Closson said. “We have processes we are always trying to improve to make our response effective, so we practice and make sure we learn how to do the best job.” Continue reading →
Artist Perri Rhoden touches up her letter on the Black Lives Matter street mural
The massive Black Lives Matter mural that fills E Pine is now a permanent part of the city’s streetscape. Every summer, it will get a touch-up and fresh coats of paint. This summer, the work to take care of the monument carried with it a new mission: honoring a fallen community leader.
Takiyah Ward, an organizer and co-founder of the Vivid Matter Collective, said this past weekend’s event was organized as a heartfelt tribute to Elijah Lewis, the community organizer gunned down in an April road rage shooting just a couple blocks from the mural.
“We have other folks working on some mural pieces for Elijah Lewis… So we decided to put together an activation just in his honor, in his legacy and all the things he did in the community,” Ward said.
Saturday’s activation provided an array of art supplies, including easels and paints, inviting people to engage in creative expression. “So we’ve got some easels and paintings and materials, folks, kids, young and old, and hang out and do their own art. So yeah, it’s just everything art today,” Ward said. Continue reading →
Capitol Hill’s 15th Ave E is known for its sense of community and vibrant local businesses but one store owner is facing an uncertain future. Mohammad Abid knows his building is going to be torn down.
What will come next for ShopRite and Abid’s passion for his store and the community it serves?
CHS reported here on early plans for a five-story, mixed-use development that will replace the the 1904-built Moore Family building and the former QFC grocery store on the block.
“Yeah, maybe four or six months, after finishing the project down the street, they will start here,” Abid expects. “Same contractor, same owner, same everything,” as the work up the street where Capitol Hill developer Hunters Capital’sproject replacing the oldHilltop Service Station is rising.
ShopRite means a lot to Abid who has run the shop for more than 20 of its nearly 30 years of business.
Coming to the United States from Pakistan in 1984, Abid says he moved to the US for an educational opportunity. After attending Edmonds Community College and working a few small jobs, he found ShopRite. “Before this, I was not married. Then I opened a store, I got married, I bought a house, I had children. I did all this to put my children through school and I have.”
ShopRite and the busy owner have been fixtures in the community. Neighbors know him, and he knows them, serving the same people for years, learning their needs, and ordering the obscure items requested.
But the city and the neighborhood needs more housing and waves of development continue to pass through the city — especially in areas like 15th Ave E on the edges of the most densely populated areas of Seattle. Abid has seen the neighborhood grow, and now the change has arrived for ShopRite. Continue reading →
Paul Kim, owner and head chef of Sakana Sushi and Kitchen
You can get sushi in almost every neighborhood in Seattle. While some bars stand out for their adherence to traditional technique, others stand out by shaking things up a bit. Now open at 15th and Madison, Sakana Sushi and Kitchen chefs are more than just skilled at traditional sushi dishes like nigiri, rolls, and sashimi, but their uniqueness comes from dishes created by owner and head chef Paul Kim.
Combining traditional Japanese sushi with innovative fusion flavors, Kim creates new dishes with flavors that fit together. With over 20 years of experience, his beginnings as a dishwasher in his uncle’s restaurant keep him grounded. Kim found passion, motivation, and a creative outlet by creating dishes that feed his community as he has stepped up from chef to owner.
Before that, he also stepped away from a path that took him out of the kitchens he grew up in with a possible future as an architect.
“What I liked was people, hospitality, and making food,” Kim said. Continue reading →
While smaller plans are being made for how to make the building more than just an empty shell and longer plans are shaping that will replace the block with new apartments and businesses, the old 15th Ave E QFC has become a strange kind of display for a strange kind of computer art.
This isn’t artificial intelligence renderings with six-fingered, oddly glossy humans. These are floppy discs — murals of pixelated images related to local businesses made with obsolete digital data drives. Yelahneb (they/them) aka “The Floppy Guy,” has been collecting and repurposing these iconic storage devices for years.
The Floppy Guy’s projects involve arranging the 3.5 inch floppy disks, mosaic style, in various patterns and designs, often resembling recognizable icons or objects. “I treat each floppy disk as a pixel,” explained Yelahneb. “If I want to reproduce a Windows icon, for example, every pixel needs to match the original icon.”
Their latest canvas has been the beige half-block wall of the emptied QFC.
CHS reported here on plans from Capitol Hill developer Hunters Capital for a five-story mixed building with around 150 apartment units and underground parking for around 116 vehicles on the site running from the middle of the 400 block of 15th Ave E to E Republican. The plans include demolition of the 1904-built Moore Family building home to a Rudy’s Barbershop and longtime neighborhood convenience store ShopRite and the adjacent grocery and surface parking lot that hosted a grocery since 1944 until QFC exited the street in 2021 in a tiff with the Seattle City Council over COVID-19 hazard pay.
If you want to help shape that project, by the way, the Pike/Pine Urban Neighborhood Council group that is active in area development outreach and feedback is hosting a meeting this week with Hunters Capital to discuss early plans for the project — The meeting takes place Thursday, June 29th at 5:30 PM at Community Roots Housing, 1620 12th Ave in the second floor Fish Bowl conference room.
Back on 15th Ave E, finding the right colors can be a challenge, as Yelahneb doesn’t alter the floppy disks with paint or other materials. “I’m at the mercy of what I find,” they said. “Purple is notoriously hard to get. I have about 10 to 12,000 floppies, and I try to keep them organized by color.”
Yelahneb says there is significance to working with floppy disks and their place in the history of technology. “As a kid of the ’80s and ’90s, floppy disks were the perfect storage medium,” they said. “It became the symbol, the skeuomorphic representation of ‘save’ in computers.”
The message, then, is a version of saving some of the memories around this part of Capitol Hill. Continue reading →
With Glo’s suddenly the shiny new kid, Pike/Pine’s Lost Lake might feel like the grizzled veteran of the Capitol Hill diner class. The joint turns 10 this week.
As the pandemic recovery continues, it might be getting back it its old ways.
Lost Lake opened in May 2013 as a 24-hour diner, but its current hours are 7 AM to midnight, with extended openings on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Kerry Martinek, Lost Lake’s general manager, admits that finding staff to work overnight is a challenge but the diner is considering the possibility of returning to round-the-clock service.
“We’ve been talking about it and we’re trying to go in that direction. There’s no date on that yet,” Martinek says.
Lost Lake has come away since 2013. Part of the extended Capitol Hill Block Party and Neumos family of Pike/Pine joints, its siblings also include the Big Mario’s pizza bars and conjoined twin dive bar the Comet. Co-founder Dave Meinert left the ownership in 2018 in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations leaving Jason Lajeunesse in charge of the company. Partner Joey Burgess spun himself out to create his own family of Capitol Hill businesses with husband Murf Hall including Queer/Bar, The Cuff, and, now, Oddfellows, and Elliott Bay Book Company.
Martinek, who has been with the cafe for almost two years after being a regular customer since its opening, is excited about the anniversary and considers Lost Lake to be a one of a kind establishment. Continue reading →
Chef José Garzón is more than just a culinary master; he’s a storyteller whose dishes weave tales of culture, tradition, and personal history. As the concept generator of Garzon, Chifa Baby, Lola Supperclub, and, now, Bad Chancla on E Olive Way below The Reef pot shop, Garzón’s journey from musician to well loved chef is a testament to his passion for food and community.
