Speaking of neighborhood groceries, it has been 111 days since the “MUP-ready development site” also known as Capitol Hill’s much-loved City Market hit the Seattle real estate market.
November’s unpriced listing — if you have to ask, you probably can’t afford it — was the surest sign that much-hyped San Francisco-based property developer Juno is now out of the picture after shepherding the property through several rounds of Seattle process on the way to plans for a mass timber mixed-use building topped with 98-residential units, including 58 studios, 21 “deep” one-bedrooms, 13 one-bedrooms and 5 two-bedrooms, above a future home for the popular Bellevue Ave grocery and new underground parking.
To make way, the existing City Market building and the laundromat next door as well as a small surface parking lot were planned to be demolished. Continue reading →
A suspect was reportedly pointing a handgun at nightlife patrons and passersby and one person suffered serious head injuries after being hit by a rock and knocked out during an E Olive Way street fight late Tuesday night.
Seattle Police were called to E Olive Way’s Crescent Lounge just before midnight where the victim in the assault had been brought inside after being struck in the head and knocked unconscious in the fight involving five or six people including the reported gunman.
Seattle Fire provided an “assault with weapons” level response to the call to treat the 40-year-old victim before transporting him to Harborview in serious condition. Continue reading →
Hillside Bar is open and doing just fine on Capitol Hill. In this season of neighborhood favorites closing over lease and landlord issues, CHS needs to make that point clear from the start.
But when we stopped in recently to congratulate Hillside on a decade of business on Capitol HIll, CHS found out we had the math wrong. We missed the anniversary.
By two years.
This year, there is no news at Hillside — just good times.
Hillside Bar is open and owner Sean McAteer renewed their deal to stay on Capitol Hill in 2022 with a new ten-year lease.
“We have always wanted to keep the tradition of Capitol Hill neighborhood bars, so I would say it was definitely a plan from the very start,” McAteer said. “Our favorite part of the location is its proximity to the most diverse and unified places in Washington.” Continue reading →
An amalgamation of a classic coffee shop with a shopping experience you’d typically find in Latino mercados, BonitoCafé y Mercadito, is preparing to open on E Olive Way, neighboring Capitol Hill’s Pie Bar and Donna’s.
It will soon serve locally Latino-grown sourced coffee and will be hosting mercado events featuring Latino vendors.
From photographers to monthly hosts of Aqui Mercado in Pioneer Square, couple Daniel and Ismael Calderon, are soon to open their dream business that was inspired last year after they hosted their first mercado event. Over the past months hosting their mercado, they were able to build a community of hundreds of supporters and fans.
It was never the plan to open a cafe-market hybrid store. However, after positive feedback from the Latino and queer community from their mercado, the couple decided to pursue opening the business that captures the vibrancy of their monthly event into a daily experience. Continue reading →
Capitol Hill nightspot Rose Temple will soon give way to new bar The Wash after one last month of business on E Olive Way.
In the end, the June 2019-born Rose Temple has been a pretty good investment.
Owners Austin Polley and Benjamin Smith were able to build the E Olive Way watering hole with a shoestring budget after the previous tenant sunk a fortune into a failed speakeasy venture. Polley tells CHS they’ll exit with a payout for helping The Wash get started after January. Continue reading →
After the loss of her frequent collaborator and business partner Rachel Marshall in 2023, food and drink entrepreneur Kate Opatz says she plans to bring a small dream the two shared to E Olive Way.
You have the debut of the “smallest, prettiest cocktail bar” on Capitol Hill — and maybe anywhere — to look forward to in 2024.
Opatz announced this week she is beginning work on the new teensy tiny cocktail project with help from designer Niko Ciel McMahan in the E Olive Way space formerly home to Crumble and Flake. Continue reading →
In 2024, chef José Garzón will add Capitol Hill to his culinary map with the opening of Bad Chancla, a “love letter to millennial immigrants and first gen Latinx Americans” that will bring “a simple and delicious mix of bodega style sandwiches, rice bowls, fresh juice and cold sides” to a tiny space on E Olive Way.
“A chef used to be measured by the size of his restaurant, absolutely,” Garzón told the Stranger about his Seattle ambitions earlier this year. “But for me, it’s about what you can do outside the restaurant.”
Garzón and the crew of “Latinx street food” collaborators have been busy beyond any one restaurant’s walls, growing with pop-ups, events, and link-ups like Garzón, inside Belltown’s Black Cat Bar, that explore chifa — Chinese dishes made with South American flavors popular in Peru and Ecuador, Garzón’s home nation.
Powered by “a year of research, eating take out in Miami, Vancouver BC, Portland , Hawaii and Las Vegas,” Bad Chancla will be the first “autonomous store” in this effort, growing on the power of its own merits in a space below The Reef pot shop. Three-year-oldLa Rue Creperie made way for the new project. Continue reading →
Tiny Capitol Hill Middle Eastern walk-up counter Yalla is leading the way for a growing group of Seattle restaurants, bars, and cafes organizing to help those caught in the violence of the war in Gaza.
Chef Taylor Cheney has announced details of a citywide fundraising effort for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund that continues to add new venues on Capitol Hill, across the city, and throughout the region.
“Thank you so very much for everyone’s compassion in this city,” Cheney said in an update on the effort. “I had no idea it would go this way, and felt a little lonely doing our fundraisers at first.”
“We do not feel alone anymore and I want to tell you, you are warming the hearts of my Palestinian friends greatly,” Cheney writes. Continue reading →
Wednesday, Crumble & Flake Pâtisserie will wake up after its sleepy days off to start a new round of morning baking. It will be the start of its last week on Capitol Hill and city living.
Part of E Olive Way for more than a decade, Crumble & Flake is moving to Issaquah where it can stretch out in a charming Gilman Village house where the bakery will take on new life as a cafe with offerings far beyond French pastries.
Crumble and Flake’s final day on E Olive Way will be Sunday.
“I will absolutely miss Capitol Hill,” owner Toby Matasar tells CHS. “I go all the way back to 1991 when I first lived in Capitol Hill. I’ve always loved it here and it’s been hard to watch the changes the neighborhood has gone through over these last twelve years.”
Matasar says her husband and Crumble partner Geoff Ogle grew up in the area “so we’ve both watched the many transitions this neighborhood and especially this block has seen.”
Crumble & Flake opened at the corner of E Olive Way and E Howell in 2012 under Seattle pastry artist Neil Robertson. The former Canlis and Mistral Kitchen pastry chef sold Crumble to Matasar in 2017. A pastry chef trained in New York and Paris who moved to Seattle in 2000, Matasar gained a loyal following running Eats Market Café in West Seattle for a decade. Following the cafe’s 2015 closure, Matasar started a new venture and balanced out the other side of the “gluten divide” with her Niche Gluten Free Café and Bakery on 12th Ave across from Seattle University.
Niche shuttered in 2019 as Crumble & Flake continued to thrive but Matasar says the spirit of her cafe experience is part of the inspiration for the Issaquah move. The new Crumble & Flake will add “exceptional comfort food” to the menu including “the legendary Reuben sandwich and corned beef hash.”
Crumble & Flake’s exit will leave the E Olive Way corner space empty for the first time in more than a decade. Continue reading →
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It took years — plus a few extra months — to make it happen but the “Broadway and John Street Signal” project is transforming the busy intersection’s traffic patterns.
The new “BUS ONLY/ONLY BUS” markings are applied restricting left turns onto Broadway from John to only transit. The rest of the project includes new protected left-turns on Broadway along with all the necessary markings and signal changes required to make it work.
CHS reported here in June on the planned two-month construction project’s long-anticipated start. The Seattle Department of Transportation couldn’t exactly explain why the work dragged on four months — “Project construction was originally anticipated to last approximately 3-4 months,” a spokesperson said, despite what the department said this summer. “The start of work was delayed about one month due to finalizing the signal design and weather,” they added.
The original vision has been boiled down by time and shifting funding sources after originally being raised as a community priority to improve safety in the area around Capitol Hill Station.
The final project has included rebuilding the traffic signals at the intersection of Broadway and E Olive Way/E John, adding new “left turn pockets” and a “separated signal phase” for eastbound traffic on E Olive Way, installing a new transit-only left turn lane for westbound E John, and removing an area of in-street bike parking “to accommodate transit turning movements.” Continue reading →