At what point is a temporary closure no longer temporary?
The expansion of Capitol Hill’s much loved HoneyHole toasted sandwich joint onto E Jefferson has apparently gone cold. The location just off 12th Ave across from Seattle U’s Championship Field has been closed since at least late January.
A sign went up around that last week of January announcing the temporary closure. Weeks have passed and the space remains dark.
Calls to ownership haven’t been returned and messages to the HoneyHole social media accounts have so far gone unanswered. A check of the city permit paperwork, meanwhile, reveals no clues about any work planned or underway at the location and court records also don’t indicate anything amiss. Continue reading →
Portland-born vegan Jewish deli chain Ben and Esther’s has aspirations of someday bringing its plant-based corned beef reubens to the East Coast. First, it will add a location on Capitol HIll.
With three delis already in motion — two in Portland, and one in San Diego — the company has announced its next expansion will be to Seattle. Continue reading →
Construction underway this summer at the Heath Printers building on Capitol Hill (Image: CHS)
Sometimes it’s a secret. Sometimes nobody knows. And sometimes you just haven’t asked the right person.
While the pace of new food and drink openings has understandably slowed, two Capitol Hill and Central District “mystery restaurant” projects continue to take shape. As the industry continues its work at recovery, the projects represent bright — and intriguing — lights on the horizon.
On Capitol Hill, work has been underway for months in a full transformation of the interior of Boylston Ave’s Heath Printers building with a planned change of use to “eating & drinking establishment” and construction of “substantial alterations for tenant improvements of restaurant and office spaces throughout existing commercial structure,” according to plans filed with the city. The property just around the corner off E Pine is part of the near block snapped up by developer Asana Partners and was the home to Capitol Hill-born coworking company Office Nomads before that venture went fully virtual during the pandemic.
Asana has brought on Capitol Hill-based Graham Baba Architects, the prolific firm behind many of the neighborhood and city’s most ambitious recent food and drink construction projects, to design the space. Continue reading →
The skewering of meats, open flame of the grill, and even the cute little robot have gone quiet — and nobody is answering the phones. Broadway’s Junkichi Robata Izakaya will be closed for “several months due to renovations” after only one year of business.
The curt message appeared on the restaurant’s website to start the month as the 200-block Broadway E robata grill concept has gone dark. Company representatives haven’t responded to repeated calls and messages about the closure. Continue reading →
Now it can be revealed. Capitol Hill’s mystery pop machine is alive and well and apparently sightseeing. And in a sure sign of the impending Capitol Hill apocalypse, it now has PR representation.
The viral soda dispenser — yum! — missing for months from in front of the Broadway Locksmith resurfaced unexpectedly Monday morning on social media, revealing its temporary location to be near the Space Needle. The pop machine has also apparently hired a graphic design team. Continue reading →
Someday, you won’t have CHS to tell you about Capitol Hill restaurants planning to open 18 months from now. You need to learn to fend for yourself. Here is something to practice on: Limoncello Restaurant.
CHS is pretty good on the comings and goings of Capitol Hill and the nearby and usually we have some idea of a project’s details even if we don’t have enough to report on it.
Limoncello is a mystery. As far as CHS’s reportorial resources reach, we don’t have a clue about where the project is headed. All we have to work with is this March 21st Tweet:
We reached out last week and got a reply from the account — “we’re putting together a media Package with all the info,” it said. We haven’t heard more since.
So, welcome to our world, reader. Enjoy the mystery. And good luck with your reporting.
We’ve had an early taste of Seattle spring in the days leading up to Valentine’s 2017, how about some chatter about a new restaurant and rooftop bar project being lined up for a classic Pike/Pine building with plans to be open this summer.
Developer Hunters Capital tells CHS it is underway on a seismic overhaul and full rehab of the Colman Automotive building on E Pine at Bellevue that it acquired for $3.85 million in 2012. “Initially we are going to spend 4 to 5 months stripping the building down to its bones, sandblasting, bringing in upgraded utilities and seismically upgrade it for new occupancies,” a Hunters rep tells CHS. Part of those big changes: a restaurant with roof deck component. We asked who is planning to move into this new Pike/Pine creation but that’s where the Capitol Hill development and real estate investment firm gets quiet. Continue reading →
It’s not very interesting inside… yet (Image: CHS)
A bookstore in U Village. A drive-up grocery store in Ballard. A checkout-less convenience store on 7th Ave in Amazon-ville. With Amazon’s voice control platform Alexa reportedly “stealing the show” at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the retailing giant has also been busy innovating and testing new concepts in its home city. But, so far, none of its “meatspace” experiments have made a home on Capitol Hill, the neighborhood where many of its employees live.
That might be about to change.
CHS has learned that an Amazon executive central to the rollout of the company’s retail projects including 7th Ave’s Amazon Go checkout-less concept is involved in the giant and highly secretive retail project slated to fill a 10,000 square-foot retail space in the Mercedes Benz dealership-turned AVA Capitol Hill development in the 600 block E Pike.
A development manager for Avalon Communities declined to comment telling CHS he was not allowed to discuss the tenant and Amazon has not replied to inquiries about the project.
The Amazon senior program manager included in City of Seattle filings on the project worked on the University Village Amazon bookstore and the launch team for Amazon Go, according to his Linked In profile. Continue reading →
There is a lot of water testing going on around here these days. Seattle Parks officials tell CHS they’re working to figure out why the Cal Anderson reflection pool water has taken on a red hue. If it turned purple this week, there would be no questions. But apparently water testing is needed to figure out what, exactly, is plaguing the duck-friendly pool. “Our crews will take a sample to have the water tested this week,” a spokesperson said. “Once we have results, we will develop a plan to drain, clean and refill the pool.”
While a working reservoir still lurks below Cal Anderson (CHS wrote about it here in 2015 when the facility was due for a cleaning), the reflecting pool next to the pump house is purely for aesthetic. There has been a reservoir at the site for 115 years. After the state mandated that Seattle’s open water sources needed to be covered in the early 1990s, community groups helped lead an effort to cap the reservoir with a park. The ripple pool and water mountain have become an iconic element of the neighborhood. But a murky red pool? Not as much. Continue reading →
As much as the return of the Capitol Hill Block Party has some remembering the “good old” days of Pike/Pine circa 1997, the changes underway on E Pike may eventually leave you pining for the CHBP days of yore — or, at least, remembering a day when there weren’t all those pesky large grocery stores on every block.
According to permits, the project’s plans for multiple retail units along the street have been pushed aside in favor of one combined “retail store” in the project. At just over 10,000 square feet, the store would be about half the size of Elliott Bay Book Company, for example, but twice the size of the still-empty OfficeMax that shuttered on Broadway earlier this year.
The developer wasn’t talking.
But CHS has learned that the project is being lined up as a grocery store involving an unknown company with plans to join what will be a wave of new market offerings joining the area in coming years. By 2017, a Whole Foods Market is destined to rise at Broadway and Madison as part of a 16-story apartment development. And developers say a “Portland-based grocer” is in talks to become the anchor retail tenant in the development surroundingCapitol Hill Station.
We’re not sure what that leaves as far as grocer possibilities to join E Pike where hundreds of new apartments will soon join the market in the blocks between Broadway and Summit. Maybe Samuel Pitts is getting back into the business.
UPDATE 7/24/2015 10:00 AM: Uh oh. In a letter dated July 20th, DPD says the plan for the mystery project to combine what was planned as multiple storefronts on E Pike doesn’t jibe with zoning. The developers have the opportunity to reply to the correction notice.
