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Seattle’s crazy restaurant boom
Jerry Corso, owner of Bar del Corso on Beacon Hill, serves guests at his popular restaurant. (Ellen M. Banner/The Seattle Times)
Originally published November 16, 2017 at 7:00 am Updated November 16, 2017 at 3:38 pm
Tons of openings, surprising shutdowns, a staff shortage — no wonder local chefs are uneasy. What’s going on?

HAVE YOU BEEN to Opus Co., the new Phinney Ridge restaurant from two chefs who’ve worked with the great Rachel Yang? Eaten Mutsuko Soma’s already-renowned handmade soba at her brand-new Kamonegi in Fremont, where Art of the Table used to be? Been to the new location of beloved Art of the Table, a block away? Tried the imported-from-Hong-Kong, reportedly incredible Betsutenjin Ramen on Capitol Hill? The other three, soon to be four, new ramen places within half a mile of Betsutenjin? The half-dozen new pizzerias nearby? Any of the 35-plus new places specializing in poke in and around Seattle?

If you can’t keep up, it’s not your imagination — restaurants are opening at an unprecedented rate. Over a month and a half this summer, at least 40 debuted hereabout.

If that seems overwhelming, consider this: Seattle had 2,696 restaurants as of the first quarter of 2017, according to Department of Revenue data — up 25 percent from a decade ago. (These DOR figures represent all food service businesses, including full- and quick-service places, trucks and carts, and caterers.) Contrary to the oft-quoted “fact” that half of all restaurants fail in the first year, the Seattle survival rate for restaurants has been hovering around 87 percent a year out (up from 83 percent in 2007). And the numbers for Seattle restaurants’ gross annual sales are startling: up 45 percent over the past decade, to a 2016 total of $2.9 billion. Yes, billion.

It’s very big business, getting bigger all the time. Last year, for the first time, spending on eating out outstripped spending at grocery stores nationwide, according to U.S. Census data. And Seattle’s economy is, as you might have heard, booming. We’ve got more cranes than any other U.S. city, and more new people, too — more than 90,000 newcomers since the start of the decade. And they’ve got to eat, right?

Why, then, does Seattle’s restaurant scene feel so unstable? Why do chefs speak — quietly or a lot less so — of high anxiety?

SEATTLE RESTAURANT CASUALTIES

“Pivot” has become an industry verb in Seattle, a euphemism for changing a floundering restaurant to something with more prospects for profit instead of shutting it down. And closures, while relatively few and far between, sometimes feel full of portent. A pivot/closure case in point: James Beard Award-winning chef Maria Hines’ Ballard restaurant, Golden Beetle. It served all-organic, adventurous takes on Mediterranean food, but the neighborhood balked at paying more for a gyro. “My heart aches,” she said upon changing the place to a family-friendly, conceptually easy-to-swallow gastropub earlier this year. But she still couldn’t get out from under the debt. Hines closed Golden Beetle this spring to concentrate on her other two restaurants, Tilth and Agrodolce.

Seattle’s finer-dining audience is “spread thinner and thinner,” Hines observes. A top chef’s imprimatur doesn’t have the draw that it used to — too many new places to try, and too much traffic to fight for crosstown “foodie” repeat visits. And to Hines, the rejection of Golden Beetle felt like a rebuke to culinary creativity. She was left with a philosophical question about the city: “As it grows exponentially fast, how do I grow exponentially fast, and hold on to my craft for dear life?”

South Lake Union, the land of Amazon, has been uncharted restaurant territory since the company took hold. Serial failures there have defied all conventional wisdom. Shanik — opened in 2012 by Meeru Dhalwala, half of the team that made Vij’s in Vancouver, B.C., a lines-down-the-block hit — lasted three years. In 2015, chef Travis Kukull’s much-lauded “weird food” lasted seven and a half months at Mollusk, now the very unweird Dexter Brewhouse. Restaurateur Josh Henderson opened five restaurants in S.L.U. last year, then took the radical step of closing three of them. He echoed others on “the pressures of Amazon”: a dearth of dinner business, a desire for quick-serve, a neighborhood still under construction, diners unwilling to travel from elsewhere. “[You] look in the mirror and say, ‘Is this [expletive] working?’ ” Henderson says. “Bank accounts don’t lie; butts in seats don’t lie.”

Elsewhere, new restaurants are cropping up in relatively affordable neighborhoods like Beacon Hill and Columbia City, as rents rise and longtime businesses get pushed out. South Park is set for four debuts in just the next few months, one of them a wine bar.

https://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/seattles-crazy-restaurant-boom/