I like the fact that Seattle is not a stagnant community. The unemployment rate is low, and new restaurants are opening all the time. Unfortunately, there are some changes that are not welcome. A few examples:
1. Hing Loon closed earlier this year. It was a Chinese restaurant in the International District that served the definitive clams in black bean sauce. There was a menu, but many items were posted on the walls in Chinese (with occasional English translations).
2. Sabra was a Mediterranean restaurant in Pike Place Market. The proprietor was a friendly woman from North Africa. It closed over the summer and was replaced by a Chinese sandwich shop, Country Dough. We had lunch there yesterday, and Julian was underwhelmed. My pet peeve about the place was that they served flavored teas for an outrageous price, twice that for a cup of coffee. No plain black tea was served. (See my rant about tea for my take on this faux pas.)
3. Yesterday we learned that the building that houses Julian’s go-to coffee shop, Caffe d’Arte, will be torn down next year. A 40-story building will go up in its place. The coffee shop will move to another location, but this means another soul-less high rise blotting out the Sun and views of Elliott Bay and the Olympic Mountains for folks on the ground.
I’m not sure why HIng Loon and Sabra closed, but rising rents could be to blame. I lived in Dallas when escalating commercial real estate rent and damn-the-torpedos development were rampant. Just before I left for grad school, the bottom fell out of the oil market, savings & loans went bankrupt, and home values (including mine) plummeted. While Seattle’s economy is much more diversified than Dallas’s was at the time, another downturn could result in lots of folks losing their shirts.
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