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Part of brunch’s appeal comes from its total superfluity. It’s not breakfast, it’s not lunch, and it’s rarely a wholesome, nutritious, or sober prospect. A reprieve from the rushed protein shakes and sad desk salads that fuel many a workweek, brunch provides the opportunity to sit and savor something unnecessary. At its worst, brunch is a dumbed-down, overpriced version of a restaurant’s regular menu. But there are loads of places in Seattle doing genuinely creative riffs on the brunch classics: Benedicts topped with braised duck and hoisin butter, Vietnamese-style chicken and waffles, and of course the Dutch baby, that oft-overlooked symbol of Seattle civic pride.In our August 2025 update, we’re saying goodbye to The Whale Wins, an outpost of the Renee Erickson empire which is closing permanently amid a tectonic shift at the celebrated restaurant group. We added a couple of local favorites with weekend specials worth lining up for, plus a newcomer to the North Seattle brunch scene. We also revisited a few places already on the list to make sure everything is current.Know of a spot that should be on our radar? Send us a tip by emailing seattle@eater.com.

This is a curated list of Seattle’s most notable and permanent restaurant and bar closures. See a closing we missed? Then drop us a line.CAPITOL HILL — Acclaimed Vietnamese-influenced restaurant Stateside and its sibling bar Foreign National both abruptly closed at the beginning of the month, after a decade in business. Owner Eric Johnson was fairly tight-lipped about what happened, giving no reasons in extremely short Instagram posts, but told Eater Seattle that the end of Stateside’s lease was what prompted the closure.CAPITOL HILL — Another particularly notable closure announcement came from Mamnoon, the flatbread-centric Middle Eastern restaurant that has become a cornerstone of the dining scene. It will close on September 14; co-owner Wassef Haroun told Eater Seattle broader economic factors (like Seattle’s recent slow growth) made the restaurant unsustainable. Haroun’s restaurant group, Mama, still operates Mbar and Mamnoon Street and it is making selling prepared foods in grocery stores a larger part of its business.ROOSEVELT — “Geeky third place” Distant Worlds Coffeehouse, which appealed to the overlapping sci-fi/fantasy/board game community, is closing at the end of the month. In a goodbye message, owner Rebecca SerVoss wrote, “You have sent us love and let us be part of your joys. We have been co-conspirators and celebrants and friends. ⁠But the sad reality is that we’ve been unable to negotiate a sustainable lease with the landlord. We tried.⁠”BALLARD — Sad news from Bickerson’s Brewhouse, courtesy of MyBallard: The brewery is closing its Ballard location on August 29 because co-owner Shaunn Siekawitch has been diagnosed with “advanced-stage cancer. ”We cannot continue to run two locations and make sure Shaunn has the attention to care she needs,” the owners wrote in an announcement. Bickerson’s Renton location will remain open.BELLEVUE — Just months after opening, SuperKim Khao Man Gai has shut down its restaurant in the Bellevue Towers development, reports Puget Sound Business Journal. This was originally the second location of SuperKim Crab House, but in May it became a chicken and rice–focused concept. “The company cited issues around the property’s infrastructure, particularly its all-electric kitchen configuration, as a reason for both closures,” the Journal writes. Electric kitchens produce lower carbon emissions that gas ones, but, as the Journal notes, restaurants believe electric stoves are slower and harder to use. The Pioneer Square SuperKim space will now incorporate the Bellevue concept, now called SuperKim Chicken House.BAINBRIDGE ISLAND — Acclaimed seafood restaurant Seabird is closing on September 28. Though it only opened in 2022, it made a big splash, netting a number of awards and accolades from local and national media for its inventive dishes and creative use of seaweed. Owner Brendan McGill — who operates several area restaurants under the Hitchcock Restaurant Group umbrella — told the Seattle Times that the restaurant was no longer viable during the slow, rainy winter months, when Bainbridge gets fewer visitors. He plans to open another restaurant in the space at some point.

At Eater Seattle, we have to eat out a lot — it’s right there in the website name, next to “Seattle.” Sometimes, this research shows up in the articles and maps we publish, but sometimes, we eat something so good that we have to tell everyone about it. This running monthly column is a place for us to share especially good dishes with you.Pike Place Market is full of same-y menus — a lot of the restaurants serve tourists, and tourists want seafood, ergo seafood flourishes. So it can take a lot to stand out from the crowd, but Matt’s in the Market accomplishes that. If you have a craving for a bowl of bivalves, check out Matt’s, which is really more “above” the market than “in” it. The broth is loaded with lemongrass and cilantro, which gives it an earthy, herbal flavor, and you get a lot of different textures from the chorizo, the crunchy croutons, and huge, creamy corona beans. Combine that with the waterfront views and you have yourself a luxurious lunch.I went to this upscale Scottish pub in Ballard — one of the city’s few Scottish eateries — to try the fish and chips, but once I saw haggis on the menu I had to order it. If you don’t know, haggis is a “savory pudding” made from offal and oats. It has an earthy, dark, slightly gamey flavor, and these croquettes are a great way to package that haggis-y goodness. The whiskey-mustard cream sauce didn’t add a lot, in my opinion, but these little guys didn’t need any sauce.It’s “little fried balls” month here at Eater Seattle! There are a couple things to know about this new takeout spot on Aurora near Green Lake: One is that it’s serving big portions of Southern food for under $20. And two is that one of your sides should definitely be the corn fritters, hot, slightly sweet balls of comfort that come loaded with whole corn kernels that are like buried treasures. Maybe two of your sides should be corn fritters.Mean Sandwich opened nine years ago, which makes it not quite old enough to be a revered local institution but also not quite new enough to qualify as “hot” anymore. It’s not newsworthy, it just makes incredible sandwiches. This po’ boy is a shining example of the form: pickly remoulade, crunchy fried oysters that are hot and meaty inside, and some spice from something — maybe the lemon pepper mayo? We should all be talking a lot more about Mean Sandwich, is what I’m saying.

Gordon Bowker, an entrepreneur most known for co-founding Starbucks but who also founded Redhook Brewing during a long and eventful career, has died at the age of 82, reports the Seattle Times.Bowker was a uniquely Seattle character. According to a history of Starbucks’ early years, he was born in Oakland, California, but after his father died in a World War II submarine, his mother moved them to Seattle to live with her parents, who were “Norwegian immigrants who had taken part in the Alaska gold rush before settling in Ballard.” He went to college at the University of San Francisco, where he met one of his future Starbucks co-founders, Jerry Baldwin, and then moved back to Seattle, where he worked as a cab driver, Underground Tour guide, and editor at the original Seattle magazine.In 1971, Baldwin, Bowker, and third co-founder Zev Siegl opened the first Starbucks location (Bowker came up with the name). It didn’t serve drinks but sold coffee beans sourced from Peet’s along with tea and spices. Initially, Bowker kept his day job at an ad agency while working in the shop on weekends. (He also earned some publicity by sending some free beans to a Seattle Times columnist.) Starbucks struggled throughout the ’70s, then, in 1982, it hired Howard Schultz as director of marketing. Schultz pushed the company to focus on selling espresso drinks, and, after briefly leaving to start another coffee company, bought Starbucks with the help of investors in 1987. (To this day, Schultz is sometimes incorrectly referred to as the founder of Starbucks.)In a 2008 interview with the Times, Bowker complained that people asked him too often about the founding of Starbucks. And he certainly did a lot more than just that. For years he was on the board of Peet’s, which Starbucks owned briefly in the ’80s. He encouraged the journalist David Brewster to start Seattle Weekly and wrote restaurant reviews for it under a pseudonym. And in 1981 he founded Redhook Brewery, one of the country’s first microbreweries.“In 1981, there was no roadmap, no playbook,” wrote Kendall Jones at the Washington Beer Blog. “The world was thoroughly dominated by the biggest beer companies, which were growing through mergers and acquisitions. Even regional breweries like Rainier were too small to survive and were gobbled up by bigger fish, which in turn were gobbled up by even bigger fish. But a few weirdly creative fish were hatching new ideas and swimming against the current.”Bowker is linked to another moment in Seattle beer history: Before starting Starbucks, he founded an advertising firm with Terry Hecker, and that firm went on to produce the delightfully weird Rainier Beer ads in the ’70s and ’80s that featured “herds” of “wild Rainiers,” aka huge beer bottles with legs. The commercials were so iconic that years later, they inspired a documentary.In the 2008 Times interview, Bowker attributed his success in part to a “contrarian” streak. He saw opportunities in fields where everybody else saw problems. He treasured the sensation of figuring out that “something’s been overlooked.”Baldwin told the Times that Bowker, who was a lifelong friend, “really was able to feel the pulse, or maybe the pre-pulse, of the zeitgeist of the moment. … He could see what was coming, and it was just part of his wiring. He wasn’t looking for it, it was just there.”He also may have had an instinct to be a little bit of what we would today call a troll. For many years (ending in 2012) Alaska Airlines handed out prayer cards with meals, a practice that struck Bowker as odd. He told the Times in 2008: “What’s the idea of putting a prayer on there? Please don’t crash? God help us, don’t crash?” So he read the prayers out loud.“I also was curious what kind of effect that would have,” he said. “The flight attendants didn’t like it at all.”

Mamnoon, the flagship of the Mama restaurant group, is closing after 12 years, ownership announced on Monday, August 25. Its last day of service will be Sunday, September 14.When owners Racha and Wassef Haroun opened Mamnoon in 2013, it was a celebration of the cuisines of Iran, Lebanon, and Syria, reflecting the Harouns’ backgrounds. They were first-time restaurant owners, but they created an instant hit. Seattle Met named it the restaurant of the year, praising its mana’eesh flatbreads, sayadieh (roasted halibut over smoked green wheat), and spicy-sweet muhammara spread. As the Harouns wrote in a goodbye letter posted to Instagram, Syria was consumed by civil war at the time, which meant “our family couldn’t travel back and mamnoon became our new haven — peering into the past and future— that couldn’t wait to welcome you into.”The Haroun family gradually expanded into a restaurant group that included the South Lake Union rooftop spot Mbar, the Eastside restaurant Hanoon, and a place next to the Amazon Spheres that has run through several names and concepts but won praise last year from the Seattle Times for its mashup of Lebanese and Mexican cuisines. But Mama group has shrunk in the last few months: Hanoon closed earlier this summer, and the Mexican influence is off the menu at the Amazon-adjacent restaurant, now called Mamnoon Street. Meanwhile, the company has pivoted to selling its mezze, sauces, and chips in upscale grocery stores in the Seattle area.The goodbye announcement said that “Mamnoon’s end is the rule rather than the exception in our business in Seattle,” a reference to the difficult economic climate for restaurants at the moment. There have been several notable closure announcements in the last couple of months, including Stateside and the Whale Wins. “A restaurant like mamnoon needs a healthy urban environment with diversity in all dimensions, density, spontaneity and predictability,” the owners wrote. “Alas, the last 2 years has seen scary declines in all of these, in addition to increasing costs.”Eater Seattle reached out to Wassef Haroun for more details about the reasons for the closure, but has not heard back.Mamnoon has hosted countless fundraisers and pop-ups over the years, including many that supported charitable efforts in the Harouns’ home region. In 2020, it raised money for victims of a massive explosion in Beirut, and more recently put on an event with local Palestinian American chef Nadia Tommalieh that supported the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.“It was important for us to connect Seattleites to the struggles of people in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine,” the Harouns wrote, “and connect our global communities to Seattle. And to be a part of a first wave of forward-thinking Levantine restaurants that allowed the world to understand us as modern, resilient, culturally proud, and creative people.”

Once upon a time, the Canterbury Ale House was famed far and wide — at least on Capitol Hill — for being a dive, a sprawling bar haunted by literal ghosts as well as plenty of living regulars. Soundgarden played there in 1987, long before anyone cared who Soundgarden were. It changed owners in 2014, and they revamped it into a brighter, more family-friendly space that actually served good food, which some regarded as a sign of the Hill’s gentrification. Then it changed owners again, then closed, then in 2023 the space was turned into a stylish, but short-lived restaurant called Meliora, which closed last year.Now the Canterbury is fading further into the mists of time, Capitol Hill Seattle Blog reports, as the owners of the mixed-use building the bar used to occupy are splitting the 5,000-square-foot space in twain. That’s a huge footprint by restaurant standards, and landlord Meriwether Partners hopes that the two smaller spaces will be more attractive to commercial tenants. There’s no sense yet of whether one or both of those tenants would be bars or restaurants, but Meriwether is open to the idea.There’s one leftover bit of Canterbury legacy that might sweeten the deal for prospective tenants, CHS reports: There’s still a single suit of armor kicking around.Bumbershoot reveals food lineupSeattle’s most famous musical festival has in recent years leaned into the food, and this year is no exception. New additions to the culinary slate in 2025 include Homer, Mexican Seoul, and Lenox, while returning vendors include Local Tide and Chicken Supply. Basically, if a restaurant has recently been on the Eater 38, there’s a good chance it’ll be at Bumbershoot on Labor Day weekend. For a full rundown of all the musical acts, food, and artists that will be at Bumbershoot, and to buy tickets, go here.Fair Isle is hosting a fortnight of pop-upsBallard’s Fair Isle Brewing has long been one of the city’s premiere pop-up incubators, and the brewery is leaning into that this September, launching a 14-night dinner series called the Chef Sessions. It’ll run from September 15 to September 28 and feature some of the best pop-ups around, from the Cavatelli Project to Seila. (Current kitchen resident La Marea is taking a break during this time.) These dinners will be walk-in only; note that Fair Isle is a 21-plus space. For the full lineup, go here.The ‘Seattle Times’ names the sandwich of the summerFinally, the Seattle Times had a fun rundown on the trendy dish du jour, the mortadella sandwich. For the uninitiated, mortadella is bologna’s fancier cousin, and area restaurants have been pairing it with cheese, hot honey, pistachios, and other accoutrements; it’s often served on focaccia, a bread that is a kind of local trend all of its own. Our top pick for a ‘della sandwich, and also one of the Times’ top picks, can be found at Tivoli in Fremont.