When one door closes, another restaurant opens. After 15 years in Lower Queen Anne, Crow bistro’s service has ended, and in its place Suzana Olmos is reimagining her Citizen Six Korean-Mexican restaurant, with a new name, Lazy Susan. And in its Interbay spot, a new diner is taking shape.
Crow opened on a 15-year lease in an old photography studio in an industrial building on the corner of Fifth Avenue North and Aloha Street on Aug. 18, 2004.
Olmos said she had looked at the space before it went to Crow, but it had been too big for her.
“Since I lived in the neighborhood, I went there a lot,” she said. “I was a regular there for many years really.”
Crow partners Jesse Thomas and Philip Van Seters wanted to focus on family and new ventures, respectively, and provided Crow’s last night of service on June 22. Prior to that, the building owner reached out Olmos again.
“He’s like, ‘Well, are you ready for it now,’” Olmos said. “Ten minutes later, we had agreed to terms. It was really, really perfect that way. It never hit the market.”
Citizen Six will change to Lazy Susan, now that it’s going to be in the same neighborhood as Olmos' Citizen Cafe.
“We have Citizen [Cafe] down there and Citizen beer garden, so I think more than one Citizen is a bit confusing for everybody,” she said.
All of the popular dishes are moving from Interbay, but more dinner items will be added, Olmos said, because Lazy Susan won’t be doing lunch like Citizen Six had. That should leave room for some boozy slushy machines.
“We want to add to the menu to kind of accommodate the neighborhood and all the tourists down there,” Olmos said. “I guess we’ll get a different audience down there.”
Thomas and Van Seters told Queen Anne News back in May that part of Crow’s success was patronage by folks out for a show at Seattle Center.
“There will not be a crow in sight,” Olmos joked about her Lazy Susan remodel, with an anticipated opening in August. “It’s all going to be cosmetic, a good sprucing up and brightening up, so we can get those doors open in a month.”
Six Spirits distillery, which had been next to Citizen Six, the two businesses supporting each other with shared food and beverage service, is moving to South Park.
Olmos’ Citizen Six spot also never made it to market, as she’d tapped a few friends from Damn the Weather in Pioneer Square as potential new tenants at 945 Elliott Ave. W.
Bryn Lumsden used to tend bar at Rob Roy in the late 2000s, and then he teamed up with several business partners to open Damn the Weather five years ago. Two of them were friends with Olmos, and had rented out Citizen Six for events a few times.
Their plan for the 1,700-square-foot Interbay space is called Champagne Diner.
Champagne Diner will be farm-to-table food in a diner setting, where Lumsden and friends will balance creating an inclusive, comfortable, familiar and optimistic environment, he said. There are plans for formica tables with aluminum ribboning, for a classic diner feel.
“It’s a good note in American history, the diner, so I want to lean into that as much as possible,” Lumsden said.
Lumsden has a beverage background, so he’ll be putting together the cocktail menu, more elevated than a typical diner.
“We are going to do wine-to-go, which is retail wine, which we do at Damn,” Lumsden said, adding they only sell natural wines, “with lower-intervention processes.”
Chef Brian Miyamoto will head the kitchen. He’s previously worked at Art of the Table and Restaurant Zoe in Seattle, and at Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto’s Morimoto Waikiki in Hawaii before that.
“It really is going to be a bar, a restaurant, a pub, a place for the neighborhood,” Lumsden said.
Lumsden’s wife, a designer by trade, worked on Damn the Weather, and will be doing the same for Champagne Diner.
“It just turned out super classic and matched our vision,” he said of Damn the Weather, “and we’ve just been really excited to work on this one together, and she has the magic touch.”
Champagne Diner will open for lunch and dinner, with a weekend brunch.
“I think we’re going to do 11 to 11 to start,” Lumsden said. “We may expand it to breakfast. I’m not sure what the demand is there at the moment.”
Soon enough, Expedia will open its new campus across the railroad tracks from Champagne Diner, which should provide additional traffic and customers.
“I’m excited to see what the boys will do,” Olmos said. “They’re smart, they’ll make it a destination spot, as well.”