Bar del Corso is one of the restaurants on Beacon Avenue featured in a recent Seattle Met article. Photo by Wendi.Seattle Met’s Kathryn Robinson recently posted an article about three of Beacon Avenue’s restaurants: Bar del Corso, Travelers Thali House, and Inay’s Asian Pacific Cuisine, suggesting that with restaurants like these, Beacon Hill is now a neighborhood worth bringing your appetite to.
About Bar del Corso, Robinson says “Full of neighbors sharing wine and chatting across tables, it was a true third place from the moment it opened in July.” Travelers “now has the space to do justice” to the thali and street food its owners have served until now from a portion of a small retail store on Capitol Hill. And Inay’s food, says Robinson, is “accorded solid treatment by Inay’s son Ernie”—but she even more highly recommends eating there on Friday evenings, when waiter Louie transforms into drag queen waiter Atasha for a lip sync diva tribute.
Commenters on the article and on the Beacon Hill mailing list noted that El Quetzal was left out, as was Baja Bistro. Perhaps Robinson wanted to focus on newer restaurants, though Inay’s has been around for several years.
Mark your calendar for the Beacon Hill Harvest Fair, Saturday October 22 from 2-9 p.m. Activities for all ages include apple cider pressing, art, music, and dancing. On the edible side of things, there will also be a bake sale, food vendors, a Food Forest demonstration, and, to share the harvest’s bounty, a donation drive for the El Centro de la Raza food bank.
The Harvest Fair is free and will take place at the Garden House, 2336 15th Ave. S.
Here’s the planned schedule of events:
2 p.m. until dark:
Apple cider pressing with 300 pounds of apples grown here on Beacon Hill at the Jose Rizal Park orchard. If you have extra home grown apples you would like to share, bring them to be pressed.
El Centro de la Raza Food Bank food drive
Beacon Food Forest demonstrates a “fruit tree guild”
Beacon Hill Garden Club members talk to interested folks about membership in their organization
ROCKiT space bake sale
Food vendors
2-5 p.m.: Create an Art Chair with Kathleen McHugh. For all ages, no experience required.
3 p.m.: Hamanah Don plays West African Malinke harvest rhythms.
5 p.m.: Aaron Hennings leads the Mercer Middle School eighth grade orchestra.
6 p.m.: Jefferson Community Center-based break dance crews perform.
7-9 p.m.: Harvest Fair Barn Dance featuring the Small Time String Band (Oliver Abrahamson on fiddle, Eli Abrahamson on banjo, Terrie Abrahamson on guitar, and Danny Abrahamson on bass), with Sherry Nevins calling dances that are fun for the whole family—no lessons or experience needed.
The first Beacon Boogie will celebrate food, art, and music on the Hill on October 29. Five bands will perform in five different North Beacon venues for five dollars (free for kids 12 and under). All of the venues are on Beacon Avenue South within a half block of South Hanford Street.
The festivities begin with pizza and the jazz of Trio Zazou at Bar del Corso from 5-7 p.m. Then from 7-10, the music moves to four other venues:
Another liquor license application was recently filed for a Beacon Hill business. El Quetzal, the Mexican restaurant at 3209 Beacon Ave. S., filed an “Added/Change of class/In lieu” application for a license of the type “Spirits/beer/wine restaurant service bar; off-premises sale of wine.” This is an application for an additional liquor license class beyond their current license. The off-premises license would allow the restaurant to sell wine by the unopened bottle for off-premises consumption.
The applicants are listed as Juan Jose Montiel, Elena Sarmiento, Juan Jose Montiel Cardova, and Elena Sarmiento Ruiz. The license number is 405543. As usual, if you wish to make any comments on this application, whether positive or negative, e-mail customerservice@liq.wa.gov.
ROCKiT space would like to recognize the generous efforts of our neighbors and partners City Fruit and Jose Rizal Park Orchard for picking and delivering 300 pounds of apples to Garden House! These little beauties will be pressed into cider at the Beacon Hill Harvest Fair October 22. The cider will be shared with neighbors who attend the event. Folks should bring clean jars or containers to take some home!
The Harvest Fair will run from 2-9 p.m. on October 22 at the Garden House, 2336 15th Ave. S. Stay tuned for more information later this week!
The applicants are La Esperanza de Seattle GP, Geovanni Santacruz, and Omar Santacruz. The license number is 407963. If you wish to make any comments on this application, whether positive or negative, e-mail customerservice@liq.wa.gov.
As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, The Rainier Valley Co-Op Preschool is holding their annual Fall Festival this Saturday, October 8, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The festival will be held in the 1700 block of Forest Street, in front of Beacon Lutheran Church.
The family event will include a block party, a dj dance party, live music by Eli Rosenblatt, bike parades on the hour, hot dogs, a bake sale, games for kids, a recycled toy shop, a treasure hunt in the sandbox, face painting, and more!
Neighbors of all ages are welcome to have fun and help support the preschool. Bring your bicycle if you want to be part of the bike parades.
Neighbors are invited to help with the apple harvest from Dr. Jose Rizal Park. Photo by Alessio Maffeis via Creative Commons.Another fall activity will be taking place a bit further north on the hill at the same time (10 a.m. on October 8), where neighbors are invited to help harvest apples from the orchard at Dr. Jose Rizal Park. Most of the apples will become cider for the Beacon Hill Harvest Festival later this month, but some apples will also be available for your own baking. Craig Thompson writes:
Please come down to harvest the second crop of apples (tiny, tiny one last year, this year is much bigger); these apples are destined for the City Fruit apple press at the Oct. 22 Beacon Hill Harvest Festival, but there should be enough for your baking needs.
Now, these apples may have some bugs, but last year the winesaps I picked were still good for a significant pie.
We’ll have three fruit basket pickers (whatever they’re really called), plus some orchard ladders. We’ll also have all the containers necessary to hold the apples and transport them over to the Garden House, where the cider destined will cool in the basement until the Harvest Festival.
Forecast says it should be pretty nice in the late morning, too! So please take a wee bit to pick some fruit and, also, to check out the park. It’s really pretty magnificent now, and it will only get better!
New wayfinding sign on the 17th/18th Avenue South Greenway, on 17th Avenue just south of South Forest Street. Photo by Wendi.New signs appeared along 17th and 18th Avenues South recently, the first visible step toward the new Beacon Hill Greenway, part of a planned network of neighborhood greenways on Beacon Hill. The signs direct cyclists to neighborhood locations such as Jefferson Park and Beacon Hill Station via the greenway route.
Greenways are residential streets that are designed to be safe neighborhood connections for bicyclists and pedestrians, while still allowing automobile access using traffic calming measures. (City Councilmember Sally Bagshaw has posted a FAQ with more information about neighborhood greenways on her website.)
Seattle Parks and Recreation invites all interested neighbors to participate in a public meeting October 13 at 7 p.m. at Jefferson Community Center to discuss the Jefferson Park Golf Course renovation project. The design team and Parks staff will present design options for the $7,000,000+ project, which will include a new clubhouse and banquet room, expansion of the driving range to add a second deck, a new electric cart barn, improvements to pathways, and possible parking expansion and landscaping renovations.
A new Zen Buddhist residential practice center, Dai Bai Zan Cho Bo Zen Ji, has opened on South Horton Street in the Golf Court apartment building. To mark the center’s arrival in the neighborhood, the group is holding an Open House this Saturday, October 8, from 1-3:30 p.m. at the center, 1733 S. Horton St. All neighbors are invited.
Genjo Marinello, the group’s abbot, sent us a bit about the history of the the Chobo-Ji group:
“We are a Zen Meditation group that got started with the Seattle Zen Center in the early 70’s sponsored by the then UW Art History Professor Dr. Glenn Webb. Our founding abbot, Genki Takabayashi Roshi, was invited by Dr. Webb to become the resident teacher from Japan in 1979. The group that formed around his teaching in 1983 became the current temple called DaiBaiZan ChoBoZen Temple or Chobo-Ji for short. It means ‘The Listening to the Dharma Zen Temple on Great Plum Mountain.’ Genki Roshi retired in 1997 and in 1999, Genjo Marinello Osho became the second abbot. In 2008 Genjo Osho became one of only a handful of American’s to receive full Dharma transmission in a Japanese line of Rinzai Zen Buddhism.
“For the last dozen years the group has held meditation in a triplex on Capitol Hill. Two years ago the apartment building called ‘Golf Court’ between Lafayette Ave. S. and Alamo Pl. S. was purchased by the group to be the site of its new Residential Practice Center, where people will be able to live in a city setting and strongly practice Zen Buddhism. The new Meditation Hall has been completed and the house on Capital Hill sold. There are meditation periods open to the public daily at this new site. Anyone is welcome to attend—doors open 30 minutes before each scheduled meditation period. There is a $5 introduction to our practice each Thursday from 7:30-8:30 p.m.”
This carving in the new Chobo-ji space combines a Northwest Native salmon motif with a Yin-Yang symbol. Photo courtesy of Genjo Marinello.
Mark your calendar for the 
