Two new liquor licenses have been granted to Beacon Hill businesses.
El Quetzal, at 3209 Beacon Ave. S., received a license of the type “Spirits/beer/wine restaurant service bar; off-premises sale of wine.†This was an additional liquor license class beyond their previous license, and allows the restaurant to sell wine by the unopened bottle for off-premises consumption.
La Esperanza de Seattle, at 2505 Beacon Ave. S., received a Grocery Store – Beer/Wine license.
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.
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.
According to the State Liquor Control Board, La Esperanza de Seattle at 2505 Beacon Ave. S. has made a new application for a liquor license of the type Grocery Store – Beer/Wine. This appears to be the same as a license application we wrote about last May; it is not uncommon for notifications to be re-announced with a new date if certain changes had to be made to the application.
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.
Dear Fellow Travelers,
We’ve always been open with our customers, our community, when we’ve needed your help, and you have always come through for us. Thank you for your continuing support that has allowed us to survive 13 years, including some very hard times. Travelers is again at a difficult point, our survival depends upon your support.
We have been really excited about our new restaurant, and we were slammed with customers when we opened the doors. We hired more people, “real servers,†more kitchen support, a Nepali farm woman (seriously!). All great folks. But business has dropped off, and the bills kept coming. Payday is coming, and we need your help.
Here’s what we are doing to make us easy to support
Payroll Party! Thursday night September 22nd, come help us harvest enough bounty to compensate our wonderful staff and get us through our big crunch. To make it a real party we are offering a couple of super deals
Get an extra 20% with any $100 gift certificate
Take 20% off any sale totaling $100 or moreYou can add up lots of little stuff and still get the 20% discount. With the certificates, the extra 20% can be a separate $20 certificate if you prefer. We’ll be open at both locations with tasty food and beverages. We have wine and beer too at the Beacon location (try a Taj from India, or a Kingfisher), delicious with pakoras.
Though we don’t like reviewing restaurants until they’ve been open for a few months, we’ve been to Travelers several times already and found the food to be tasty and inexpensive. We like it, and hope they will stay around.
(Updated to add information about the Seattle Weekly review—Ed.)
Bethany Jean Clement of The Stranger made her way to Beacon Hill’s Bar del Corso recently for a review. She contrasts the site’s former existence as dive bar The Beacon Pub to the newly brightened-up pizza establishment that replaced it (“pizza parlor,” with its overtones of Shakey’s, doesn’t seem to be the right term for this type of modern-Seattle-by-way-of-Naples restaurant), name-checks other Hill stalwarts such as Inay’s and Baja Bistro, and brings up the “G word”: gentrification.
Read the review at The Stranger, and tell us what you think here in the comments.
Seattle Weekly‘s Hanna Raskin also visited Bar del Corso recently and had good things to say, particularly about the pizza crust:
“At Bar del Corso, former Betty pasta maestro Jerry Corso has provided Beacon Hill with a neighborhood-defining pizza crust, and residents are so thrilled that it’s not uncommon for customers at the new restaurant to encounter an hour-long wait on a weeknight.”
Raskin’s review is here. What do you think?
According to their Facebook page, there will also be “soft openings” on Friday, July 29 and Saturday, July 30 from 5-9 p.m., and on Sunday, July 31 (during Beacon Rocks!), Wednesday, August 3, and Thursday, August 4 from noon-9 p.m.
The local restaurant hours survey mentioned in the Beacon Hill Blog a few days ago has now closed.
It turns out that the free version of Survey Monkey only allows you to see the results of the first 100 respondents to a survey. So far, 110 people have responded. I’m not prepared to buy the paid Survey Monkey service for this particular exercise, so we’ll have to call it good with the first 100 responses that were received. It’s not perfect, I know, but it still seems like a large enough sample to get a picture of how people in the neighborhood are feeling about later hours at El Quetzal, Victrola, and Kusina Filipina.
My take away from the numbers (which are below) is that there is significant support for El Quetzal to be open later in the evenings. Out of the 100 respondents below, 82 of them strongly agreed or agreed that they would patronize El Quetzal more often in the evening if it stayed open at least an hour later.
There was less consensus among respondents about whether later hours would increase their evening patronage of Victrola and Kusina Filipina: 41% strongly agreed or agreed that they’d patronize Victrola more often in the evening if it stayed open later. About the same number of people felt similarly about Kusina Filipina (40.4%).
A lot more people were neutral about Victrola and Kusina Filipina than they were about El Quetzal. I’m not sure of the best way to read those responses. It seems like maybe they are saying that they aren’t sure whether later hours would affect their evening patronage of these places, but they remain open to the possibility that later hours could make a difference in their behavior.
Conversely, respondents who disagreed or strongly disagreed (and there were some of these folks) seem to be saying that they know pretty clearly that changes in closing times will not affect their behavior, as far as evening patronage of these businesses goes.
Anyway, enough commentary. Here are the questions and the responses.
1. If El Quetzal Mexican Restaurant in Beacon Hill was open until 9pm (or
later) each night, I would patronize it for dinner or drinks more often
than I currently do.
| Response Percent | Response Count | |
| Strongly Agree | 43% | 43 |
| Agree | 39% | 39 |
| Neutral | 10% | 10 |
| Disagree | 4.0% | 4 |
| Strongly Disagree | 4% | 4 |
answered question: 100
skipped question: 0
2. If the Beacon Hill Victrola location was open until 9pm (or later) each
night, I would patronize it during evening hours more often than I
currently do.
| Response Percent | Response Count | |
| Strongly Agree | 18.2% | 18 |
| Agree | 23.2% | 23 |
| Neutral | 29.3% | 29 |
| Disagree | 21.2% | 21 |
| Strongly Disagree | 8.1% | 8 |
answered question: 99
skipped question: 1
3. If Kusina Filipina Restaurant in Beacon Hill was open until 9pm (or
later) each night, I would patronize it for dinner more often than I
currently do.
| Response Percent | Response Count | |
| Strongly Agree | 8.1% | 8 |
| Agree | 32.3% | 32 |
| Neutral | 38.4% | 38 |
| Disagree | 13.1% | 13 |
| Strongly Disagree | 8.1% | 8 |
answered question: 99
skipped question: 1
(Thanks to Jake for creating this survey and sending us this write-up of the results. –Ed.)