Restoration Ristorante

For months, on and off, I've been working on an article for the South Seattle Beacon about the old Lakeside Tavern -- that wooden two-storey building with the upside down sign, about a mile south of Rainier Beach -- which used to be the company store for Taylor's Mill, and is about to become the Pizzeria Pulcinella. (Look for the article next week -- I promise it's got lots of fascinating information not included here...)

I've watched the place get gutted, retrofitted, and painstakingly restored. I've read up on the history of Dead Horse Canyon and Taylor's Mill. I've talked to the new owners of the building, who are lovely people, and to Vince and his wife Carla, also lovely, who are opening the restaurant. (It's Vince Mottola of Vince's Italian Restaurant, if you know that place. This one has a different feel to it, though.)

Here's what the building looked like back in September, after an astronomical amount of work had been done already. Lloyd (on the left) is one of the owners, and Bob is one of the contractors.


The sign was upside down on the south side, so people coming up Rainier from Renton saw this:


Why was the sign upside down? Legend has it that the tavern owners didn't pay the bill for the sign, and the sign company took revenge by coming in the middle of the night and flipping it over. The tavern owners learned to live with the upside down sign, and it eventually became something of a landmark: many people can't really figure out which building I'm talking about until I say, "You know, the one with the upside down sign."

Anyway. Here's what the place looks like now:


Tonight the owners -- six Filipino guys who have known each other since college -- had a party there, which was also a sort of dry run for the opening, which is next week. When Lloyd invited me, I jumped at the chance: after all this time watching the place get fixed up, and learning about the various strands of history that have converged there, I couldn't wait to see everybody in a room together -- and to taste Vince's authentic Neapolitan pizza. Andrew, alas, was out elsewhere, so Josie and Simon and I headed down to check it out. So did about two million other people, it felt like.

What a crowd! The room was crawling with round-cheeked babies, rootbeer-drunk kids, proud investors, exhausted restaurateurs, beaming waitstaff, serious baristas, and hipster chefs. Delicious pizzas kept coming out of the wood-fire oven almost as fast as excited people kept pouring in the door. The place felt right; I don't know how else to describe it.


The pizza chef recognized me from, of all places, the Laughing Dog -- that first cafe that opened in that round building at the corner of Dawson & Wilson about four restaurants ago. The Laughing Dog had the best motto ever -- "Come. Sit. Stay." -- and fabulous food for the first six weeks or so. Then after this guy left, it went rapidly to hell and closed within a year. Here he is preparing a tiramisu pizza, which I thought sounded a little questionable:


But once the kids got their first whiff, he couldn't turn 'em out fast enough. Simon's comment: "Chocolate Pizza! Just like on Club Penguin!"


Lloyd introduced me to all the partners, including Alex Rolluda, who came in with an armload of drawings and plans for the property next door, which the group also owns. (If that name sounds familiar, yes, he's the architect whose firm designed Orca's new Garden & Science Annex -- small world!) The coolest part of the plan is to divert the Dead Horse Canyon stream where it runs under the building so that they can daylight it in the park next door. Nice, eh?

On the way out, I made the kids walk around to the south side of the restaurant to have a look at Vince's delightful homage to the old Lakeside Tavern and its owner's delinquent sign bill:


I'm not sure why this makes me smile so much. I think it's that wonderful feeling that the stars have aligned somehow, and something special has finally fallen into the right hands. Hooray.