The owners of Prost! and the Nickerson Street Saloon are joining with two others to open The Ridge restaurant at 7217 Greenwood Ave. N., next to Ken’s Market. The Ridge, a family-friendly restaurant, will serve pizza, sandwiches and salads. The Ridge will also have a bar, and will serve beer, wine and liquor. The Ridge will be open for lunch and dinner. They will not offer delivery, but will have take-out.
They hope to open by the end of August.
Chris Navarra owns Seattle German Pubs Inc., which includes Prost! at 7311 Greenwood Ave. N. and four other pubs (Prost! In West Seattle, Prost! in Portland, Feierabend in South Lake Union, and Die Bierstube on Roosevelt).
His co-owners of The Ridge will be Chris Gerke (who has owned the Nickerson Street Saloon on the south side of the Fremont Bridge for 16 years and lives in our neighborhood), Tom Griffith (who owns T.S. McHugh’s and 10 Mercer downtown) and Larry Wikan (a beer distributor who also lives in the neighborhood).
Navarra gave us a sneak peek at the inside of the space, which is currently gutted. The front area will have regular tables and the bar to the left, while the back area will have large family-style tables perfect for a baseball team end-of-year banquet. Also in the back upper area will be the kitchen and some games, such as shuffledboard or old-fashioned video games like Ms. Pac-Man.
The walls will be covered with old neighborhood photos.
“We’re going to be all about the neighborhood. We’re trying to name all the pizzas after neighborhood businesses. The Carmelita is going to be the vegetarian; the True Value will be pepperoni or double pepperoni,” Navarra explained.
He said the restaurant would also like to name pizzas after the Woodland Park Zoo and Fire Station 21, and donate a portion of the proceeds to the zoo’s conservation efforts and a firefighters’ fund.
Navarra and his wife and 2-year-old daughter live in the neighborhood. His family is from Germany, so he was used to being able to take the whole family into a pub while visiting there, and wanted to create the same kind of experience here (hence the recent addition of a railing at Prost! that symbolically separates the bar from the regular tables, so children can now enter that restaurant).
Navarra, who opened Prost! in September 2002, looked at several available spaces in the neighborhood over the last few years, but found the rents too high. He said the old Berserk Games space, at 2,400 square feet, was perfect, and the landlord (the owners of Berserk Games) were very accommodating and happy to find a new tenant without having to actually advertise. (Berserk Games, now called Card Kingdom, moved to Ballard.)
“I’ve had this concept for a pizza place in the neighborhood for a long time,” Navarra said.
While the restaurant will be family-friendly, Navarra envisions it turning into the adult neighborhood hangout later in the evenings.
“After the kids go home, we want to make it a place to come.”