Capitol Hill to Get Another New Pizza Place, One Year After Conservatives Predicted a Pizza Apocalypse

What he said.

As you may recall, I wrote about the eight pizza places that opened on Capitol Hill in the past year. All those new restaurants arrived within one year after conservatives trumpeted a single Capitol Hill pizza place’s closure as a sign that Seattle’s higher minimum wage was killing small business.

Today, we can add another new pizza place to the list. John Sundstrom, owner of the fabulous fine dining restaurant Lark and the more casual Slab—which I believe to be the single best sandwich shop on Capitol Hill—is opening a pizza place called Southpaw on 12th Avenue, a little over ten minutes’ walk from the pizza place that closed down last year. Southpaw,  as with all of Sundstrom’s restaurants, will use locally sourced ingredients. But it’s not going to be ridiculously expensive. Bethany Jean Clement broke the story for the Seattle Times:

“We’re not just backing up the pizza supply truck to unload standard mozzarella,” Sundstrom says. But while you can expect some of the “Lark aesthetic and quality range,” he notes that big-enough-to-share pizzas will “probably be around 20 bucks.” Instead of slices, Southpaw will serve quarter-pies, about two slices’ worth for $5 — “enough for a one-person lunch with a salad… a walking-and-eating kind of size.”

Southpaw will also serve fancy soft-serve ice cream, which is a familiar staple at another bustling business on Capitol Hill, the Rachel’s Ginger Beer on 12th, just down the street from the future Southpaw site.

Considering that Seattle workers are doing better now than they were before the minimum wage increased, and considering that restaurant owners are investing in workers despite all those supposedly “job-killing” regulations, maybe it’s time for conservative talking heads to take notes from Idris at the top of this post and cancel the apocalypse? Seems as though the sky might not be falling, after all.