Well, you have 4 more days if you’d like to get your Katina’s fix! After that, one of Seattle’s sleepiest breakfast icons will be gone forever, and nothing like it is ever likely to exist again.
Katina’s is/was more of a time machine than a restaurant. Everything in it was old and worn down. The food was vaguely Greek, but it was greasy spoon American done with a proud nod to the birthplace of democraxy. Things just were blindingly obvious, like the fact that the prices were already pared to the absolute, hardscrabble, rock bottom. That the aged owners slaved over the place. That so many meals had been cooked there (in fact 50 years’ worth) that you just knew accreted food odors were all that held the furniture together. That when owner or server smiled, they actually meant it.
I may have eaten there 100 times, but I wasn’t a regular. But a neighbor was, not in the modern sense that it was on his list, but in the sense that Katina’s was the only breakfast he ever got out.
It’s been reported that the familiar story is playing out yet again: Landlord abruptly doubles the rent, leaving restaurant no choice but to close. Property is sold at maximal profit to developer specializing in minimal cost and homogenized urban blight. The residents of the 100 new housing units will be eating McDonalds and Hot Pockets, and know nothing of Katina or this genre of culinary Americana.
https://www.yelp.com/biz/katinas-kitchen-seattle
Go there while you still can.
