The Kingfish Cafe, our neighbor, is closing.
This is a huge sadness. When we moved here, a huge plus for Capital Hill was that it was a mixed neighborhood … mixed meaning a good community of Blacks, Jews, Nuns. Priests, Catholics, other misc. “White folks,” artists, UW faculty, business folk … etc etc.
One of the best things about the mix was the Kingfish. Twenty years after we moved in “The Sisters” opened a place with some money from Gary Paton, the basketball star. The food ..best word would be unique. Not really (despite the name) soulfood nor typical N’Awlins, the sisters used family recipes from a cousin ..Langston Hughes. Unique, wonderful, ..what more can one say? Even as the neighborhood became “white” and the sisters’ restaurant became famous as a top Seattle place,. the sisters’ tiny place remained the one place in Seattle where we could say we felt like we were lving in America. Today’s Seattle has achieved apartheid. What is left of the community we wanted to be part of, the middle class Black community of the 1980s Central Area, has moved on. Sadly that now incudes the Kingfish.
After living there all that time, you still haven’t learned how to spell your neighborhood’s name?
Yep. Sad truth is that I always got by in spelling tests cuz most words could be sounded out. Tx for the correction though .. how do you like it spelled?