Last week, award-winning baker and popular pop-up entrepreneur Ben Campbell announced that his Ben’s Bread will take permanent root in Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood this fall, and the announcement hides more excitement for Phinney Ridge foodies.
Campbell and his wife Megan’s up-and-coming bakery will open at 7009 Greenwood Ave. this fall. N opens and will serve the sourdough and focaccia breads that have built Campbell’s reputation for excellence. They plan to open from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., with breakfast sandwiches, donuts, and toasts in the morning, sandwiches, salads, and cereal bowls at lunchtime, and drinks like espresso, kombucha, and beer and wine to take away. In the evening they hope to be able to use the space for pop-ups, a supportive allusion to the company’s own path. However, a look back at Ben’s Breads’ past provides additional clues as to what brought Ben’s Bread to Greenwood and why locals can hope for more locations in a similar style soon.
Campbell previously ran the bread program for Sea Creatures, the group best known as “Renee Erickson’s Restaurants”. But Erickson owns the group along with a few other people, including business manager Chad Dale – who just happens to be the developer behind the Ben’s Breads building, but also a future resident.
The property on the corner of Greenwood Avenue North and North 7th Street has been in the works for many years as the developers first had to do an environmental cleanup when a dry cleaner spilled chemicals decades ago and littered the ground up to nine meters deep. More recently, this was an Oroweat Bakery Outlet. In 2018, Dale and his team won a lengthy, highly controversial battle to get the building 55 feet tall instead of the original 40 feet, which gave the building its crowning glory – the top floor he plans to be on Life.
Ben’s Bread is a small, family-run bakery in Seattle, Washington.
Courtesy of Ben’s Bread
“When my wife and I kept coming back to talk to us about aligning our personal values and priorities with life in the city, we wondered if we could bring a new vision for the urban lifestyle to life,” says Dale . His family, along with a small group of others, designed the building for what he calls the “community roof” model of apartment building. The ground floor has around 5,000 square meters of retail space – of which Ben’s Bread will use 1,400 – which open onto an inner courtyard. The second to fifth floors are home to 35 family-friendly apartments that Dale and his co-developers want to live in. “Our goal was to create a space with carefully curated spaces – maximizing the combination of quality, aesthetics, cost and proximity, diversity, sustainability, community, inclusion and long-term contribution.”
The results of this buzzword soup goal remain to be seen, but for now it benefits the city’s foodies to have someone at the best restaurants in town with such an interest in what’s in below. Dale calls the retail portion of the building an extension of their intentions, saying that they are “curating a very special group that compliments each other and the community very well,” with more announcements over the next several months.
Ben’s Bread is a small, family-run bakery in Seattle, Washington.
Courtesy of Ben’s Bread
“Our trading partners are part of our community, interconnected and curated (a little selfishly) to take into account how we live and what we hope to contribute to the neighborhood,” he says. Reading how Ben’s Bread is part of the expanded Sea Creatures pedigree may torture the metaphor, but it shows what the future might hold for Phinney Ridge: Other former Erickson employees include Brandon Petit of Delancey, Michelle Magidow of Union Saloon undoon Joe Sundberg and Rachel Johnson from Manolin / Old Salt.
But Sea Creatures restaurants themselves have long had success in common spaces like Walrus and the Carpenter and The Whale Wins, as well as in multi-unit complexes like the Strip with Bateau, General Porpoise, and Boat Bar (formerly Bar Melusine). Even before looking elsewhere, Dale and Erickson restaurants have a wide variety of talent ready for their own spot, like Taylor Thornhill and Bateau’s chef and sous-chef Justin Legaspi – after all, the restaurant’s Instagram suggested on a “New project coming soon.”