Acclaimed Seattle chef Brendan McGill is closing the book on a decade of restaurants at downtown’s Exchange Building, sharing a raw, emotional farewell on social media that mourns both his shuttered spaces and the slow unraveling of the city’s central business district.
McGill, owner of Hitchcock Restaurant Group, closed Café Hitchcock and Oyster Cellar at the base of the Exchange Building on May 31, ending a 10-year run that began with packed lunch rushes and ended with empty sidewalks.
“Three years of building and opening beautiful, rewarding spaces, a couple years of deep uncertainty, then a long, gradual decline that I simply refused to believe wouldn’t turn around,” McGill wrote in a Facebook post this week…