Iconic restaurant suddenly closing after 100 years

The storied Seattle locale is shuttering permanently after over a century in business.

Apr 21, 2025 - 13:50

Iconic restaurant suddenly closing after 100 years

If you're up for a challenge, you might consider training for a marathon, becoming fluent in a new language (try Icelandic or Mandarin if you're really ambitious), or getting your pilot's license.

If you've already done all of these, or you're just up for an even bigger challenge, try opening a restaurant.

Starting up and running a restaurant is one of the hardest and most thankless jobs in the retail and service space.

Restaurant launches typically require a lot of cash up front. After buying your property, you'd need to invest in pricey equipment for the kitchen, furniture and decor for guests, renovations, licensing, permits, insurance, and inventory.

You'd also need to hire labor, which is pretty hard to find nowadays.

Once all that is done, you'd need to invest in marketing and signage to actually convince prospective diners that their money would be well spent at your establishment.

And that's before you start stocking all that perishable inventory, a never-ending expense that typically results in a lot of food waste.

In fact, the average cost of starting up a restaurant runs somewhere between $275,000 to $425,000, depending on location, type of fare, and other factors.

The Virginia Inn is closing after more than a century.
Image source: Shutterstock

Restaurants are hard to run

Once you put all that cash up front, you might think the hard part is over.

But the truth is, it's just getting started.

Labor is hard to find, but it tends to be even harder to keep, since working in a restaurant often involves long hours during peak times.

More closings:

The recurring cost of food and inventory is also steep, especially if you're buying high-quality ingredients.

And owners need to pay the typical costs associated with any brick-and-mortar establishment, like rent, insurance, cleaning, and utilities.

Plus, customer tastes are fickle.

So it's no surprise that just under one fifth of restaurants fail within the first year of business, and 51% fail within the first five years.

Iconic Seattle restaurant closing

Even some of the most storied restaurants have difficulties.

Michelin-starred dining spots and fast-food franchises alike have seen closures in recent years.

And now, The Virginia Inn, a Seattle-based restaurant with decades of history, will follow suit.

The Virginia Inn opened its doors in 1903 and has even been featured in films. It serves traditional Northwestern fare, such as:

Mussels
Smoked salmon
Fish and chips
Fresh Pacific rockfish
Burgers

But its run is coming to a close and the restaurant will permanently close its doors on April 27, 2025.

The restaurant reportedly could not agree on lease terms with its landlord and has ultimately decided to close.

"The one sticking point that I had with our lease was the percentage-based rent that [the PDA] charges on top of the base rent and the maintenance,” owner Craig Perez said of the issue, “and that is 6% of our total sales after $1.2 million.”

The PDA is the Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority, which said “we don’t discuss the details of individual leases," adding, "Over several months, the PDA offered numerous opportunities to either negotiate a new lease or sell the business, but Virginia Inn did not pursue either path. As a result, the PDA was forced to end the month-to-month tenancy.”