Capitol Hill Legend Marjorie Is Closing With a Farewell Party

The word “institution” is thrown around a lot when we talk about restaurants, and sometimes it feels overused. But what else can you call Marjorie? For 13 years it’s been one of Capitol Hill’s most beloved dinner spots, a place where communities gathered to share plates of owner Donna Moodie’s famous plantain chips and Jamaican-style jerk chicken.

But Marjorie’s time will be ending next Wednesday, March 29, with an “End of an Era Celebration,” the restaurant announced in an Instagram post this week. Tickets for the event, which goes from 7:30 to 11:00 p.m., are $250 and can be purchased here.

Throughout its run, Marjorie has been synonymous with its dynamic owner. The Jamaican-born and Chicago-raised Moodie is a longtime fixture of Seattle’s restaurant scene, having moved to the city in 1993. She opened two restaurants with her now ex-husband, the acclaimed Marco’s Supper Club and Lush Life, both in Belltown. In 2003 the couple split and she turned Lush Life into Marjorie (named after her mother), moving the restaurant to Capitol Hill in 2010. It was so popular that it quickly had to expand into a new space, called the Annex.

If people came for the food at Marjorie, they stayed for the vibes. “It’s a place where everyone feels (and is treated) like family, where you can just show up and trust that you’ll be taken care of,” The Stranger wrote in 2015.

Moodie has become increasingly involved with civic life over the years. She’s the executive director of the Capitol Hill EcoDistrict, an organization that works to improve the rapidly growing neighborhood’s public spaces and community health resources, and has served on several community-oriented boards, committees, and commissions. Marjorie is of a piece with that work, one of the places that makes Capitol Hill feel like a true neighborhood and not merely a collection of new-build developments.

Eater Seattle has reached out to Marjorie for more details about the decision to close and will update this post if we hear back.

Though Marjorie will be missed, Moodie has at least one project in the pipeline: Boujie Bar, which is slated to occupy part of the Midtown Square development at 23rd and Union in the Central District. And the restaurant will live on in its plantains, which are now sold in retail stores.