A Shiny New Flagship Hotel Restaurant Is Coming to Downtown

If downtown Seattle isn’t a good area for businesses, as some people have said, those same people evidently didn’t tell the Sheraton Grand Hotel, which is opening a luxe new ground-floor restaurant called Alder & Ash in May.

The space was formerly occupied by the Daily Grill, which closed in 2020 (before the pandemic kicked off), but with this new project the Sheraton is aiming for something a little more high-end. Alder & Ash will be operated by the Apicii hospitality group, a well-known firm that runs dozens of restaurants in New York, New Jersey, Oklahoma City, and elsewhere. In Seattle, it operates Steelhead Alley and Hatback Bar and Grille in the Mariners’ Boxyard development.

The menu has been created by Apicii culinary director Ed McDevitt and Blake Lord-Wittig, who is going to become Alder & Ash’s executive chef. As you might expect from a downtown hotel restaurant, this menu will be heavy on the local seafood and “new American” cuisine. Thankfully it sounds like there will be a few welcome twists to the staple items, like saffron crab tomalley butter with the Penn Cove mussels and mezcal cocktail sauce with the oysters.

The restaurant, located at 629 Pike Street, will serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and is slated to open sometime in late May. If nothing else, it’s a welcome sign that capital hasn’t given up on downtown.

Correction April 16 8:05 a.m.: This article has been corrected to clarify that Apicii no longer operates Rosswood in Portland.