Team Peloton: Dustin Riggs, Mckenzie Hart, Paul Dano, and Aaron Grant
A tightly packed group of businesses combining passion for the bicycle with food, drink, and repair and maintenance services is pedaling its way around Capitol Hill. As the yellow jersey in the race of big city trends, you’re probably not going to be surprised to learn that the streets of Capitol Hill and the Central District will soon be home to not one, or two, but three bicycle cafes.
“Many cyclists kind of pick up the sport and it leads to a rabbit hole,” Dustin Riggs tells CHS. “There is a lot of culture around it.”
Riggs and his partners hope to clip into that two-wheeled enthusiasm as they prepare to open Peloton at 12th and Jefferson by early October.
“The coffee and the beer and the bikes. It’s just a lifestyle kind of thing,” he said.
(Image: Metier)
In the Great Central Seattle Bicycle Cafe Race of 2015, Peloton is the scrappy, gritty contender. Riggs and his partners came together around Seattle’s bike polo scene and named Peloton for the kind of bicycling everyman and everywoman — the peloton is the tight pack in the middle of a race where most riders group up.
Don’t look back. Métier Racing and Coffee might be gaining on you. CHS first told you early this year about the plan from longtime Seattle cycling concern Herriott Sports Performance to move to E Union and open a new headquarters that is part bike shop, part training facility, part cafe. A few months later and the project has a fancy new brand ( we’ll indulge the é for now) and a due date: a soft opening in mid October with a grand opening planned for Saturday, November 7th.
Where Peloton is jeans and Deady Baby Downhill, Todd Herriott and David Richter’s Métier is performance wear and next weekend’s crit:
The new venture –an impressive 12,500 square-foot, multi-level facility on Capitol Hill’s Union Street –will house a gym with men’s and women’s locker room facilities, a bicycle service center, retail space and café. But Métier is much more than a rebranding and expansion of HSP – it’s a whole new concept for a new, wider audience.
“We hope that people of all interests and abilities can use Metier as a place they want to hang out – train in the gym with top-notch consultants, take a yoga class, check out new bikes and equipment, have a drink or watch a game or a race on the big screen,” Herriott said.
So who is the third mystery rider in the pack? We can’t divulge everything just yet but there’s another player lining up for a ride in Pike/Pine with an intriguing project also destined to combine bikes, booze, and chain grease. Here’s a map of the race route with a few key details — for now — obscured:
Yup, there’s an alley involved (Image: City of Seattle records)
At Peloton, Riggs is too busy with the buildout to worry much about competition. He’s not predicting a rivalry but there could be a few shenanigans ahead as the businesses set out on the course.
Riggs is also confident in his fellow riders. Business partners include mechanics Paul Dano and Aaron Grant, and bicycling cook Mckenzie Hart, formerly of the London Plane.
Approaching the last miles of the project the group has been working on in some form or another for five years, Team Peloton is hoping to open as soon as possible — at least by the first weeks of October, if not sooner. They’ll start with a limited kitchen with help from First Hill’s Sugar Bakery supplying pastries to go along with the coffee. CHS hopes for at least a few surly bike messengers in line to fill in a little of our Monorail Espresso nostalgia from when we worked downtown. Beer and wine will help fuel the evenings. A full kitchen for Hart to do her thing — “wraps, healthy living, breakfast and lunch, maybe dinner once a month” — will follow. Peloton shares a rapidly changing block also now home to Nate’s Wings and Waffles CD.
The cafe, like Métier, will feature a full service repair shop with new and used parts and help with bike fitting.
Riggs said he’s looking forward to seeing it fit together and creating a space for “bike nerds” and “every day” bicyclists.
“Peloton isn’t the leaders out in front, and it’s not the drop off. It’s the big group in the middle,” he said.
Peloton is located at 1220 E Jefferson and expected to open in early October. You can learn more on the Peloton Facebook page. Métier is located at 1017 E Union and is also planning an opening by mid-October. Its Facebook page is here.
Capitol Hill food+drink notes
- UPDATE: Now that Kedai Makan has moved around the corner into a big ol’ real restaurant, Tortas Condesa from Monica Dimas is ready to open Thursday on E Olive Way.
- “But he only had one beer ready for opening night…“
- The Hopvine is celebrating 20 years this week with craft brew events and special night of open mic.
- Now open (on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights): Broadway’s EuroPub beer room.
- “The Infinite Complexity Of Espresso Vivace” (btw, permits are in for this)
- Refresh Frozen Desserts is open, continuing the de-franchising of the Broadway Building.
- Congratulations to Capitol Hill-born Eltana Bagel on opening its fourth location, 826 Thomas in South Lake Union.
- For now, Gnocchi Bar only has one. But in the future?
- “How Rachel’s Ginger Beer Makes Sure Customers Walk Away Happier Than When They Came“
- Best Capitol Hill happy hour? Not another dumb list. Real advice: Quinn’s Pub.
- Created on Capitol Hill: Is Butter OK?
- Aglio e Olio coming to Madison Valley.
- Blue Moon burgers now use gluten free buns from 15th Ave E’s Nuflours Bakery.
- Two Doors Down doing Oktoberfest:
Join us on Saturday 10/3 for an Oktoberfest celebration that everyone can enjoy! We’ll be featuring a great selection of Oktoberfest and German-style beers on draft from breweries such as Silver City, Georgetown, Alpine and Leavenworth and naturally we’re adding brats to the lineup for the event as well. We’ll have pretzel bites for the kids and a special burger, The Bavarian (¼ lb NW beef patty with stone-ground mustard and house-made apple/fennel slaw served on a pretzel roll) for the adults in the crowd. Don your dirndl or lederhosen and we’ll reward you with happy hour pricing on any of the twenty beers or ciders we have on the draft line up. Our regular menu is available as well. Prost! - Have you been to Ernest Loves Agnes yet? Here’s what it looks like.
- Seattle Times tries Chavez (we told you about it here)
At Chavez, Mexican homecooking elegantly embellished (@Gilbertphoto) Story: http://t.co/MxPX8CvM0T #Seattle pic.twitter.com/vvF3MiFD9h
— Seattle Times Photo (@SeaTimesPhoto) September 25, 2015
| This week’s CHS food+drink advertiser directory | |
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Bicycle cafes are fine, but I eagerly await the coffee/brewski purveyors for those of us in the unicycle community.
Etaoin, where you been?
What about juice boxes for the tricycle community?!?
Which stage of gentrification is it when Ethiopian grocery stores are replaced by craft beer “lifestyle” cafes aimed at bicycle enthusiasts? Seriously though, it is nice to see some home grown development in the neighborhood. It sounds like the Peloton crew is a scrappy group of entrepreneurs who are living the dream.. hope it all works out for them.
living the dream indeed! i invite you – and all – to witness our progress as we build out our space. we love that people that work/live/commute around our area stop by and inquire about what we’re doing. if you’re in the hood, stop by and check it out. we’ve always got time to chat with and meet our neighbors.
Jefferson is now Capitol Hill? Lol
Nobody called it that but you. We write about all sorts of shit on Capitol Hill… and beyond! Thanks for stopping by.
Thanks for the love, CHS!
@etaoin – we will be happy to serve our unicycle/tricycle brethren – juice boxes for the children or the young at heart.
@jason – don’t think that we haven’t thought about the elephant in every conscious seattleite’s mind – what does gentrification look like and how much of it is acceptable in our neighborhoods? let me tell you what i’ve learned and what i know about our situation specifically: the space that we now occupy was previously an ethiopian restaurant/bar since the 90s. since we’ve moved in, i’ve been able to meet and chat with the previous tenant about her business and the reasons why she gave it up. i asked her personal questions because i was curious why someone would end their business in such a great location after so many years. she told me that she was done working that hard, her kids were grown, and her husband also owns his own business, so there was no more need for her to continue operating her own business. she essentially retired. that was a great relief to me because i did not want to feel like i was the reason that a 20 year old business had to close their doors. this is not the case.
“we are the gentrifiers.” this thought weighed heavy on my conscious and was a topic of conversation amongst my partners and our close friends/consultants. then we put things into context. we – dustin, mckenzie, aaron, and i – are all low income citizens in this city. we have all existed on ~20k a year incomes for the majority of our years here in seattle. this will not change – we cannot afford to give ourselves raises beyond what we are accustomed to making. so, if you consider a small group of people just getting by doing what they are passionate about and doing it outside of working for someone else – i don’t know what to tell you that would make you feel better about what we are doing. i guess you’re going to have to visit and make a final judgement for yourself, which i invite you to do even before we’re open for business. we will be working 9-9 every day until we open. we’d love to chat with you or anyone curious about what we’re doing face to face. we’re confident that after meeting us and hanging out in our space that you will feel good about giving us your business. and we will greatly appreciate it.
TLDR;
thanks for the great article and hope to see all of our neighborhood community soon.
<3,
peloton seattle
Here I was thinking there were too few places for white males to go nowadays, and tada: a bike shop/cafe!
Because white males are the only people who like bicycles and food…