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Fifteen years of accessible but authentic French cafe dining and drink will come to an end on 12th Ave early in the new year. Beloved Cafe Presse is planned to close forever in February as owners Jim Drohman and Joanne Herron are beginning to look ahead to retirement and have agreed on a deal to sell the restaurant.

“Something I think about every day — being a positive influence on my employees,” chef Grayson Corrales tells CHS about her plans for stepping out of the kitchen and into an owner’s role with her first restaurant, Maripili, set to take over the Cafe Presse space.

Drohman told CHS the decision to sell came about as the cafe came up on decision time about extending its current lease.

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Drohman and Herron’s other Francophile-favorite Le Pichet in Belltown has a lease through 2023 and the owners have an option to extend its run, depending on how retirement planning is going.

“We’ve been thinking of trying to wrap up and think about retirement,” Drohman said. “We could have renewed but a five-year year chunk was more than Joanne I were willing to commit to.”

Creating a restaurant that lasts one year or five years, let alone 15, Drohman said, wasn’t something the business partners set into ever thinking about what might come next. But as the years stacked up, a vision of passing Presse along to a new generation formed. Then the pandemic hit.

“We had hopes an employee would take over,” Drohman said, “but COVID threw a monkey wrench into that.”

Instead, early next year, Drohman and Herron will hand over the keys to the 12th Ave restaurant to Corrales.

CHS spoke with the new owner from Spain where she is traveling and interning in preparation for making the major investment in Maripili pay off. The first-time restaurateur is planning a tapas menu with a fusion of Spanish-American flavors in a revamped venue that will shift away from the all-day, all-night ambience of Cafe Presse. The focus in the beginning will be dinner before eventual expansion to weekend brunch. Happy hour will eventually arrive and signal things are flowing well in the new venture. The central bar will not go to waste. Maripili’s focus will be on gin and tonics, and a sherry menu. The tap will switch out to Estrella Galicia and there will be exclusive Spanish and Washington wines.

Corrales hopes to also brighten up the space, and bring “a little more youthful” spirit to the restaurant,  removing wallpaper, brightening the room, and adding art to the walls with the feeling of Spain’s northwest Galicia region.

“I am hoping to bring the most beautiful and relatable culture I can from Galicia,” she said.

Maripili will also debut along with a new neighbor in the building. CHS reported here on the plans from Anchorhead Coffee to open a new cafe and bakery in the former Stumptown space next door.

Seattle diners may know Corrales from her work at Junebaby where she served as pastry chef until earlier this year. She called her time there a “generally a positive experience” and says she “never personally had issues” with Edouardo Jordan who was forced to shut down the Ravenna restaurant amid sexual misconduct accusations.

The chapter has left Corrales hopeful she can be an empathetic owner with “really clear boundaries.”

Cafe Presse, meanwhile, will continue in its space until into February, Drohman hopes, extending its long history here a few more months.

The cafe was born into the Seattle and Capitol Hill of the mid-2000s. Drohman had returned from Europe to work in Seattle as a chef at Campagne. Herron was part of growing The Ruins into the powerhouse dining and event space of the era. The opened Le Pichet together in 2000. Cafe Presse, complete with a magazine and newstand and a Diffuseur de presse en France theme, came about in the summer of 2007.

It has been home to croque madames and croque monsieurs, Soupe à l’oignon gratinée, liver terrine, Fallafels en automne, roasted half-chickens, pommes frites, and Stella Artois since with lively mornings, afternoons, and evenings. Before the pandemic, the long, central bar lived and died along with international soccer and World Cup games.

The Christmas week timing wasn’t the best for announcing Cafe Presse’s news but it came about out of the timing of the deal’s closure and restrictions from a non-disclosure agreement.

Some of Presse’s employees will move on. Some may stick it out until the end.

For Drohman, the sale and the announcement of the closure brings a major milestone after weeks of work to try to make the best possible ending for Cafe Presse under the circumstances. This is how it will end.

In the beginning, the goal with creating Presse, Drohman said, was achieving a “rapport between quality and price” and to “exceed expectations.”

“In Seattle, a restaurant that lasts 15 years is really an oddity,” he said. “It is gratifying and amazing that people like what you do.”

“It’s all a cook can hope for.”

Cafe Presse has announced its final day of business will be February 13th. You can expect Maripili to debut by spring at 1117 12th Ave.

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