Owl Sprit Cafe in Port Townsend closed down last month to undergo renovations to expand its dining room, menu and hours, which owners hope to unveil this week or next.
The cafe, which opened 10 years ago, is owned by Tina Fink-Sezgun and Kim Hendricks. The pair said they originally wanted to sell the business and had put it up for sale for months. Several interested parties inquired about buying the restaurant, but in the end, Hendricks and Fink-Sezgun said they just weren’t the right fit for what they wanted for the business into which they’ve poured their hearts and souls. Instead they decided it was time for an upgrade to revamp and expand the business.
“We didn’t have the money for a renovation when we first opened,” Fink-Sezgun said. “But now we can have the kitchen and space work for us instead of having to work around it.”
The renovations will expand the dining room, kitchen and add bar seating, which Eileen Skidmore, the new dinner chef, said is an essential part of expanding the menu for a dinner service.
The bathroom, which originally was at the end of a long hallway, will be moved to open up the kitchen space. More space in the kitchen means room for more capacity and a larger variety of dishes.
The lunch menu Owl Sprit patrons know and love will stay the same, Skidmore said, but the dinner menu will expand on the restaurant’s theme of local and fresh foods at approachable pricing. Skidmore said she hopes to bring in dishes that incorporate her tastes and personality but stay true to the restrictive diet accessibility of the lunch menu, including vegan/vegetarian and dairy and gluten-free options.
The new menu will have a “tapas” style small dishes section as well as entrees, pastas and desserts with a commitment to locally in-season foods.
“Basically I want it to be Chimacum Valley on a plate,” she said.
Local resident and die-hard Owl Sprit consumer Judy Drechsler said she has eaten at the cafe at least one or two times a week since they opened.
She said she’s excited for changes and thinks Owl Sprit is one of the best restaurants in town for the quality of food for the price and the different dietary options.
She sees the expanded dining room as a major plus since she said the place is always full.
The new hours will see the business open from 11 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. for lunch and then 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. for dinner. The restaurant will also now take reservations, where before it was always first-come first-served. The expanded dining room will also accomodate large parties, where before the seating was limited by the size of the tables and their combinations.
“We used to have to turn people away all the time,” Fink-Sezgun said. “We hope we’ll be doing that less often.”
The interior decoration will also go through an upgrade but Hendricks said she wants to ensure people that the owl mural, now a prominent feature of the dining room, will remain.
Fink-Sezgun said what really shows how far they have come with the business is that when they first opened they bought everything second-hand, and now they are having pieces custom-made. They want the dining room to have the same comfortable and cozy feel but with a little more sophistication.
Spring is the ideal time of the year for the changes, Skidmore said, because it will allow them time to adjust or reorganize before the non-stop onslaught of what she calls the “walking unfed” descend on Port Townsend in the summer.
This is her first time building a menu completely from scratch, and it presents a unique but exciting opportunity, she said.
Hendricks said Skidmore was her and Fink-Sezgun’s first choice for a new chef. They knew they wanted to hire a woman, and remembered Skidmore from when she had once applied to Owl Sprit.
When her name came up it was an “aha moment” and they approached her with their idea. Unsure of how to best contact Skidmore, Hendricks said she eventually flagged her down on the street and told her “I have an idea we need to talk to you about.”
Fink-Sezgun said they are on a tight schedule to re-open since right now all their employees aren’t working. They hope to have it back open by the first or second week of March.
During the break, Skidmore said she will take time to train their almost doubled-in-size staff and create all the new kitchen processes.
