About Town: Redmond-Based Cafe Chain Branches out in Sammamish

The Sammamish Café, opened in May this year, is quickly gaining a foothold on the Eastside with its comfort-food menu.

Customer demand recently led its owners, Michal and JoAnn Scott, to expand the eatery’s hours to include dinner service Wednesday through Sunday evenings.

The Scotts moved back to the area in the 1980s, after managing a milk plant in Sunnyside for several years. Michal Scott, a native of Bothell, says that his idea to start a restaurant business here first jelled largely because he enjoyed going out to breakfast, but “couldn’t find a decent place to eat.”

At around the same time, the old Emmilou’s Restaurant in Redmond was for sale, and so he and JoAnn put menus together with the help of family—the café’s corned beef hash was Michal Scott’s aunt’s recipe—and transformed Emmilou's into the , launching what is now a seven-store local chain, Cafés Inc. The company’s corporate offices are also in Redmond, just across the street from the restaurant.

Along with Sammamish Café, the newest in the chain, Cafes Inc. owns and operates the Village Square Café, the Issaquah Café and the Woodinville Café, along with restaurants in Mill Creek, Mukilteo and Bothell. Three of the seven restaurants are open for breakfast and lunch, and the other four include dinner as well.

The restaurants each have a unique feel but some definite similarities. The menu is a good example. You can go to any one of the restaurants and enjoy the same classic American-style comfort food menu, Scott said.

The restaurants also have a '40s-era ambiance and are outfitted in décor that is unique to their locations. In Sammamish, the theme is built around three family resorts operating at the time at Lake Sammamish—Pine Lake and Beaver Lake—with vintage fishing gear, photographs, and even snow shoes adorning the walls. The Village Café has a Derby Days theme, and the Issaquah Café celebrates Salmon Days.

Scott says Cafés Inc. looked for a location in Sammamish for some time, not an easy feat with the high cost of retail space, he said. The restaurant found a home in the Saffron Shopping Center at 228th Avenue and Inglewood Hill Road, and has been well-received since its May 1, 2011, opening, Scott said.

“With the great response we’ve gotten and because we served a lot (of those customers) at the Issaquah Café,” Scott says the expanded dinner hours seem to be successful so far. Asked if the café might open for dinner more days of the week, Scott said it’s possible down the road, but the company will keep its current hours at least through the next year.