Sammamish Café now Serving Up Comfort Food for Dinner

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

Now Sammamish residents can be comforted more often.  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 Village Café, launching what is now a seven-store local chain, Cafés Inc. The company’s corporate offices are in Redmond, also, just across the street from the restaurant.

Along with Sammamish Café, the newest in the chain, Cafes Inc. owns and operates the Village Café in Redmond, the Issaquah Café, and the Woodinville Café, and 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 ’40s era American-style comfort food menu, Scott says.

The restaurants also have a ’40s era ambiance, outfitted in décor that is unique to their locations, Scott says. 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 says. The restaurant found a home in the Saffron Shopping Center at 228^th Ave. and Inglewood Hill Road, and has been well-received since its May 1, 2011 opening, Scott says.

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