I recently met a friend for lunch in Issaquah’s Gilman Village. She told me it was the place to shop and hang out when she was a teenager. It’s been a few decades since we were 16 and meeting our friends at the mall, but Gilman Village still feels like a very cool place to spend a sunny summer day — especially with two recent restaurant additions.
“The parking lot is full every single day,” says Toby Matasar, owner of one of those newly opened restaurants, Crumble & Flake. “Every shop opens by 10, and by 10:30 it’s packed.”
Matasar moved to Seattle in 2000, first working as executive pastry chef for Tom Douglas. In 2005, she opened her own bakery in West Seattle, Niche (which closed in 2015), and she acquired Crumble & Flake in 2017, when it was a slip of a space on Capitol Hill. Late last year, she closed the space to relocate to Gilman Village, settling in the building that used to be The Boarding House.
The old Craftsman home is the last original building in Gilman Village; it opened as a restaurant in 1973, when building codes were looser, serving customers until it closed last winter. When Matasar bought the place, there was a ton of work to be done to bring it up to current code — including removing the original bathtub from the bathroom (it now sits on the outdoor patio, filled with flowers).
Matasar, who opened Crumble & Flake at the end of May after months of renovations, says she’s “thrilled to be part of this community. I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I thought whatever [space] I found was going to be my last place. This couldn’t be a better way to finish out this pastry chef life of mine.”
The morning I visited Crumble & Flake, a line formed as soon as the shop opened at 10 a.m. There’s a lot more room at the new location — and a bigger menu. In addition to all the French patisserie-style pastries available, there’s a full lineup of sandwiches and salads. Right now, the full cafe menu is available beginning at 11 a.m. daily, but Matasar says that will soon bump forward an hour to 10, as soon as doors open.
You can opt for the Reuben ($19) or a croque monsieur ($18) off the lunch menu, or try your pick of plenty of pastries.
The blueberry almond financier ($5) is the only version of a blueberry muffin I want from now on. The pistachio lemon gâteau basque ($6.85) features a delicate, buttery pastry shell that encases an intensely nutty pistachio filling. When it comes to chocolate, the gluten-free truffle cookie ($3.85) was good, but the chocolate hazelnut scone ($4.50), topped with crunchy sugar crystals, was incredible. Not overly crumbly, the scone has deep cocoa flavor and was studded with crunchy nuts. Perfect with coffee or tea.
And Crumble & Flake isn’t the only new spot in the village to grab a bite or a cup of coffee. Just across the way is Levant Cafe, which opened last October. The brightly lit space specializes in Turkish fare, including a coffee service that uses hot sand to heat the water, with each cup made to order and poured tableside.
The coffee is intensely rich. I usually like a medium roast with a hit of steamed milk, but the coffee at Levant was perfect with just a sprinkle of sugar.
I also had a za’atar and cheese crepe ($13.99), stuffed with cucumber, tomato, mozzarella and za’atar, served with a green salad topped with vinaigrette. They have a mix of sweet and savory options as well as gluten-free crepes.
On another visit to Levant, a friend and I shared the medley plate ($22.99), the gyro plate ($19.99) and a piece of pistachio baklava ($5.99).
The medley plate is piled with muhammara, hummus, baba ghanoush, kibbeh, falafel and grape leaves, served with a side of pita bread. Everything was fresh — including the grape leaves, which were still warm. The muhammara is slightly spicy, while the hummus is silky-smooth. The Lebanese kibbeh — balls of crispy fried meat — had just the right ratio of bulgur to beef and were tender and well spiced.
The gyro plate is definitely large enough to share — especially when paired with another dish. The sliced gyro meat was lightly crisped and piled high over a mound of saffron rice, drizzled with a garlicky tahini and served with a side salad and a scoop of hummus.
It’s perfectly executed — but the next time I visit Levant, I am going all in for more grape leaves and kibbeh.