Business & Tech

Barrio Bellevue Restaurant Announces Closure, Will Become Private Party Venue

The restaurant, which was part of the group behind Purple in Woodinville and Seattle, announced its closure on its website.

, the modern Mexican restaurant at 10650 NE 4th St, will close and be transformed into a private party venue, which is a new concept for its parent company Heavy Restaurant Group.

The Seattle-based company has six restaurants, including Purple Cafe and Wine Bar in Woodinville, Seattle, Kirkland and Bellevue, Barrio in Seattle and Lot No. 3, next door to Barrio Bellevue. Its first restaurant was in Woodinville in 2001.

Heavy Restaurant's Larry Kurofsky said that the decision to close Barrio Bellevue hard considering the people who worked there and the patrons who liked it, but that the decision to change resulted out of a combination of factors, including customer demand.

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He said the concept of modern Mexican food was well received, and the Capitol Hill Barrio did its best year last year, but that the Bellevue restaurant was not getting the foot traffic it needed to have.

"It wasn't performing as well as it needed to for that space," Kurofsky said.

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At the same time, customers were asking for space to book parties of 200 or more, which was hard to accommodate in the Heavy Restaurants current restaurants.

The Barrio Bellevue space will be redesigned to be flexible for groups.

"We can accommodate weddings, and corporate events, and we will create a lot of internal events, cooking classes, wine tasting," Kurofsky said.

"We're excited about the future."

The restaurant was the first of the three Heavy Restaurants that opened on the corner of 106th Avenue NE and NE 6th Street.

The restaurant, which served Mexican-influenced modern fare and featured Latin music and a large candle wall, opened in September 2009, a month before the adjoining . opened May 2010.

Barrio's location on Capitol Hill in Seattle will remain open.

About 40 people were employed at Barrio Bellevue, and about 75 percent of those workers found a place at one of the other restaurants owned by Heavy, Kurofsky said.

The closure was announced by Larry Kurofsky on the restaurant's blog. It said in part:

While we will not roll out our full plan until early fall, we can share that our vision is for an engaging and inviting event space that will be available for both large private parties of up to 200 guests, as well as specialty events including wine tastings, cooking classes, and a host of new concepts that our team is already developing.

The blog post said that catering for the new space would include menus from Barrio, Purple and Lot No. 3.


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