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. More 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 doi.