This fall, the University Village shopping center welcomes no fewer than 12 new retail and dining establishments, including the grownup hipster-wear of Amsterdam’s Scotch & Soda, resort-wear from Calypso St. Barth, mom-wear (“Hello, waist!” — their quote, not ours) from Hot Mama, and eyewear from Sunglass Hut. In the active wear aisle, there’s both Nike Running and American Eagle Outfitters.
If you get hungry, there’ll be Din Tai Fung dumplings (about which Jay has the other kind of reservations), the “premium casual dining” (e.g., pizza, sliders, sandwiches, sushi) of Joey Kitchen, and an “upscale homestyle” menu at Liam’s, from Curt “Call me Beecher’s” Dammeier. For dessert, Molly Moon’s ice cream.
Most of these options are paint-by-numbers fill-ins: the U Village has long been a hotbed of well-to-do moms doing daylight shopping, and there’s already a Tommy Bahama for Calypso St. Barth to go on playdates with, along with active wear from everyone from North Face to Lululemon. Ditto the dining options leaning toward pricier family fare.
But Scotch & Soda at least represents a symbolic crack in the U Village’s infamously inaccessible façade — if you don’t have the time to drive there and, buzzard-like, circle the parking lot, you’ve been not their kind of shopper: bus service just isn’t, and it’s difficult even to walk there. (Yes, in fairness, there will be a new, 700-stall in a parking garage there on the south side.)
Whereas the Amsterdam fashions of Scotch & Soda match well with Dutch bikes. (For their “Bike Project” promotion in New York, they sent two renovated Dutch bikes to Chelsea Leyland and Josh Madden — and quickly found that a Scotch & Soda-branded Dutch bike would be a pretty good seller.) Not everyone may know that you can dip into the U Village from off the Burke-Gilman Trail; a road leads down to the Village campus right by Counterbalance Bicycles. No navigating of the busy, multi-lane boulevards surrounding U Village required.
