5 Corner Market Bar & Kitchen Softly Open This Week

As Nancy Leson reported last week, the former Lombardi's space in Ballard is busy transforming itself into 5 Corner Market Bar & Kitchen. Executive chef Sam Crannell says the soft opening might happen tomorrow, or Saturday if the gastropubby restaurant needs a bit more time to get organized.

Crannell, a veteran of Quinn's and Oddfellows Cafe, says 5 Corner will serve "food you just don't see traditionally in a bar." Dishes will boast "an amount of heat, spice and smoke that really hasn’t been done in the city yet."

In describing 5 Corner, it's easy to haul out a lot of overused restaurant terms: craft beer list; small-batch bourbon; seasonal; local; nose-to-tail dining. But hey, these concepts wouldn't be buzzwords if they weren't thoroughly enjoyable.

When I called, Crannell said his kitchen had just finished making some housemade sausage from a whole pig brought in from Coho Farms. That pig will also showed up in a pulled pork sandwich, a rillette, and crispy chicharrones before Crannell's team uses the bones to make stock.

A menu and website are forthcoming, but Crannell says the restaurant will "always have a good steak and always have a good burger." Other mainstays include fish and chips and handmade pastas, though the menu will change with the seasons and Crannell's "whims and boredom."

The restaurant is one of just a few in the country to have a Wood Stone Josper oven, a charcoal broiler that delivers grill flavor from the confines of a restaurant kitchen (Cafe Lago says it's the first restaurant in the U.S. to have one, installed just recently).

On the bar side of the equation 5 Corner has a Washington-focused wine list without huge markups, says Crannell. Geoff Kaiser at Seattle Beer News also has the tentative beer list for the opening.

For the moment, Crannell declines to identify the owner, but commenters over at MyBallard have done their homework.