Wood-fired pizza lovers rejoice: Mioposto is officially coming to Mercer Island.
The opening date for the new restaurant — estimated to be late summer or early fall of this year — will coincide with that of the Hadley apartment building that Legacy Partners plans. Mioposto will occupy 2,300 of the 9,000 square feet of building’s retail space, and Legacy is currently negotiating leases with two other tenants.
Mioposto, “my place” in Italian, is a wood-fired pizzeria that exclusively uses locally made wood-fired ovens, domestically sourced olive oils and tomatoes, hand-stretched dough and Eastern Washington Applewood. In fact, the only cooking appliance in the kitchen is an oven.
“It forces an honesty to our cooking,” said owner Jeremy Hardy.
The oven is the “rockstar” of the restaurant, Hardy said, which will feature a full bar and a pizza bar where customers can watch their food being prepared. The Island location will also have an outdoor seating area, with a fireplace pending the city’s approval.
Mioposto’s first location opened in Seattle’s Mt. Baker neighborhood almost exactly 10 years ago. The pizzeria focuses on “simple, great and well-prepared food.”
It also tries to source ingredients domestically, and its local focus is what attracted Mercer Island-based Legacy Partners to the partnership, said Steffenie Evens, Legacy’s vice president. Mioposto frequently participates in fundraisers and other philanthropic efforts in the community.
Mioposto will open at 11 a.m. daily and serve lunch, dinner and brunch on the weekends. The breakfast menu features two brand new items: shakshuka — a chickpea, tomato, oregano and Calabria pepper stew topped with an egg — and panenata, bread soaked in egg custard and roasted with apples and pancetta that Hardy described as similar to French toast.
The restaurant will also serve Caffe Vita espresso, Stumptown Coffee, Bloody Marys and “Bloody Marias,” made from smoked tomato juice and tequila infused with pepperoncini. It will have a full bar and a happy hour, and speciality cocktails such as “Fire and Ice” — Woodinville Rye Whiskey over special smoked sweet vermouth ice cube — along with homemade limoncello and barrel-aged Manhattans.
Hardy’s wife Tiah created many of the menu items. The menu features salads, sandwiches and, of course, pizza, but Tiah wanted to add steak to the menu. Now, Mioposto serves an oven-roasted 12-ounce ribeye after 5 p.m.
Tiah is the CFO of Mioposto and “one of the top five cooks I’ve ever known,” Hardy said.
“She puts food on the plate that you really want to eat,” he said. “We wanted to create a restaurant that we would want to go to, and that’s exactly what we’ve done … We still go there for date night.”
Hardy has five children and said that his restaurants still welcome kids, providing dough for them to play with while they wait for their food to be prepared. But it was only after a remodel that made the restaurant less kid-friendly (with linoleum tile floors) and more romantic (with brick details and low lighting) that Mioposto really took off.
“Sales went up 45 percent,” Hardy said. “The restaurant has been on a vertical ever since.”
The plan for Mioposto is to move east, to Redmond, Issaquah or Bellevue next.
The Mercer Island location will mark a slight departure from Mioposto’s usual aesthetic. The other restaurants, in Seattle’s Admiral and Bryant neighborhoods, have similar styles: small, warm, romantic and often set in older buildings with a lot of brick details. The Hadley building will be brand new, and Mioposto will mirror that with a more sophisticated, mid-century modern style, Hardy said.
To aid in that endeavor, he hired architect Graham Baba, of Fremont Collective, Melrose Market and many restaurants including Revel and Westward.
“We’re going to embrace the modernity and have fun with it,” Hardy said.
For more, go to www.miopostopizza.com.
