Way back when, maybe five years ago, a sea-farin' man named Ezequiel Romero climbed up the hill behind his boatyard in Ballard and found himself a restaurant for sale at the corner of Queen Anne Ave. N. and Boston.
It had been home to a series of unsuccessful culinary ventures (Flow, Orrapin, Opal) and prospects failed to improve under Romero's stewardship. Within a year ads were appearing on Craigslist offering to sell the premises, the furnishings, the equipment, even the name at an attractive price. There were no takers, and, soon, no lunch service, either. Instead, just enough patrons kept coming back on cool evenings, attracted by sidewalk seating where gas-fed flames flickered from table-top fire pits.
But there came a moment, soon enough, where the rent needed to be paid. The Facebook page, well, who cares if it's only updated every couple of years, right? The menu? Hard to tell what was happy hour and what was dinner; prices were all over the map, too. The website, which was once www.lalunaseattle.com? It has another year to run but already resolves to a random page that sells heating and air-conditioning equipment. Romero himself is long gone; he's back on land, though, working out of Ballard as an independent house-painter.
The restaurant's business license? Expired. So it's no surprise that La Luna's heading into that dark, cloudy night. End of August, we heard, but we checked with some of the neighbors, who said they heard end of September.
But the first week of September came, and so did the movers. Tables, chairs, equipment: anything that wan't bolted down was hauled away. The flames in the sidewalk fire pits had flickered their last, the clock had finally run out.
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