'It was just so nice to see people's faces.' Washington state creaks open

On Wednesday, Columbia City resident Michael Wolfe was celebrating.

“It’s my 50th birthday. The state reopens. It’s a great birthday present,” he said. “I get to sit at the bar at my favorite brewery for the first time since March of 2020.”

His favorite brewery is Flying Lion, a small, neighborhood place on Rainier Avenue in south Seattle.

Wolfe and his friends got there five minutes before it opened on Wednesday, “so I could be the first one at the bar,” he said.

Wednesday was the first day that Washington state businesses were allowed to fully reopen. Bars, restaurants and gyms can now operate at full capacity, and fully vaccinated employees and customers no longer have to wear masks. But, while some businesses made immediate changes, others weren’t yet ready to go back to the way things were pre-pandemic.

Since the pandemic began, Flying Lion Brewing served customers to-go only, or at the tables set up in a tent on the brewery’s parking lot.

Wednesday marked the first day their inside space was open at all in more than a year.

Manager Sara McCabe said the brewery also opened the bar and stopped requiring masks for fully vaccinated employees and customers.

“The first group of strangers that came in without masks, I actually like got a little teary-eyed,” McCabe said. “It was just so nice to see people’s faces and, like, smiles.

"That’s part of why I love bartending," she continued. "To talk to people and see people and engage and see their expressions.”

Everything’s back to normal in this brewery — almost. McCabe isn’t sure when, or if, they’ll bring back Thursday night trivia.

“We would always have a packed house on trivia, every Thursday,” she said. “It might come back at some point, but … one step at a time.”

Other nearby businesses aren’t nearly as far along in their reopening.

At the Columbia City PCC, it appeared that all employees and almost all customers were still masked.

The Seattle Gymnastics Academy doesn’t plan to change anything about their capacity restrictions or masking requirements until a vaccine is available to children under 12.

And Bike Works, a bike shop that didn’t allow customers inside for the duration of the pandemic, won’t change that until after the holiday weekend.

Olympia Coffee, just up the street from Flying Lion, hasn’t opened indoor seating.

“It’s not really just as simple as me opening up and letting you sit down,” said Missy Costell, the coffee shop’s manager.

Costell said the café was already short-staffed — and, to open up indoors, she’d need even more employees. And service employees are hard to come by these days.

That said, she added, “it’s an important role of coffee shops in the community to provide that space where people can hang out and enjoy their coffee and do some work and meet people. It is really something that people are craving.”

To make that happen, the shop will start closing an hour earlier every day. That way, Costell will have enough staff to be able to open four indoor tables — space for about a dozen people, a third of the café’s usual capacity.

She hopes to have enough staff to open fully in August.

The café was brand new when it had to shut down for the pandemic, so she’s only ever seen most of her regulars when they were wearing masks.

“We’ve already noticed some customers coming in that we, like, don’t recognize right off the bat without their mask,” she said.

After more than a year, it’s an adjustment.