New Traditions Cafe is back, with live music, new menu items and maybe more outdoors

New Traditions Café — restaurant, music venue and community gathering place — is open once again.

Concerts will resume in September, beginning with funny feminist folkies The Righteous Mothers, who’ve performed at the café nearly every year for a quarter century. The Sept. 17 and 18 shows will be the first since March 2020 for both the band and the café.

Meanwhile, co-owner Jody Mackey is aiming to expand the outdoor dining area the restaurant added last summer in what used to be a single off-street parking space.

The mostly organic café’s menu is evolving, too, with new items including fresh-pressed juice, avocado toast and more gluten-free options.

The reopening — happening in conjunction with changes and improvements made possible by a restaurant revitalization grant as part of the American Rescue Plan — is a joyful chapter in the café’s history, said Mackey, who owns the café and adjacent fair-trade store with business partner Stacey Muguet.

“We’re returning to be the community space we’ve always been,” Mackey told The Olympian. “We get to be a drop-off site for donations for EGYHOP (Emma Goldman Youth and Homeless Outreach Project), which supports people living on the streets. We get to welcome back the mighty Unitarian guys for their weekly meeting. We get to have poetry and book readings.”

“Everyone is so excited for us to be open and be available for the community,” said café manager Eric Nieman, who moved to Olympia from Encinitas, California, to take the job. “I’ve only been here about a week, and this has really opened my eyes to the importance of this place.

“It is more than just a restaurant.”

Since March 2020, New Traditions — founded as Traditions in 1996 by Dick Meyer and taken over by Mackey and Muguet two decades later — has been through the ups and downs most businesses weathered during the pandemic.

The business closed at the start of the pandemic and reopened in June 2020, with the café offering only outdoor dining in the small covered area that had been a parking space. Unable to make outdoor dining sustainable, the café closed again on Dec. 31.

It opened again on July 9 with a commitment to both continuity and change.

For the first time, the restaurant is making almost all of its menu items on the premises, said Nieman, who’s the first restaurant manager in the business’s history.

The soups have always been made in house, but the quiche, lasagna and other main dishes were purchased from Tacoma’s Antique Sandwich Co., which was a sibling to Traditions when Meyer owned the business.

There are more new menu items on the way, including waffles and other breakfast fare, and all of the food will soon be coming to diners’ tables more quickly than before, Mackey said.

“We’ve been kind of a slow restaurant,” she said. “I’m doing things to speed things up, so people can come here for lunch and get out in a decent length of time. One of our focuses is to set things up in a way that makes it easier for employees and easier for you.”

One of the things she’s doing is buying two $10,000 impingement ovens, which use a mix of convection and microwaves to heat food more quickly and consistently than a microwave.

“Things like the crust on the quiche will come out perfectly,” she said.

The outdoor dining area is once again in use, and Mackey is hoping to expand it.

“Our dream is to move out into the park,” she said. “If that happens, I’ll put a stage out there and a deck, and it will be enclosed. It will feel like the European cafes that are part of parks.”

She wants to use just a small part of the park and place the stage under the large sequoia trees not far from New Traditions.

The city of Olympia is interested in the plan, she said, but it’s not a sure thing because if a business uses part of a park, the city has to purchase an equivalent piece of property elsewhere.

“It’s an underutilized part of the park,” she said. “We would like to make it more beautiful.”

The Righteous Mothers

• What: The funny feminist folkies are taking the stage for the first time since March 2020.
• When: 7 p.m. Sept. 17 and 18
• Where: New Traditions Fair Trade Café, 300 Fifth Ave. SW, Olympia
• Tickets: $25, $20 for students and those with low incomes. Call 360-705-2819 for tickets and reservations.
• More information: https://newtraditionsfairtrade.com/

This story was originally published July 14, 2021 at 5:00 AM.