Customers wait for takeout from Maneki Restaurant (Photo by Assunta Ng)
Maneki, the 117-year-old Japanese restaurant in Japantown, received $40,000 last month from a program called Backing Historic Small Restaurants. The money will go toward creating more outdoor seating and other upgrades.
Since early on in the pandemic, Maneki, for the first time ever, created an online ordering system and offered takeout. In July, it launched a GoFundMe to help raise some cash. Maneki also received a loan from the federal Payroll Protection Program, in addition to a small grant from the City of Seattle and help from Puget Sound Energy on a new HVAC system.