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- ADDRESS: 4926-4936 NE Fremont St.
- YEAR BUILT: 1974
- SQUARE FOOTAGE: 2,560
- MARKET VALUE: $1.2 million
- OWNER: CZ Property LLC
- HOW LONG IT’S BEEN EMPTY: Since March 2020
- WHY IT’S EMPTY: Pandemic casualty
Peer into the windows of Eclectic Kitchen on Northeast Fremont Street and you’d think the place had just closed for lunch and would reopen in the morning.
Tables are prepped with silverware wrapped in napkins. Jam jar glasses stand upside down, awaiting juice. There’s a bus tray, left in midbus.
But look more closely and you see that the Eclectic Kitchen might have closed for much longer. A plant on one table is dry and dead. The blackboard advertises avocado toast for $5, a price not seen since 2020 (it’s $7.50 at the TwentySix Cafe and $9 at The Society Cafe).
Eclectic Kitchen, in short, is frozen in time, like Pompeii after Vesuvius spewed hot gas and ash on the city, fixing people in their final acts.
Public records show that a couple named Ian and Lora Bramson created a business entity called Eclectic Kitchen LLC in November 2009 using the address at Fremont and 50th Avenue. The pair divorced in October 2016. Ian, now 59, got the restaurant and paid $20,000 for Lora’s share, according to court documents. Ian soldiered on for three more years, garnering mixed reviews.
In a text message to WW, Ian confirms that the pandemic did him in.
“Shut down at the beginning of COVID and never looked back,” he wrote.
The building and an attached house are owned by CZ Property LLC. Among the owners of CZ is the Milton O. Brown Trust, with an address on Highway 99 in Vancouver, Wash.
Milton O. Brown, 95, is a lawyer, disbarred in Oregon in 1998, according to court records, for dealings on the Totem Pole Shopping Center in Vancouver. His company, MOB Investments Inc., is run by Brenda Christina and Shauna Freidenberger, according to Washington records. Christina is his daughter and Freidenberger is his granddaughter, according to a person familiar with the company. Freidenberger is also a professional psychic, according to her LinkedIn.
MOB Investments didn’t return messages. The address given in its public filings is an office above a car battery shop on Highway 99 in Vancouver, Wash. No one answered the bell there, but an employee of the battery shop said MOB operated out of an office atop a loading dock in the back. The woman who answered the door there said she couldn’t talk to a reporter.
The little restaurant on Fremont may be an afterthought for MOB. The company paid $25 million for a 75,000-square-foot retail complex in Wilsonville in February, according to real estate services company CBRE, which represented the seller. It has a Red Robin and a Jimmy Johns that aren’t encased in the COVID era’s equivalent of broiling pyroclastic ash.
