West Seattle restaurants: Opening night for El Chupacabra on Alki

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The clouds have slid in, but the earlier sunshine drew enough of a crowd to Alki tonight to make it look a little bit like almost-summer. And the newest deck open for food and drink is the balloon-festooned El Chupacabra Mexican restaurant and bar, site of the former Casa Feliz, beneath Siam Pura, east of Homefront. This is the second location for El Chupacabra, a quirky hit on Phinney Ridge. Owner Aaron Wright is on Alki tonight:

Inside, following up on our preview from earlier this week, a little more of the distinctive decor:

And what would any place named after a mythical creature be without a few skeletons on the shelves?

You can find menu – including plenty of vegetarian/vegan options, as Wright promised when we first talked to him in January – and hours information on El Chupacabra’s Facebook page.

kate April 8, 2011 (9:38 pm)

I LOVE LOVE LOVE El Chupacabra! SO happy to see them in the neighborhood. I also love Siam Pura. Let’s not forget about Pepperdock, either. I’ve already been to Chaco Canyon three times this week. Good times!

RJB April 10, 2011 (9:07 am)

Woo-hoo!! Welcome to the Westside!!

barryleaf April 10, 2011 (10:15 am)

check out the posters in the bathroom, very disturbing

Sonoma April 10, 2011 (11:43 am)

What’s Chupy’s Web URL? I googled with no luck. All I found was one of those retro-silly, messy MySpace pages that no one over 18 has used since 2009. I am eager to try this place, but I want to see the menu.

WSB April 10, 2011 (12:21 pm)

No website – just Facebook.

David Mayne April 11, 2011 (2:37 pm)

I was turned away 2 times on opening day, once because they didn’t open as advertised at 11:30, the second, because they didn’t want to hassle with takeout that evening. I tried to go back today, Monday 4/11, expecting it to be open at 11:30, to find a paper taped on the door saying not open until 4:00pm. So I’m 3 strikes so far – a suggestion on better communication here, perhaps ?

WSB April 11, 2011 (2:50 pm)

They did post via Facebook that their Alki hours this week would be 4-midnight.

David Mayne April 12, 2011 (8:31 am)

OK, so I search for “El Chupacabra in facebook search panel, I get: http://www.facebook.com/?sk=lf#!/pages/El-Chupacabra/128963857149336

It has 400 “check ins”, and 63 people that like it. But absolutely no content, like you are mentioning, i.e the hours. Perhaps they have another page ? If so, why doesn’t the search on their name give the right page ? So I still do suggest that there may be s a bit of an information gap here

WSB April 12, 2011 (8:39 am)

Sorry, David, here’s the direct URL (which was linked in a couple of our stories). Facebook search, to be blunk, sucks. Sometimes you will get those fake pages with no content, sometimes you will get the real page. I had to find lots of WS establishments when we switched to a “page” recently, so I could “like” them, and I discovered how awful their search system remains:
http://www.facebook.com/bar.chupacabra
.
It never seems wise to abandon the open Web, but some businesses choose to. Google (etc.) remains the primary means of finding info. (As a site owner, we are well aware of that!) It’s really simple to set up a blog-format site if that’s all you can muster, and at least put up a couple evergreen posts with hours etc. But … everyone has to do what they feel is best for their business. – TR

David Mayne April 12, 2011 (10:31 am)

Thanks for the link, WSB. I agree it is not so wise to not have a reasonable and findable web presence, and as you say, it is pretty easy to do now with wordpress, etc. I will say that I wasn’t the only disappointed potential customer that walked up yesterday, and saw the nice computer generated text of the hours – one guy cussed them, another expressed disappointment, all within the 30 seconds I was there. In my book, this isn’t good for a business at all.

Rusty April 17, 2011 (10:39 pm)

Take out food? Really? On opening night? It’s a bar! I’m pretty sure there will be plenty of “potential customers” who don’t need an interactive blogsite for information and might just walk in, order a drink and figure it out. I’m also interested in reading your book about the food and beverage industry. Can you post a link?

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