Every employee who walks into Pidgin Cooperative at Fishermen's Terminal starts at $25 an hour with a shot at owning a piece of the business within a year. That's the deal brothers Seth and Zach Pacleb built with partners Erica Reich and beverage director Spencer Rossman when they opened the worker-owned restaurant and bottle shop in September 2025 at 3909 18th Ave. W.

The model works like this: after 2,000 hours of service, any worker can buy a $1,000 membership share granting voting rights, full visibility on the restaurant's finances and access to profit-sharing. A payment plan is available, and preliminary voting rights kick in after an initial $200 investment. Tips are pooled equally between front-of-house and back-of-house staff.

Pidgin now has six worker-members, The Stranger reported Aug. 11, with a seventh on track.

The co-op fills the former Highliner Public House space on the working waterfront, a spot the team fell in love with on their second restaurant tour, according to a Port of Seattle blog post. The Pacleb brothers, originally from Bothell, bring fine-dining credentials from Canlis, Crush, Restaurant Zoë and The London Plane. But their path to Pidgin ran through 15 years of farmers market hustle.

Starting around 2010 with a pop-up called Brothers and Co., Seth and Zach built a ramen-and-taco operation that rotated through markets across Seattle, including Ballard, Queen Anne and Capitol Hill. They bartered food with neighboring farmers until it became a sourcing philosophy. Zach built a color-coded spreadsheet tracking dozens of local growers, their products and peak seasons. That spreadsheet now drives Pidgin's rotating fresh sheet.

"The farmers would walk up to us, you know, like 'We're hungry,' and we'd feed them, and then at some point one of them asked us, 'Do you want to trade food for food?'" Zach Pacleb told The Stranger. "You'd have a farmer who has, like, a 35-pound bin of delicata squash that they just don't want to take home. I'd be like 'Yeah, okay! Totally! Looks like I'm feeding you for the next three weeks.'"

COVID-19 killed the farmers market operation. During the pandemic, the team hatched the co-op idea. Zach told The Stranger the motivation was partly physical: years of kitchen work had taken a toll, and the traditional chef-owner model of grinding alone terrified them. A cooperative would spread decision-making and give long-term staff real agency.

To get there, they raised money from farmers market regulars, community investors and a Kickstarter campaign. The Good Business Network of Washington connected them with a business coach from Patty Pan Cooperative. They consulted Jude's Old Town and found a co-op-focused lawyer through a Seattle co-op Discord channel.

The menu draws on the Paclebs' Filipino and Hawaiian heritage: ramen made on an imported Japanese noodle machine, Hawaiian-style plate lunches, Filipino grilled chicken (inasal), loco moco and a smoky eggplant omelet called tortang talong. The bottle shop spotlights local and independent beer, cider and wine producers.

The Stranger reported that Seth Pacleb envisions eventually creating an umbrella organization to help new Seattle restaurants launch under a co-op model, with shared resources and lawyers. That vision arrives as the city's hospitality industry grapples with wage theft investigations, staff strikes and rising costs. Workers at the Walrus and the Carpenter in Ballard ended an eight-day strike in June after ratifying a collective bargaining agreement.

Pidgin Cooperative is open Wednesday and Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Phone: 206-954-8568.