Mark Holloway and Donna Malek 1990
They’re essential for weathering the cold in Ellensburg, and D & M is already the coffee in your cup. But which is your favorite restaurant for bringing out-of-town guests or the ‘rents when they come? Try Cornerstone Pie. Ellensburg’s latest destination.
Let this stylishly cozy spot be your go-to-pizza spot for wildcat weekends. Come October, sport your guests through the refurbished doors of our town’s local history. Doors that once housed the locals in the newly razed hilltop hospital, now open to a new generation of living service.
Cornerstone Pie’s mission is to bring the best and the brightest to the wood-fired pizza pie. Locally grown veggies and a mouth-watering array of locally harvested toppings served old-style Italy with an urban-centric twist. Where you gonna go?
Autumn is all about the next venue for long-since-college-locals, Donna Malek and hubby and biz partner Mark Holloway. Now that spring quarter has arrived to the ‘burg, and the frost is off the ground of the newest building to join the Ellensburg community [on the corner of fifth and Sprague streets] kitty-cornered to Safeway and the old Washington School Building where the City of Ellensburg renovated in 2010, New Italian-style pies are happening.
Whether you are a party of two or a party of five, value and quality is in the details of a season-fresh menu. Holloway and Malek have thought of all the little things that pay big dividends. Smarter dining starts here.
“Altering this area’s dinner habits is going to be tricky,” says Holloway. “We want to bring a destination to our town like the places Donna and I seek out when we take our family on the road.”
Holloway says that their restaurant is made of all they seek and more. “If you are into cozy table conversations, warm summer nights, local music, and delicious pizza pies, it’s tough to find a place like this, we wanna be here too.”
Foodservice is not unknown to D & M and this is not their first go at the food biz. In years past, Malek and Holloway renovated the old Episcopalian church and fashioned the Yellow Church Cafe. The cafe was so successful they had to sell it to keep up with their growing coffee business, and now, Holloway says, is the time for a true family restaurant, Humble Pie.
The couple says they chose the location based on their own wildcat memoirs. Sharing a tiny apartment in the old house that once stood in the empty lot at the corner of Sprague and fifth, many sunsets and lazy college days were lived.
“What makes it all worth it is that we finally built the spot of our dreams and it will become the in-town place where the wildcats and the city folks meet.”
msmendesmith 