A living room for Seaside

The Times was the town’s only cinema from 1940 until 1989. Then it sat. In 2016 new owners took the empty house and did the unfashionable thing: they kept the theater and added a brewery. Sisu Brewing — Finnish for a kind of stubborn courage that English keeps trying to translate — brews on site. Lambert is the manager of that room. She is also executive director of the Seaside Downtown Development Association, the nonprofit that hangs the flower baskets and the lighted starfish, runs the wine walks and Halloween Happenin’s, and argues, year after year, that Broadway is a place and not a corridor. The two jobs are not a coincidence. A downtown that cannot gather will not stay a downtown.

The doors open at eleven. The Honey Orange Lager, which Lambert will tell you has no fancy name, is the number-one seller. The other taps run to Tenacity, Grit, Rock-Ribbed, Indomitable Spirit — “Finnish fire,” she has called it. A burger named for the building. A screen that still takes a movie. Sporting events, live music, a free community screening when the town needs one. Lambert’s other calendar is the SDDA’s: alleyway wayfinding between the Avenue A garage and Broadway, a $10,000 city grant in 2026; Halloween Happenin’s; the long, unglamorous work of keeping baskets watered and starfish lit. People who only come in August do not see that work. People who live here do.

On a March night the house ran The Princess and the Frog for free and asked the town to come in costume. That is the customer, and it is also the civic argument: a brewery that will darken the house for a G-rated cartoon is not only selling beer. Lambert has the same instinct about people. Of Dawn Fujiwara-Pavlik, who opened Crafted in Seaside after years of hanging baskets with the SDDA, Lambert said, “Dawn made herself a local immediately through her volunteering and her big heart. You want her on your committees. She gets it done.” A living room, if it is any good, is a place where the committees actually meet.

It is 133 Broadway. Half brewery, half theater, all Seaside, as the house puts it. You can eat, drink, and watch something without leaving the building. The Honey Orange Lager is the one the regulars will point you toward if you ask for what people actually order. If you are in town for an SDDA event — a wine walk, a car show, Halloween — this is often the room the rest of the evening returns to. And if you only have an hour, sit where you can see both the bar and the screen. That is the whole idea.