July 03, 2012--SILVERDALE -- The Silverdale Beach Hotel has been sold and is in the process of becoming a Best Western entity.

The $6.8 million sale was made Thursday.

Most customers since then have found the hotel's restaurant -- Josef's Waterfront Grill -- closed, with only morning continental breakfast being dished up.

Whether the restaurant will reopen and what the hotel will look like was an unknown Monday. The fate of hotel workers' jobs also was not known.

General Manager Bryan Shorb decline to give many details.

Watchers say the hotel -- unique in Kitsap because it has a full-service restaurant, ballroom, breakout meeting rooms, a central location and parking -- attracts customers that other area hotels or free-standing convention centers cannot. That's most notably business customers, but also the affordable-family crowd.

"It's a hugely important hotel to the Kitsap Peninsula region," said Patricia Graf-Hoke, manager of the Kitsap Peninsula Visitor and Convention Bureau. "I think it could be a shining star here in the entire region."

Those familiar with the situation also said the sellers -- Josef Diamond Investments LLC, Joel Diamond and Cindy Scott, who are associated with the parking-lot people -- sought a much higher price for the 151-room facility with 5,000 square feet of meeting space. But maintenance that had been deferred over the years was a factor for the lower price.

The Kitsap County Assessor's Office values the hotel and land at 3073 NW Bucklin Hill Road at $5.6 million this year, down from $7.23 million in 2011.

The buyer was YC Silverdale Hotel Group LLC, and Best Western spokeswoman Laura Cherry said the property was in the process of becoming a Best Western member.

David Maimon, a Diamond asset manager in Seattle, said the property, on the market since last fall, got some notice.

"There was a fair amount of interest," he said.

The hotel was built around 1987 on the foundation of an earlier hotel venture that never went forward.

It flew under a number of flags as time went on, including the Silverdale on the Bay Resort Hotel, WestCoast Silverdale Hotel and Red Lion Silverdale Hotel.

The venue drew a number of events over the years, ranging from KitsaParty, a now-defunct countywide charity celebration, to numerous political and business conference events.

Josef's Waterfront Grill was named for Josef Diamond of Seattle, who died in 2007 just shy of 100 years old. The elder Diamond helped build his family empire of more than 1,000 parking lots on the West Coast. His parents had fled the Ukraine to escape anti-Semitic rule of the Russian czar, and raised him and his siblings in Los Angeles, according to seattlepi.com.

Previously, the hotel's 78-seat restaurant was called the Mariner Grill.

Phoenix-based Best Western International Inc. has 4,100 independently owned and operated hotels, about half of them in North America. It was started in 1946 by California hotelier M.K. Guertin. Another Best Western property in Kitsap County is the Best Western Plus Bainbridge Island Suites.

The sale was handled by CBRE Hotels.

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