The Everett Waterfront Quietly Turned Into a 17-Restaurant Neighborhood This Year

Ask someone who's lived in Everett for a decade what's down at the waterfront and most will still say the marina, maybe Lombardi's for pasta, maybe a walk out to the jetty if the tide's right. That answer was accurate for a long time. It stopped being accurate sometime around December 2025, and if you haven't been down to the Port of Everett's Waterfront Place since spring, the map you're carrying in your head is out of date.

The Port itself has started counting. In a recent promotion for its summer concert series, it pointed people toward dinner beforehand at one of the 17 onsite waterfront restaurants now open at Waterfront Place. Seventeen is not a rounding error. It's the number you get after roughly two years of construction and tenant build-out, three new restaurants opening in 2026 alone, and a deliberate plan that turned a stretch of Seiner Drive from marina parking into something closer to a food hall spread across several buildings.

This matters for how you spend the next few weekends, because August is the month all of it overlaps before most of the free programming winds down for the year.

Two Waves, Not One Slow Trickle

The restaurant growth at Waterfront Place didn't happen restaurant by restaurant over a few years. It happened in bursts, tied to two buildings the Port broke ground on together: a 12,000-square-foot building intended for Rustic Cork Wine Bar, Menchie's, a café tenant, and Tapped Public House, and a smaller 6,000-square-foot building next door meant for a fish market and a second food tenant.

Construction finished, then the tenants arrived in waves. Rustic Cork Wine Bar and The Net Shed Fresh Fish Market & Kitchen opened first, in December 2025. Tapped Public House followed on March 2, 2026, with a ribbon cutting that drew more than 100 people, largely because Tapped built the largest open-air rooftop deck on the waterfront in Snohomish County on top of its space. Menchie's at the Marina opened a couple weeks later, mid-March. Marina Azul Cocina & Cantina, a family-run Mexican restaurant from the team behind Casa Azul Cocina & Cantina in Woodinville and Agave Cocina & Cantina in Issaquah, was last to arrive, holding its ribbon cutting on June 25, 2026.

Owner Julian Ramos, who's run restaurants since 2002, has his son Esteban and nephew Alejandro managing the new location, floor-to-ceiling windows and marina murals inside, and a covered patio built for year-round outdoor seating. That's a family business making a real bet on this stretch of shoreline, not a chain filling a lease.

There's one gap worth knowing about if you're the type who wants coffee before a waterfront walk. The fourth suite in that first building was originally planned for a café called Alexa's Cafe. As of March 2026, Port CEO Lisa Lefeber was still describing an active search for a breakfast and brunch concept to fill that spot, alongside a separate hunt for a steakhouse or experiential dining tenant for the last open pad in the newer building. Neither had a confirmed tenant as of that update. If you're planning a morning trip down there expecting a sit-down breakfast spot, it's worth checking current listings first. It wasn't there as of this spring.

What's Actually Open on Restaurant Row Right Now

Here's the current roster, old anchors and new arrivals together:

Lombardi's Italian Restaurant, which predates all of this, still anchors its own corner of the marina and doubles as a landmark for finding the Thursday concert lawn, since the show sets up in the parking lot just north of it.

Sean Drought, co-owner of Tapped Public House and founder of Way Group Hospitality, which also operates The Net Shed, has a specific recommendation if you're deciding what to order: the Prime Rib Dip.

What's Left on the Calendar, and in What Order

Start with this Thursday, August 13. It's a normal Music at the Marina night at Port Gardner Landing, gates and food trucks at 5, music at 6:30, done by 9. Free, no tickets, just show up. The series is bigger than it looks: more than 80 percent of its funding comes from community sponsorships rather than city or Port dollars, and organizers describe it as one of Washington's largest free summer concert series. Every set is followed by a Late Shift after-party at a rotating downtown venue, recent weeks sending crowds to Apollo Exos, El Sid, and The Horseshoe.

Then comes the one weekend worth clearing your calendar for. Friday, August 14 through Sunday, August 16, three separate free programs land on top of each other for the only time this summer.

Friday the 14th is a Float Find day, meaning five clear clue balls will be hidden somewhere within the Waterfront Place boundary between 10th and 18th streets, redeemable at the Hotel Indigo front desk for a hand-blown glass float made at Schack Art Center. Twenty more floats go out that same day on Jetty Island for anyone who takes the ferry or brings a boat out. That same Friday and into Saturday, the Downtown Everett Association runs its Summer in the City festival at Wetmore Plaza, with a Float Find cityside tie-in that gives visitors a shot at one of 50 floats there. Saturday and Sunday, August 15 and 16, Schack Art Center holds Fresh Paint, its biggest arts festival of the year, along Hoyt Avenue between Pacific and Hewitt, with more than 100 artist booths and live glassblowing demonstrations.

None of these three events were built around each other on paper. They land in the same 48 hours because Schack Art Center is a partner on both Float Find and Fresh Paint, and because Summer in the City has always claimed the mid-August slot downtown. The overlap is real either way, and it won't happen again before the season winds down.

After that weekend, the calendar starts closing for real. Two more Music at the Marina Thursdays remain, August 20 and August 27, the latter being the final show of the season. Two more Float Find Fridays remain too, August 21 and August 28. The Port measured a real effect from last year's version of the hunt, reporting a 10 percent increase in visitors to Waterfront Place tied directly to it.

Jetty Island Days has the longest runway of the group. The seasonal foot ferry from Jetty Landing Park keeps running through September 6, so there's still time to get out to the sandbar even after the concerts and the float hunt wrap for the year.

How Locals Actually Get Down There

The one detail that trips up first-timers is parking. Event parking rates kick in on concert nights and during festival weekends, and the closest spaces fill early. The Port runs a free shuttle called the Trawley that lets you park once and move between spots along the waterfront instead of circling for a second space near whichever event you're headed to. On concert nights, Wheels to the Waterfront also runs a complimentary shuttle from Everett Station starting at 4 p.m., which is the easier option if you'd rather skip parking altogether.

When the Port broke ground on the newest Restaurant Row buildings in 2024, CEO Lisa Lefeber pointed out that just two decades before, this stretch of shoreline had been industrial land with legacy contamination and limited public access. What's there now is the product of roughly a billion dollars in public and private investment, a marina with 2,300 slips, and a restaurant lineup that added five new tenants in about seven months, from Rustic Cork Wine Bar's December 2025 opening to Marina Azul's ribbon cutting this past June. This particular stretch of August is a good time to see all of it running at once.

Steve & Meriam Knoblaugh have spent decades watching Snohomish County neighborhoods like this one change, and they still get a kick out of a good waterfront Thursday. If you're ever curious what a change like this has done to home values nearby, the team at Steve Knoblaugh can pull real numbers for your specific block. Start with a free, no-obligation look using their Get Your Instant Home Valuation tool.