For most of the last few decades, the honest answer to "what's down at the Everett waterfront" was: not much, unless you had a boat. Lisa Lefeber, the Port of Everett's CEO, put it plainly when Tapped Public House opened its doors in March. "We have the largest public marina on the West Coast," she told the Herald. "If you didn't own a boat, there wasn't anything for you to do down here. So we're trying to bring stuff for people to do."
That sentence explains more about this stretch of shoreline than any brochure could. The marina has always been massive. What's new is the reason to walk down there if you're not untying a line.
The View From The Marina, Twenty Years Ago
It's easy to forget how recently this waterfront was working land, not a destination. When the Port broke ground on the two newest Restaurant Row buildings in the summer of 2024, Lefeber described the site as it looked two decades earlier: the former epicenter of Everett's mill town roots, marked by legacy contamination and limited public access. That's not a rebrand talking point. That's what a working port waterfront actually looks like before someone spends years cleaning it up.
The site now known as Waterfront Place is a 1.5-million-square-foot redevelopment on 65 acres, and the marina piece alone holds 2,300 slips and 5,000 linear feet of guest moorage, making it the largest public marina on the West Coast. None of that changed the fact that, until fairly recently, a non-boater had no real reason to drive down and park. The Port tracked more than 1.6 million site visits in 2024, a number that only makes sense once you understand the last two years have been spent deliberately building reasons for people without a slip number to show up.
Five Ribbon-Cuttings In Seven Months
The clearest evidence of that effort is the pace of restaurant openings at Fisherman's Harbor, the district the Port calls Restaurant Row. Between early December 2025 and late June 2026, five new tenants opened in a stretch of buildings that didn't exist two summers ago.
| Business | Opened |
|---|---|
| Rustic Cork Wine Bar | Dec. 2, 2025 |
| The Net Shed Fresh Fish Market & Kitchen | Dec. 16, 2025 |
| Tapped Public House | March 2, 2026 |
| Menchie's at the Marina | mid-March 2026 |
| Marina Azul Cocina & Cantina | June 25, 2026 |
Tapped's Everett location, the fourth for the family-friendly gastropub chain after Camano Island, Mill Creek, and Mukilteo, opened with the largest open-air rooftop deck on the waterfront in Snohomish County, according to the Port. Marina Azul, which followed in late June, comes from the same family behind Casa Azul in Woodinville and Agave Cocina in Issaquah. Owner Julian Ramos has been in the restaurant business since 2002, and his nephew Alejandro and son Esteban now run the Everett location day to day.
The dollars back up the pace. The Port projects $5.6 million in revenue from retail and industrial tenants, including restaurants, in 2026, compared with $4.1 million in 2025, a jump largely tied to this exact wave of openings. That's not a marketing estimate. That's the agency that collects the lease checks telling a reporter what it expects to bank this year over last.
These new arrivals join a set of businesses that were already anchoring the waterfront before the current build-out started: Fisherman Jack's, which opened in 2023, South Fork Baking Company, and the breweries and distilleries that gave the area its first reason to be called a destination, among them Scuttlebutt Brewing, Sound 2 Summit, and Bluewater Distillery.
The Two Spots Still Sitting Empty
Here's the part that generic "new restaurants to try" roundups tend to skip: the rollout isn't finished, and it hasn't gone perfectly.
For more than a year, the Port has been trying to fill a breakfast and brunch slot in the same building as Tapped and Rustic Cork. At one point, Alexa's Cafe out of Bothell was lined up to take the space. Then, according to the Port, the deal fell through. As recently as this spring, Lefeber confirmed the Port was still hunting for a breakfast tenant, which means morning coffee at the marina still meant picking from what's already there rather than a dedicated breakfast counter.
The bigger vacancy is Parcel A7, the last undeveloped restaurant site along the promenade. The Port is looking for a high-end steakhouse or similarly experiential concept willing to sign a long-term ground lease and build its own restaurant on the spot. The site can hold a two-story building with up to 8,000 square feet of interior space, valet parking, an outdoor patio, and a rooftop deck, with boat-in access at the Port's adjacent guest dock and the Grand Avenue Park footbridge connecting straight over to downtown. It's one of the better waterfront addresses in the county, and as of this spring, the Port had yet to announce a signed tenant, more than a year after the parcel was first marketed.
Neither gap is a knock on the project. If anything, it's proof of how fast the rest of it moved. Five tenants signed and opened in roughly seven months while these two harder-to-fill spots are still being courted. Walk Restaurant Row this month and you'll likely still pass at least one storefront that isn't there yet, right alongside ones that are barely a few weeks old.
What's Free While The Tenant Mix Keeps Changing
You don't need to wait for the steakhouse to have a reason to go down there this month, because the Port and its partners have built a full summer calendar that doesn't depend on any single business staying open.
Music at the Marina runs free Thursday-night concerts at Port Gardner Landing through August 27, part of a series the nonprofit Everett Music Initiative has organized since 2021 and expanded to nine shows this year. On Friday evenings from August 7 through 28, Robert De Freitas of Panessence returns for the fourth annual Puget Sound Steel Drums sessions at the Pacific Rim Plaza near Hotel Indigo, a low-key, walk-up listening spot rather than a formal concert. Float Find Shoreside sends people hunting for hidden glass floats along Waterfront Place every Friday through August 28, tied into the Schack Art Center's Fresh Paint festival happening downtown August 15 and 16.
For anyone who wants actual beach time instead of a boardwalk view, the Jetty Island ferry runs Wednesday through Sunday from July 8 through September 6, departing the dock at 522 10th Street with tickets running $4 to $7 per person for access to two miles of sandy shoreline and warm shallow water. And the Everett Farmers Market, now in its 33rd season, still sets up every Sunday from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Wetmore Avenue between Pacific and Hewitt, the same downtown blocks the footbridge connects to.
Come See It While It's Still Filling In
The mistake would be treating Restaurant Row like a finished attraction you either have or haven't checked off. It isn't one. It's a working port that spent twenty years cleaning up a mill town's legacy footprint, then spent the last several months signing five new leases while a breakfast counter and a steakhouse still sit unclaimed. The waterfront that used to have nothing for non-boaters now has a wine bar, a fish market, a gastropub with the county's biggest rooftop deck, frozen yogurt, and fresh tacos on a covered patio, plus a free concert or a boat ride most weeks through Labor Day. What it doesn't have yet is proof that it's done changing.
That's usually a good sign for a neighborhood, not a bad one. A waterfront that's still filling in its storefronts is a waterfront where property values, foot traffic, and demand are still finding their level, which is exactly the kind of detail worth knowing whether you're grabbing tacos this weekend or just keeping an eye on what your corner of Everett is worth. If it's the latter, The WC Group tracks these shifts across Snohomish County as part of the job, and we're always happy to talk through what a changing waterfront means for your own address.
