"If you didn't own a boat, there wasn't anything for you to do down here." That's how Port of Everett CEO Lisa Lefeber described her own waterfront this past spring, standing at the ribbon cutting for a restaurant that didn't exist a year earlier. It's a blunt thing for a port director to admit about the property she runs, and it's also the reason August looks different in Everett than it did even two summers ago.
The change didn't happen slowly. Between December 2025 and this past June, five new restaurants and shops opened along Restaurant Row at Waterfront Place, filling out a lineup the Port had only sketched on paper the previous fall. Layer that onto a stretch of the calendar where Jetty Island Days is already running, the Schack Art Center's glass-float scavenger hunt has a few weeks left, and downtown empties its street parking for a two-day art festival, and August becomes the month where you can actually feel the marina has stopped being a place you only visit if you own a slip.
The Five Openings That Closed the Gap
Back in November 2025, the Port put a number on its own build-out: 14 cafes, breweries, and restaurants already operating on the waterfront, with five more slated to open across 2025 and 2026. All five have now opened. Here's the order they landed in:
- Rustic Cork Wine Bar opened December 2, 2025, in a building alongside established Restaurant Row names Fisherman Jack's and South Fork Baking Company.
- The Net Shed Fish Market & Kitchen held its ribbon cutting December 16, 2025, drawing 65 people for what the Port called the second new opening in Restaurant Row that year.
- Tapped Public House opened March 2, 2026, its fourth location after Camano Island, Mill Creek, and Mukilteo. The Port describes its rooftop as the largest open-air deck on the waterfront in Snohomish County, with sightlines to the marina and the Olympic Mountains.
- Menchie's at the Marina followed that same spring, bringing self-serve frozen yogurt to the same stretch of storefronts.
- Marina Azul Cocina & Cantina opened June 25, 2026, the fourth location for owner Julian Ramos, whose other restaurants include Woodinville's Cava Azul Cocina & Cantina and locations in Redmond and Kent. The menu runs from fresh tacos and sipping tequilas to a Birria Ramen Bowl and Roast Fresh Corn Ribs, served on a covered patio that looks over the marina.
That's fourteen becoming nineteen in about seven months. It's a fast enough pace that a resident who last walked Restaurant Row before the holidays would find a quarter of it unrecognizable now.
A Two-Mile Beach That's Still Running
Jetty Island Days has about a month left in its run. The seasonal ferry operates Wednesday through Sunday from Jetty Landing at 10th Street and West Marine View Drive through September 6, carrying visitors to what's billed as the longest sandy beach on Puget Sound, roughly two miles of it. A round trip costs $4 on Wednesday and Thursday, $7 Friday through Sunday, and kids two and under ride free but still need a reservation. More than 50,000 people make the trip out to the island in a typical year.
Running alongside it, and with a shorter clock, is Float Find. The Port and the Schack Art Center have been hiding 20 hand-blown glass floats on the island every week since July 10, and that program wraps August 28, about three weeks from now. If a household has been meaning to go look for one, the season for finding it is almost over.
One Weekend That Pulls Downtown Instead
The rhythm breaks on August 15 and 16, when the Schack Art Center's Fresh Paint Festival takes over Hoyt Avenue between Pacific and Hewitt in downtown Everett. It's a different kind of crowd than the beach draws: more than 100 artist booths, live glassblowing demonstrations inside the Schack itself, and a two-day attendance the center puts at over 10,000 people. Street parking downtown runs free for 90 minutes on weekdays and all day on weekends, and the EverPark garage a block over charges a dollar an hour if a booth-browsing afternoon runs long.
For one weekend, the center of gravity moves off the marina and onto Hoyt Avenue, and then the new stretch of Restaurant Row is what's waiting when the festival closes for the day. A few years ago, that same Saturday evening would have sent people back to their cars with nowhere obvious to land. Now there's a rooftop deck, a wine bar, and a patio with a marina view all within a few blocks of downtown, which is exactly the gap Lefeber was describing.
The Marina Still Has One Seat Left
Even with five new tenants seated, the Port isn't finished building out Restaurant Row. As of last fall, it was still marketing one more location, known as Parcel A7, envisioned as an up to 8,000-square-foot, two-story building with valet parking, an outdoor patio, and a rooftop deck. The listing specifically calls for a high-end steakhouse or similar experiential dining concept, and the site comes with a detail that only makes sense on a working waterfront: a boat-in option at an adjacent guest dock, plus a footbridge at Grand Avenue Park connecting the marina straight to downtown. The Port already counts more than 90 waterfront events a year happening around that corner.
That last open parcel is a reminder that what residents are seeing this August isn't a finished project. It's the middle of one, with the marina working through its own build-out at a pace most Everett residents have watched happen in real time rather than read about after the fact.
What August Actually Adds Up To
None of these four things (the restaurant build-out, Jetty Island Days, Float Find, Fresh Paint) is news on its own. What's easy to miss is how they stack in the same few weeks, and only these few weeks. Fresh Paint comes and goes in a single weekend, ten days from now. Float Find keeps going about two weeks longer than that, through August 28. Jetty Island Days outlasts both, running through September 6. The five new restaurants aren't going anywhere, but the specific version of August where a beach morning, a downtown art weekend, and a fully built-out Restaurant Row dinner are all on the table at once starts thinning out fast once Float Find and Fresh Paint are behind us.
If you've lived in Everett long enough to remember when the marina was quiet unless you had a boat parked in it, this stretch of August is a good time to see how much that's changed. If you're weighing whether that kind of change is worth planning a move around, that's exactly the conversation Julie Ochoa has with clients looking at Everett and the rest of Snohomish County. Let's Connect.
