The Marina Down The Hill From Boulevard Bluffs Just Got Six New Restaurants

"If you didn't own a boat, there wasn't anything for you to do down here."

That's Port of Everett CEO Lisa Lefeber, describing her own waterfront as recently as last year. It's an odd thing for the person running the largest public marina on the West Coast to admit, but it explains something Boulevard Bluffs residents have quietly understood for years: the neighborhood's defining feature has always been what it doesn't have. No storefronts. No busy retail corridor. Everett's own planning documents describe the area as lacking a nearby commercial center, which is part of why it reads as a ridge-top view enclave rather than a walkable town center.

That's still true of Boulevard Bluffs itself. What's changed is what sits below it.

Over the past nine months, the Port of Everett has opened six new restaurants along Fisherman's Harbor, the stretch of Waterfront Place the Port has branded "Restaurant Row." If your errands, dinners, and weekend plans have always meant driving somewhere else, that somewhere else just got a lot more interesting, and a lot closer.

Six Ribbon Cuttings In Nine Months

The pace is the story here, not any single opening. Rustic Cork Wine Bar started it on December 2, 2025, with nearly 75 people at the ribbon cutting. Two weeks later, The Net Shed Fish Market & Kitchen opened next door, drawing 65 people to its own grand opening on December 16. Then came a longer pause before the spring wave: Tapped Public House opened March 2, 2026, with a ribbon cutting that pulled a crowd of more than 100, and Menchie's at the Marina followed within the same stretch of March. Marina Azul Cocina & Cantina closed out the run on June 25, with 50 people on hand to celebrate.

Tapped is worth pausing on, because it isn't a first-time operator testing a concept. It's the company's fourth location, joining outposts in Camano Island, Mill Creek, and Mukilteo, which means the Way Group Hospitality already had three working restaurants nearby before deciding a fourth belonged at the Port. Marina Azul is making the same kind of bet from the other direction, expanding from Cava Azul Cocina & Cantina in Woodinville and Agave Cocina & Cantina in Redmond and Kent Station. Owner Julian Ramos has run restaurants since 2002. His son Esteban and nephew Alejandro are managing the Everett location, which tells you this isn't a satellite outpost someone is testing from a distance.

That kind of confidence shows up in the Port's own numbers. Port officials project $5.6 million in 2026 revenue from Waterfront Place's retail and industrial tenants, a category that includes the new restaurants, up from $4.1 million in 2025. That's not a modest bump. It's the difference between a district that's filling in and one that's already paying for itself.

The One Spot That Didn't Work Out

Not every plan at Restaurant Row has landed cleanly, and that's worth knowing if you're the kind of resident who checks back on a project every few months. A café called Alexa's originally signed a lease for the last remaining space in the building that now houses Rustic Cork, Tapped, and Menchie's. It backed out before opening. The Port is still hunting for a breakfast and brunch tenant to fill that spot, which means the morning food scene down the hill from Boulevard Bluffs remains, for now, an open question.

The bigger vacancy is more interesting. Parcel A7, the last undeveloped restaurant site along the marina promenade, is still up for grabs, and the Port isn't looking for just anything. Officials have said they want a high-end steakhouse or similarly experiential concept, something that can fill a two-story building with up to 8,000 square feet, valet parking, an outdoor patio, and a rooftop deck. The site sits close enough to the water that patrons could theoretically boat in and tie up at the Port's adjacent guest dock, and the Grand Avenue Park footbridge connects it straight to downtown Everett. It's surrounded by two hotels and 266 waterfront apartments, with more than 300 additional units breaking ground this year.

In other words, the six restaurants that opened this year aren't the finished picture. They're the fast half of a slower plan, and the flagship piece is still being negotiated.

What This Means For The Rest Of Your Year

If you've lived in Boulevard Bluffs long enough to remember when the waterfront was mostly boat storage and container cranes, the calendar down there has changed too. The Port now runs close to 100 waterfront events a year, including weekly summer concerts and two anchor traditions worth putting on your own calendar now.

Haunted Harbor runs the Friday before Halloween, which lands on October 30 this year. Holiday on the Bay follows the first weekend of December, which should put it around December 5 and 6 if the Port keeps its usual pattern. Neither event requires you to eat at any of the six new restaurants to enjoy it, but given how close Restaurant Row sits to the festivities, it would take some effort not to.

There's a simple way to read all of this. For years, living in Boulevard Bluffs meant accepting a trade: quiet, tree-lined streets and unbroken water views in exchange for driving somewhere else whenever you wanted a meal out. That trade hasn't disappeared. The streets are still quiet. The neighborhood is still, by design, not built around storefronts. What's changed is how far "somewhere else" actually is, and how much more there now is when you get there.

Lefeber's line about boat owners was an honest description of what the waterfront used to be. Six restaurants and a still-open steakhouse search later, it's becoming a fair description of what it isn't anymore.

If the changing waterfront has you thinking about what it means for property values in Boulevard Bluffs, Adam Cobb & Team tracks these shifts closely. Request your complimentary home valuation and get a straight answer on what your home is worth in today's market.