Not quite two months after it opened its doors, Allister received the highest endorsement a Mercer Island restaurant can achieve: Hometown celeb Joel McHale posted on Instagram that it was great, and people should “Go here and eat.”

Sorry, Joel, you’re too late. Everyone already was already going there and eating. They started crowding into the soft—in both feel and shade—banquettes from day one. Gossiping under the burnt clay orange archway while they waited for their marble table; basking in the gentle light of the Art Deco chandeliers and sipping cocktails with custom-cut ice cubes at the horseshoe-shaped bar.

The Mercer Island restaurant scene has long rested safely on a dependable captive audience, leading to a lot of ordinary fine restaurants and the occasional shining star—that usually faded quickly when it realized it wasn’t going to draw big crowds from Bellevue and Seattle. Now, a trio of new businesses, led by the ambitious bistro from first-time restaurateur Sara Seumae McAllister, are bucking that tradition.

“The whole point of Mercer Island is that you see your friends and your family and run into people all the time,” McAllister says. She wanted to build a better place to do that. A place to grab cocktails with friends, to get a bite to eat late at night, to have a nice lunch meeting, a family dinner that appeals across generations.

The upholstered seating and steak frites exist at the precise intersection of everyday comfort and quiet luxury. Everything feels gentle and easy and a smidge special. The custom kids cups hold chocolate milk, mixed in-house from syrup. A trio of sharp green leaves stick up attractively from the orange Jungle Bird cocktail. The bathrooms smell of gardenias. Allister is a place you want to spend time.

A miso Caesar salad incorporates the added umami just subtly enough to intrigue, the bonito flakes dancing on top embracing the salad’s inherent fishiness in a delightful new way. The salad exemplifies what McAllister described to me as her challenge: finding something familiar, that feels safe to order, and making it exciting, turning it into something that surprises and electrifies.

The steaks come out cooked to the requested temperature, the fries are hot and crisp. The food is good. It aspires to be great—and it could be: McAllister’s tenacious entrepreneurial instinct keeps her focused on improvement. But it also doesn’t need to be: The vibes and setting at Allister are rich enough that the food simply needs to fly under the radar, staying simple enough to never, ever, interfere or interrupt the flow.

Mercer Island’s restaurant scene is like a newly arrived high schooler, wide-eyed and curious, unsure of itself as it tries on trendy new outfits and hangs out with the cool kids; still looking over its shoulder at the comfortable trappings of childhood. Other than Vivienne’s Bistro, which opened in 2022 and drew guests with a modern interpretation of Cantonese cuisine entirely unlike anything else in the area, restaurants played it safe. Kitchens closed early, a TV tuned to sports passed for ambience, and the cocktails were, to be blunt, mostly terrible. “The most exciting thing we had the last few years before was like, ‘Oh my god, we're getting a Pagliacci,’” says McAllister.

The island’s precarious geography does it no favors. On OpenTable, the restaurant reservation system, McAllister learned that her restaurant shows up as a suggestion for neither Bellevue restaurants, nor Seattle. When she called her rep, he told her she had to pick one or the other. Despite the proximity to Seattle and easy access from the freeway making it easier and faster to get to from much of the city than restaurant hotspots like Ballard and Capitol Hill, Mercer Island has always been spiritually an Eastside town, so she went with Bellevue. But she has bigger aspirations, “For people to think of Mercer Island and equate it with, like, a fun place to go get food or to get a drink.”

A few blocks away, the Crawlspace Gastropub does its part to contribute to the cause. It opened shortly after Allister, with a menu of the Hawaiian cuisine co-owner Jason Farrish grew up on, Korean-inspired flavors, and also tacos. It feels less planned out or polished than either Allister or the swanky polished cocktail bar Asa Gathering. Crawlspace is the only one of the three unable to overcome the classic Mercer Island restaurant problem of feeling like it’s in a strip mall. (To be fair, it is.) But bulgogi poutine, a recent special, and a lilikoi mai tai bring enough personality to the place to make up for the lack of charismatic décor.

Where Allister’s bright and friendly space bubbles with life, Asa Gathering is dimly lit and intimate, teetering on the edge of over-the-top in a wonderfully un–Pacific Northwest way. When I first entered, a server in a floral-patterned jacket uniform informed me of an hour-long wait on a rainy Thursday night. “No problem,” I said, and, in a moment thrilling for anyone waiting for Mercer Island’s moment to shine, “I’ll wait at the bar across the street.”

At the horseshoe-shaped bar at Allister, my friend and I snacked on pommes dauphines, a sophisticated name for bite-size potato puffballs and another example of Allister nailing the mood with its food: They sound fancy, they look fancy, they taste like french fries.

When we finished up, we headed back to Asa, where the fuchsia neon sign in the restroom would have liked those pommes dauphines, too: “Fancy is my second favorite f word,” it declared. Our tiny table was ready for us, set with a complimentary jar of SkinnyPop. Glass chandeliers illuminate a wall of library-style shelves with liquor bottles and books arranged by color. The menu offers margaritas that use a citrus kosho (a Japanese fermented condiment) and an espresso martini made with Boon Boona coffee—highlighting the shared Ethiopian heritage of Boon Boona’s founder and Asa co-owner Mizan Howard.

Women on the white couches wore high heels and strappy dresses, outfits that fit in better on a Real Housewives episode than at a winter afternoon soccer game. My friend, an islander and easily as stylish as anyone there, wondered aloud if these people lived there, too, a hint of hope in her voice as she marveled at the crowd.

Allister was designed for islanders to bump into friends over late-night steak frites. Asa’s slip of a space is made for aspirational moments. Allister assures diners they are cool enough for pommes dauphine, Asa reminds them there are even higher levels to which to aspire. Crawlspace, with its eclectic but good food and laid-back attitude (plus the occasional karaoke night), doesn’t even care about coolness. Together, the trio show off Mercer Island’s first tentative steps into life as mid-lake dining and drinking destination.