A flurry of openings kicked off 2025 in Seattle’s restaurant world, including future Seattle Met best new restaurants Hey Bagel and My Friend Derek’s. But for the rest of the year, the news tended to be dominated more by the movements of big names than little upstarts. We said some tough goodbyes to classic restaurants and welcomed a few more that we hope can stick around long enough to become just that. We looked back at the year in restaurant openings and closings, sorted into the trends we tracked all through 2025.

Goodbyes

The End of Empires

This year saw restaurant empires fizzle out in a variety of manners, all of a sudden—as with Skillet’s stand-alone shops—and more slowly, as with the Mama restaurant group. It Mamnooncita in February, then Hanoon, Mamnoon, Mamnoon Street, and mBar over the ensuing six months. Other once-mighty restaurant empires met quieter ends as they shuttered their final locations, like Makini Howell’s Plum Bistro and Ezell Stephens’s Heaven Sent Fried Chicken.

Oldies But Goodies

Ten years is a long run for a restaurant, 20 remarkable, but when a place makes it 30 years, it seems hard to believe it could ever close. This year, we lost a number of storied places that made it beyond that three-decade mark, including my personal longtime favorite, Shanghai Garden (35), Wallingford Afghan treasure Kabul (33), and the original Burgermaster (73) near University Village. Ravenna Varsity changed locations, but was basically 62 when it closed. And the Pike Brewing name lives on, but after 35 years it no longer has its own brewery and brewpub.

Broken Chains

Chain restaurants aren’t really our beat here at Seattle Met HQ, but it was hard to ignore the massive implications behind the sudden closure of Starbucks’s two Reserve locations in town. The closure of downtown’s The Cheesecake Factory left us with nearly as many questions, but some of them were more like, “Who was even eating there, anyway?”

Flash in the Sauté Pan

If you blinked, you might have missed the 13-month run of Happy Food, whose Zhejiang cuisine indeed made customers extremely happy. Oh Sun Banchan made it three years before giving up on keeping the Pioneer Square restaurant afloat, and Bainbridge Island’s Seabird just a touch longer than that. Aurora’s Hangry Panda and chef Shota Nakajima’s Taku both existed for about the most cursed five years in the Seattle restaurant industry, opening in 2020 and closing in 2025.

One of a Kind

The specialness of some restaurants simply can’t be replaced, and we lost a few of those this year: The transportiveness of tiny, intimate Jarr Bar and the wealth of knowledge that fueled chef Greg Atkinson’s Restaurant Marché. The subtle grace and understated expertise of Stateside and the refined, mature creativity of Eden Hill—whose chef can now be found in the kitchen of a Woodinville hotel.

Hellos

Empire Builders

Renee Erickson’s Sea Creatures could have been an empire falling—permanently closing Whale Wins and some General Porpoise locations, and temporarily (?) closing Bateau and Boat Bar. But it also opened two new restaurants, with one more to come, in the new Railspur development. Is she going up? Down? As far away from unionized labor as she can get? Who can say?

Heong Soon Park continued his multiyear expansion march, adding the often-packed Capitol Hill Korean drinking food spot Gol Mok to his collection, which includes Meet Korean BBQ, Chan, Bacco, the Cheese Room, and Luna Park Cafe. Nearby, Pike Street Hospitality Group (Agua Verde, Rumba, HoneyHole) opened a quartet of spots this year: Cantina del Sol, Double O’ Burgers, Bar Tango, and Uncle Dom’s.

Once a fly-by-night street stand—or a half dozen of them—Tacos La Cuadra settled into not one but two stationary Seattle-area locations, and now appears to be expanding to Chicago. Fellow speed demon Toasted went from one bagel café opened in late 2024 to four locations by the end of 2025.

The ambitious owner of Xi’an Noodles opened a wildly large second location of her Happy Crab, Grillbird expanded to a second location and added a Salad Party next door, and the restaurateur who gets the zeitgeist better than any of us, Yasuaki Saito, opened the Wayland Mill.

Second Acts

They might not be empires yet, but we got a second location from Radiator Whiskey and Aslan, both of them all-ages, unlike their originals, while Triumph Valley skipped over Seattle and went straight from Renton to Shoreline with their expansion.

Cookies with Color

No more boring brown, this year’s best new bakeries came out with colorful treats: hibiscus-plum pink concha at Pan de la Selva, pistachio-green winter tree-shaped croissants at Pufftown Bakehouse, and Kemi Dessert Bar’s taro cream cake box. Cloudy Cafe’s Indonesian-infused baked goods weren’t as colorful as the year’s earlier openings, but they were just as good. And the baked goods—cake, particularly—have filled up the slip of a space that holds Zax Eat ‘N Three on Aurora.

Viral Sensations

Follow the lines to the year’s biggest hits and you’ll end up with bialys from Hey Bagel, sandwiches from Greenwood’s Fortuna Bottega, and ice cream with little googly eyes from Fremont’s Many Bennies. Then there was the hottest club in town—the line for new matcha spots like Phê, Taz, and Yoka Tea.

Pizza Party

AK Pizza could fall under viral sensations, given the difficulty of getting your hands on the pies, but it was just the latest in this year’s parade of new pizzas, including Sacro Bosco, My Friend Derek’s, and—see above—Renee Erickson’s Un Po Tipsy.

One of a Kind

The current economy is a bit anti-innovation, but that didn’t stop the worker-owned Pidgin Cooperative, PNW-Mexican seafood counter La Marea, farm-to-counter service phenomenon De La Soil, and, of course, the inimitable 2025 Seattle Met Restaurant of the Year, Little Beast. Each of these spots puts out fantastic food, but also looks at smart ways to stay afloat in extremely tough times for the industry, like Little Beast’s multiconcept set-up, operating as a subscription butcher shop half the week.