Walk down Commercial Avenue past the Brown Lantern this month and you will smell curry leaf and mustard seed tempering before you smell hops. That is new. What is not new is the building itself, or even the idea of someone besides the Brown Lantern cooking inside it. The building has hosted food service beyond the Brown Lantern for close to two years, as part of downtown Anacortes's dining scene.
Here is the part that took some digging: the two restaurants Anacortes has been buzzing about most this year did not open in new construction. They opened inside buildings that already had someone else's grease trap, someone else's walk-in, someone else's ghosts. Downtown Anacortes isn't growing a new restaurant scene so much as it's recycling three or four addresses on Commercial Avenue into better versions of themselves, and the mechanics of how that happens say more about the town than any "best new restaurants" list ever could.
One Block, Three Kitchens
Start with the numbers on the doors. As GoSkagit reported, chef Shyni Skowronski opened Curry Leaf Restaurant at 408 Commercial Avenue, next to the Brown Lantern, in a space just under 900 square feet, serving southern Indian dishes like malabar parotta with beef curry. Six doors down at 414 Commercial, Nick and Kami LaLonde run Tide & Taste, an ingredient-focused fine dining room built around oysters, champagne, and a menu Kami describes as pulling from what she and Nick actually like to eat. And at 418 Commercial, A'Town Bistro keeps its familiar lunch, social hour, and dinner service running Tuesday through Saturday, the steady middle child between two turnovers.
Three kitchens, one block, and only one of them was there before 2025. That pattern shows how existing downtown storefronts can be put to new restaurant uses.
414 Commercial: The Nest Gives Way to Tide & Taste
Before Tide & Taste, 414 Commercial was The Nest, an American-style cafe that closed its doors. Nick LaLonde was already known around Skagit County for his artisan bakery, Good Bagels, but Tide & Taste was a different bet entirely: fine dining in a building that had just spent years serving cafe fare. The restaurant opened January 9, 2025, and the couple built the concept around a simple premise, that the food should just be an honest reflection of what they'd want to sit down and order themselves.
That is a real risk. Taking over a space with an established identity, in this case a casual daytime cafe, and asking the same four walls to hold a wine list and a raw bar instead, is a bet that the address matters less than the kitchen behind it. More than a year and a half later, Tide & Taste is still open, still serving the same hours, and still the address people mean when they say they're going out for a nicer dinner downtown.
Food Service Alongside the Brown Lantern
The more interesting story is next door. The Brown Lantern is a Commercial Avenue institution, the kind of tavern that could easily add a dinner menu of its own if it wanted one. Instead, owners Casey Rogers and Jamie Kauffman spent months looking for someone else to run dinner service out of the 900-square-foot space attached to their building. In its report on Curry Leaf's opening, GoSkagit quoted Kauffman: "We know how hard it can be for new restaurants to get started." The GoSkagit report also quoted Kauffman about handing the space to Skowronski: "So we're excited to help somebody else out with this space."
The building now brings together the Brown Lantern's bar service and food from independent operators at different times of day. And Curry Leaf isn't even the first tenant in that arrangement. MaryAnn Tostenson has been serving breakfast out of the same building daily since October 2024, meaning the Brown Lantern's building has effectively split into three shifts under three different operators: breakfast and dinner run by independent operators, with the tavern itself running the bar.
Skowronski built her following the slow way before she had a storefront at all, cooking at pop-up events including a Holiday Market at the Depot Arts and Community Center in November 2025. By the time she opened on a Saturday in February, the following was already there. In the GoSkagit report, Skowronski said, "We were very busy right away." She added, "The space is very tight, but people are happy to sit and enjoy the fresh food we make right in front of them."
How Downtown Restaurant Spaces Find New Uses
Commercial Avenue's restaurant changes show how existing ground-floor spaces can take on new uses. A similar pattern appears in downtown event venues.
Anacortes's marquee food-and-drink event, Bier Near the Pier, used to be held at the Port of Anacortes Transit Shed on the actual waterfront pier. It moved to the Depot Arts Center a few years back because the Port needed that space back for its own operations. The festival is expected to remain at the Depot Arts Center until roughly 2028, when the Port plans to open its new events center.
The Anacortes Chamber of Commerce and the Downtown Anacortes Alliance organize the winter Anacortes Cuisine Scene program, which runs restaurant weeks each January through March to encourage locals to eat out during what the Chamber calls the quieter season. Participating restaurants build special menus around monthly themes.
What's Actually on the Calendar This Fall
If you're deciding where to be downtown this month, the dates are set. Bier Near the Pier returns to the Depot Arts Center on Saturday, October 3, from 2 to 7 p.m., with a beer and cider ticket at $55 for eight tastings or a zero proof option at $30 for five. Halloween brings its own downtown ritual after that, with trick-or-treating along Commercial Avenue from 4 to 6 p.m. and more than a thousand kids typically showing up to work the storefronts, Curry Leaf and Tide & Taste included.
Between now and the Cuisine Scene restaurant weeks the Chamber runs each January through March, the block at 408 through 418 Commercial offers a snapshot of downtown dining. Three kitchens, three different operators, and an open question about how the next storefront might be used.
That question is worth watching as a measure of how downtown spaces adapt to local dining needs. A four-block main street offers a useful view of what people choose to visit and how existing buildings can support new uses.
If you're weighing which Anacortes block puts you closest to all of it, or just want a local read on how downtown's restaurant turnover reflects the wider market, Rob Skelton knows this stretch of Commercial Avenue as well as anyone selling real estate on Fidalgo Island. Reach out anytime for a free consultation, no pressure, just a straight answer about what's happening in the neighborhood you already call home.
