The spread at Ilmu, one of many reasons to drive to Bothell.
In the course of a food writer’s year, trends emerge and patterns become visible. In 2025, I ate and drank my way through lists of the Seattle area’s best new restaurants, best old restaurants, sweetest scoops, and flakiest pastries, plus so much more. Over and over, I found my GPS guiding me north along Bothell Way as it hugs the northwest shore of Lake Washington. I followed the Burke-Gilman as if it were the yellow brick road, but instead of glittering green buildings of Oz it led to lobster in parsnip pannacotta, an heirloom tomato tartine with roasted garlic mayo, and perhaps the second-best meal I ate last year, which I unfortunately cannot tell you about because it was not licensed and I do not want the people who made it to get in trouble because they are in search of a location and have plans to formalize their operation.
The best meal I ate last year also came in Bothell. T55 Pâtisserie, whose take on pain au chocolat made our pastry list, briefly opened a restaurant called Ilmu serving weekend lunch. The seafood-heavy multicourse tasting menu included Sea Inlet oysters with hibiscus granita and oxalis, a crisp rosette filled with spicy fish paste, and basil shiso sorbet on a sablé Breton inside a sake foam with yuzu meringue. Shortly after my June meal, the restaurant went on hiatus. Just this month, it returned—and, thus, I’ll be returning to Bothell.
Had it stayed open, it surely would have made my list of best new restaurants, joining another Bothell spot, De La Soil. OK, yes, that’s in Kenmore, but we will not get pedantic here, just like we accept that people from Puyallup need to say they’re from Seattle while anywhere outside Western Washington. More important, it serves excellent food—much of it grown just over the border on the other side of Bothell, at Woodinville’s Tuk Muk Farms.
The main reason the suburbs in general are attracting restaurant talent from Seattle is obvious: cost. The Westerfields had all but given up on their own restaurant until the opportunity that became De La Soil arose. Katie Pohl, cofounder of T55, said they had looked at every building in the Chinatown-International District before settling in Bothell. The older buildings all left any necessary upgrades to tenants, and they simply didn’t have the budget to get those spaces up to code.
De La Soil found community in Kenmore.
But Bothell, specifically, has its own draw, balanced at the top of the lake, straddling the county line, bridging between suburbs that lean more and less rural. Pohl said they hadn’t realized how many Eastside customers they had until they were mobbed from both sides of the lake when they opened in late 2022. For Cody Westerfield of De La Soil, it was the setting, right on the Burke-Gilman Trail and 10 minutes from the farm; for his wife, Andrea, the community. “They’ve been open arms, they’ve been more than supportive. I feel like they’ve just been rooting for us from the beginning,” she says.
It's a restaurant—and suburb—worth rooting for. The Burke-Gilman and pedestrianized downtown made my many trips to Bothell rather pleasant, with the chance for a stroll before or after a meal. The new restaurants here joined an already thriving scene that includes the inimitable Brazilian-tinged teriyaki spot Tá Jóia and (at least) three of the region’s top Indian restaurants.
This summer, not long after my meal at Ilmu, the Bothell city council voted to overhaul its land use code. The reforms are intended to promote new housing and small businesses, and include the legalization of neighborhood corner stores and cafes anywhere in the city. Which means that I might be spending much of 2026 driving to Bothell to check out new eateries, too, and I have no complaints about that.