If you have been meaning to get back to Hanoon for that Sunday brunch with the bottomless mimosas, stop planning around it. The restaurant closed in May 2025, and the space has been sitting in transition for over a year while half the internet's dining guides still describe it like it opened last month.
That gap between what the internet says and what is actually happening on the ground at The Village at Totem Lake is the real story here. Restaurant turnover at Totem Lake moves faster than the content written about it, and if you are planning an evening based on a "best of Kirkland" list, there is a decent chance you are working from outdated information. Here is what is actually true as of this month.
The Space Everyone Assumes Is Still Hanoon
Hanoon opened at Totem Lake as the Eastside sibling of Seattle's Mamnoon and Mbar, part of the Mama Restaurant Group's expansion out of the city. It was designed to do double duty: an airy cafe serving baked goods and coffee by day, an elevated Levantine dining room by night. For a couple of years it filled that role well.
Then it closed. The 3,500-square-foot space at Totem Lake sat empty until Seattle restaurateur Ethan Stowell announced this spring that he is bringing a new concept called Lime Social into that exact spot, according to reporting picked up by KIRO 7. Lime Social is a family-friendly Mexican restaurant, launched by Ryan Donaldson, Rob Jensen, and Jim Neil, built around a higher-volume, lower-check model rather than the special-occasion pricing Hanoon carried. Stowell, recently on his own after stepping away from his namesake restaurant group, is opening it as one of two new projects this summer alongside a steakhouse called Cut Club in downtown Seattle's Hotel Max.
The practical takeaway for anyone who lives near Totem Lake: if you have skipped that corner of the shopping center because you assumed Hanoon was still your option there, it is worth checking back in. The identity of that storefront has changed twice in about fifteen months, and neither change has fully caught up in search results yet.
Why Totem Lake Turns Over Faster Than You'd Guess
This is not a one-off. Totem Lake's operator, CenterCal Properties, has described the center's leasing pace in blunt terms before. Back in 2022, general manager Ray Chavez noted the property was already at 90 percent leased with a fresh round of restaurant additions on the way, on top of seven new businesses added earlier that same year. That is a shopping center actively cycling tenants in a way that a stable, long-established retail strip does not.
The mechanism is straightforward once you see it: Totem Lake was rebuilt from the ground up as a mixed-use lifestyle center rather than a legacy mall with legacy leases, so its restaurant spaces are treated more like flexible retail than permanent fixtures. A concept that does not hit its numbers gets replaced within a season or two, not slowly phased out over years. That is good news if you like variety and bad news if you get attached to a specific menu.
What's Actually Running at The Village Right Now
Strip out the closures and the still-indexed old announcements, and here is the current lineup at Totem Lake as of this month:
- Silverlake Ramen — the California ramen chain's first Washington location
- Umigawa Sushi — from the team behind Wallingford's Kisaku
- Dué Cucina — casual, scratch-made Italian pasta
- Kati Vegan Thai
- Serious Pie — Tom Douglas's pizza outpost
- Salt & Straw — ice cream, useful before or after a Cinemark showing
- Stack 571 Burger & Whiskey Bar
- ShabuGen — tableside Korean barbecue
- Panda Express
Whole Foods and Trader Joe's anchor the grocery side, and Cinemark still runs the theater that a lot of these restaurants are built around for date-night traffic. Lime Social is the newest name to add to that list once it opens later this summer.
The Same Story Is Playing Out Downtown
Totem Lake is not the only part of Kirkland rewriting its restaurant map right now. Down at the waterfront, Tanaka Ramen & Izakaya took over the former Island Soul and Arleana's space, marking the company's first restaurant in Washington after locations in Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, and Hawaii, according to WhatNow Seattle's reporting on the opening.
And on Park Lane, near the central waterfront retail strip, Von's 1000Spirits opened its third location on June 10, 2026, in the space that used to be Feast. It is the Seattle hospitality brand's second Eastside outpost after Woodinville, and it brought its signature scratch-made sourdough pizzas, a $7.99 Scratch Martini, and an interactive bar element called the Wagering Wheel, per WhatNow's coverage of the opening.
Two different pockets of the city, two different operators, the same underlying pattern. Kirkland's restaurant real estate is moving fast enough right now that any static list, including this one in another year, needs a re-check before you build an evening around it.
This Week's Reason to Go
If you want a reason to walk through Totem Lake before summer ends, Kirkland Urban's free Sunset Markets + Concert Nights Series wraps its 2026 season on Thursday, August 20, from 4 to 8pm at Kirkland Urban Plaza. This year's four-part lineup ran Eden in May, Roemen and the Whereabouts in June, and Laurel Canyon Legacy in July, closing out with West Coast Feed for the finale, according to Kirkland Urban's own event page. Expect the open-air market of local makers alongside the live set, plus the usual family activities like the splash pad and photo booth. It is a small, no-cost way to close out the season before the neighborhood's restaurant map shifts again by fall.
Kirkland rewards the kind of attention that keeps up with it. The city's dining scene, its event calendar, and its neighborhoods all move at a pace that a five-year-old blog post cannot capture, which is exactly why it helps to have someone paying attention on the ground. If you are curious what else is changing in Kirkland's neighborhoods, from Totem Lake to Houghton to Market, the Kirkland neighborhood guide on our site is a good place to start.
And if the conversation ever turns from where to eat tonight to what your home is actually worth in this market, Jennifer Rogers is glad to help. Get Your Home Valuation whenever you're ready to talk numbers.
