Walk the mezzanine level of Redmond Town Center this week and you will notice a gap where Asher Goods used to be. The home goods shop closed, and in its place a build-out crew is finishing a narrow space that will soon become Te-Hand Roll Bar, an omakase hand-roll concept from the owners of Bellevue's Kuro Sushi. The opening is aiming for September, which means that if you are heading to the Downtown Redmond Art Walk on September 19, there is a decent chance the new spot two blocks away will already be seating guests.
That single tenant swap would be a footnote on its own. But it is one of several food businesses moving into a stretch of the center that a commercial broker has started calling something specific: food row. And once you know that phrase exists, the pattern of what has been disappearing from Redmond Town Center starts to look less like normal retail churn and more like a deliberate strategy.
The broker's own words
A broker with JSH Properties, Jacob Morgan, represented the landlord and tenant in the deal, and dubbed the section of the Redmond Town Center as "food row," with its diverse selection of restaurants as a driving factor behind the sale.
"When you look at Redmond Town Center's repositioning of this specific portion of the center, we have created a sort of food row destination."
That is not marketing copy written after the fact. It is a leasing broker describing an active strategy, quoted while the ink on the Te-Hand Roll Bar deal was still drying. And Morgan was not shy about what comes next. He continues to seek tenants for two spaces formerly occupied by Claire's and Sunglass Hut, though he would prefer to sign on a food or beverage tenant this time around. The mall is not filling vacancies as they come. It is actively converting non-food retail into dining, one lease at a time.
What "row" actually means here
The scale of this shift is easy to undersell if you only glance at the center's own numbers. Redmond Town Center's directory page describes itself as home to over 120 stores, 20 restaurants, three hotels, six fitness studios, healthcare, arts and entertainment. But the trade press coverage of the Te-Hand Roll Bar deal put the dining count higher, noting a long list of 25 other restaurants and beverage offerings, including Thai Ginger, Sama Cellars wine lounge, and Kizuki Ramen.
That five-restaurant gap between the center's own directory and the number a broker cited while pitching a new deal is not a typo. It is a sign of how fast the count is moving. A property manager's static directory page cannot keep pace with a leasing strategy that treats every closed storefront as an opportunity to add another kitchen.
Look at what is already anchoring that corridor and the pattern becomes visible. Alongside long-running tenants like BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse and Kizuki Ramen, the center now includes Dong Ting Chun, a Hunan-style Chinese concept, as well as Matador, In.gredients, Woodblock, and the hotel bar AKB. Sushi alone is getting crowded. Te-Hand Roll Bar will join a sushi scene on the Eastside that already includes Momiji, Sushi In Joy, and Musashi's, among several others. Morgan is not adding sushi because Redmond lacks it. He is adding it because the Eastside area has a strong affinity for sushi restaurants and food row is built to capture repeat visits, not novelty.
The size tells you the strategy
The Te-Hand Roll Bar space itself is worth a closer look, because its dimensions say something the marketing language does not. The owners of Kuro Sushi in Bellevue will open their second restaurant concept in a 1,487-square-foot space previously used by Asher Goods. That is a small footprint by mall standards, built for a fast, high-turnover counter format rather than a sit-down destination. Small spaces with quick table turns are exactly what a landlord wants when the goal is packing more distinct food experiences into the same square footage a single big-box tenant used to occupy. Food row is not simply a rebrand. It is a math problem about revenue per square foot, and small specialty concepts solve it better than department-style retail ever did.
Owner Jin Lee has said he is drawing inspiration from Hello Nori, a popular hand-rolled sushi bar in Vancouver that also operates five other locations across Canada. That is a concept built for replication, not a one-off. If it performs the way Morgan is betting it will, expect the model to show up again somewhere else on the Eastside before long.
Why residents already know this corridor, even if they didn't know why
If you live near Redmond Town Center, you have almost certainly walked through food row without naming it. It sat at the center of two of the summer's biggest gatherings. Derby Days, the city's long-running July festival, used Redmond Town Center as its overflow lot, with parking available at the Redmond Town Center, with free shuttles to Derby Days, because the City Hall campus lots fill fast. Just days later, the Redmond Arts Festival planted itself directly inside the center. VALA Eastside and Redmond Town Center presented the annual Redmond Arts Festival at Redmond Town Center, a three-day outdoor festival that ran July 31st through August 2nd, 2026. Attendees browsed more than 60 talented artists showcasing original paintings, sculpture, jewelry, ceramics, photography, mixed media, and handcrafted works while over 25 onsite cafes, restaurants and quick serve options fed the crowd. Food row was not a side note to that festival. It was the reason people could stay all day.
That festival closed its gates two days ago as of this writing, and its Spotlight Exhibition continues at VALA Art Center through September 13, giving festival-goers who missed a piece they liked a second chance to buy it. The point is not that these events happened. It is that Redmond Town Center's food strategy and its role as the city's default gathering space are the same story, reinforcing each other. A festival draws thousands of people who need to eat. A denser restaurant row keeps them there longer and gives the center a reason to host the next event too.
What to watch for next
Morgan's comments make the near-term trajectory fairly easy to read. Two more spaces, previously home to Claire's and Sunglass Hut, are actively being marketed with a stated preference for food and beverage tenants. If that preference holds, food row grows again before the year is out, and the five-restaurant gap between the center's directory page and the trade press count widens further.
For anyone who has lived near the center for a while, the practical takeaway is simple: the next time a familiar retail shop disappears from that stretch of the mall, the smart bet is that a restaurant, not another clothing store, replaces it. That is a different kind of neighborhood change than a new subdivision or a rezoned lot, but it shapes daily life just as directly. It is one more reason food row is worth watching even if you have no plans to move.
If you are weighing what shifts like this mean for property values on the Eastside, whether in Redmond or across the water to Kirkland and Bellevue, Jennifer Rogers tracks these commercial patterns as part of understanding how neighborhoods function day to day. Get in touch through her Redmond neighborhood page if you would like a local read on what a changing commercial corridor means for the block you live on.
