"We almost named the restaurant the Pigeonhole," says Chef Fairoz Rashed, the force behind Ilmu, the tasting-menu restaurant hidden inside T55 Pâtisserie on Main Street. "That's what everybody wants to do, right? They want to stick you in a box, and you live in that box. We want to live outside the box."
He was talking about food. But he could have been describing the block his bakery sits on. A few doors down, at the corner of Bothell Way NE and Main Street, downtown's most-used public space isn't a park, a plaza, or anything the city has committed to permanently. It's a 1.10-acre parcel called Lot EFG, and it's still in the middle of a soil and groundwater cleanup the city estimates will take six to eight years. Everything happening on it right now, the mural panels, the rotating food trucks, the pop-up storefronts, is there because the ground underneath isn't ready for anything else yet.
That's not a caveat. It's the reason the corner works.
The Lot That Isn't Actually a Park
Lot EFG sat mostly empty for years while the city worked through remediation planning. In 2024, the city council decided that "mostly empty" didn't have to mean "closed," and directed staff to activate the site temporarily while cleanup continued underground. The result, branded Triangle Junction, opened to the public on October 11, 2025, with covered seating, community flowerpots, a rotating slate of small businesses through the Pop Shops on Main incubator, and a food truck pad run through a mobile food incubator program the city built in partnership with King County Health.
None of it is meant to last in its current form. The city's own materials are explicit that permanent uses for the lot will be decided later, through an upcoming Downtown Subarea Plan update, once the site reaches a "No Further Remediation" designation. Until then, Triangle Junction functions as a low-stakes proving ground: a place where a food truck can test a menu, a first-time vendor can rent retail space without signing a downtown lease, and the city can figure out what downtown Bothell actually wants before pouring concrete for good.
What's There Because It's Temporary
The art follows the same logic. Rather than commission one permanent monument, Bothell's Arts Commission set up a juried call for six mural panels around the theme "Intersections." Twenty-one artists applied. Nine finalists were paid to submit full proposals, and a three-person jury scored each one on concept, creativity, public engagement, and feasibility before inviting six to paint, among them Devika Kapoor, who blends traditional Warli folk art with contemporary Bothell imagery, and Ananda Basak, whose panel uses music and color to depict cultural intersection. One of the six panels was designed entirely by participants at Seattle Children's Alyssa Burnett Center, an adult life program for people with autism spectrum disorder, under instructor Jonathan Baker. Commissioners specifically praised that submission for how thoroughly it involved the community it represents.
The mural program isn't the only thing that's treated the lot as a rotating gallery rather than a finished space. In August, the city hosted the Blades of Change Mosaic Art Festival at Triangle Junction, where artists Myron Curry, Jamee Linton, and Sloane Miller live-painted three recycled nuclear fan blades into large-scale sculpture while singer-songwriter Zan Fiskum, a top-nine finalist on season 18 of NBC's The Voice, played live. The finished pieces stayed behind as a public installation. Nothing about that event required a finished building or a permanent budget line. It just required a corner willing to host something for one afternoon.
All six mural panels are being formally unveiled this Saturday, and the timing lines up with another event the city planned to precede it.
Saturday, September 26, downtown Bothell:
- 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. — Sustainamania, a community sustainability event, at Bothell City Hall
- 2:00 p.m. — Mural dedication at Triangle Junction, corner of Bothell Way NE and Main Street, with councilmembers and the artists sharing the thinking behind each panel
Walk from one to the other and you'll cover the two ends of what this stretch of downtown is currently trying to be: a city government explaining its long-term plans, and a plaza built entirely around the idea that plans can change.
The Food Scene Everyone Else Just Noticed
Triangle Junction isn't the only part of downtown that got built this way. In December, Seattle Met named Bothell, paired with neighboring Kenmore, its 2025 Culinary Suburb of the Year, pointing to Ilmu's tasting menu, the Brazilian-inflected teriyaki at Tá Jóia, and at least three of the region's stronger Indian kitchens as evidence the area had quietly become worth a drive from Seattle. None of those businesses got there by opening big. Ilmu's chef and his partner, Katie Fairoz, started selling small-batch ice cream out of a farmers market booth before building a brick-and-mortar bakery in Seattle's Chinatown-International District in 2019, then moving that bakery to Bothell in 2022 when they outgrew it. Ilmu itself still runs on borrowed time inside T55, one or two seatings a week, at hours as unconventional as 2:30 on a Saturday afternoon. Fairoz has said the long-term goal is to eventually move it into a dedicated restaurant and bar space. For now, the tasting menu lives inside the bakery, the same way downtown's plaza lives on top of a cleanup site.
That pattern is showing up in what's opening this fall, too. Agave Cocina & Tequilas, a family-owned Mexican restaurant that started in 2009 and already runs locations in Seattle's Queen Anne neighborhood and Issaquah Heights, is opening a third location at 18505 Bothell Way. Indus Indian Restaurant and Bar is opening at 3922 148th St, with co-owner Durga Valluri telling local press the Mill Creek area had no Indian restaurants nearby and the team wanted to serve that gap directly. A new fast-casual spot built around katsu, curry sauce, and shredded cabbage has landed as well. None of these are flagship openings from national chains betting on a market they've researched from a spreadsheet. They're small, specific bets from people who already know the neighborhood, the same way the city's small-business incubator on Lot EFG is a bet on entrepreneurs rather than a finished retail plan.
It helps that the city cleared the path for exactly this kind of growth. In 2025, the Bothell city council overhauled its land use code to promote new housing and small businesses, including legalizing neighborhood corner stores and cafes anywhere in the city. The dining wave didn't happen despite downtown's unfinished state. It happened because the city stopped requiring things to be finished before they could exist.
The Pattern, Not the Openings
None of this is really about any single restaurant or any single mural. It's that downtown Bothell's most talked-about spaces right now, the plaza, the food scene, the incubator programs, all share the same structure. They're built on small, reversible commitments rather than one big finished project. A remediation lot gets pop-up tenants instead of sitting fenced off for six years. A chef auditions his most ambitious cooking inside a bakery instead of waiting for the capital to open a full restaurant. Six artists get six removable panels instead of one commission that has to be right the first time.
If you live here, that's worth knowing before Saturday. The mural you'll see dedicated at 2 p.m. isn't a finished statement about what Triangle Junction is. It's evidence of how the corner works: try something, see if it holds up, decide what's next later. That's true of the panels, the food trucks, and, if Fairoz's plans hold, eventually Ilmu itself.
Whenever you're ready to think about a home base of your own in a neighborhood that keeps building its identity this way, Greely Group is glad to talk through what that could look like. Schedule Free Consultation.
