If you live in Bellevue and your mental map of Wilburton is still the old one, a Whole Foods run and a stretch of car dealerships along 116th, this is the summer to redraw it. The block that used to sell cars is about to serve dinner, and the trail that will one day float 100 feet above it is already under construction.
The interesting part is not any single opening. It is that a food hall, a rebuilt wooden trestle, a light rail station, and a pedestrian bridge are all landing on the same seven acres, more or less on the same schedule. For the first time, a Bellevue resident can walk out onto 116th Avenue NE this summer and see the shape of what planners have been drawing for a decade.
The Address That Reframes The Map
The address to hold in your head is 600 116th Avenue NE. That is where Willie Burton's, a new food-and-beverage destination, will debut this summer on a former car dealership site, developed by Marcus Lalario of Sugar Shack Unlimited in partnership with KG Investment Properties and Harrison Street Asset Management. The food hall itself is the visible piece. Underneath it, the site is doing a different kind of work.
The first phase of the development plan calls for roughly 600 mid-rise and high-rise apartments and townhomes and about 20,000 square feet of retail and dining along the Eastrail corridor, and the City of Bellevue completed a 300-acre rezone of Wilburton last summer, with the updated Comprehensive Plan showing Wilburton accounting for 12% of the city's housing growth and 16% of job growth through 2044. Read that as a resident, not an analyst: the number of neighbors within a five-minute walk of your favorite Wilburton coffee stop is going to keep climbing for the next two decades, and the businesses opening this summer are the ones betting on being there first.
Willie Burton's marks "Phase Zero" of a plan to transform a seven-acre site near Eastrail, the Wilburton light rail station, and Bellevue's Grand Connection Crossing into a high-density, mixed-use development.
Phase Zero is the useful language. What opens this summer is the sample platter.
What Willie Burton's Actually Is
Strip out the press-release adjectives and here is the shape of it. The 5,000-square-foot food hall at 600 116th Avenue NE is on track to open by midsummer, led by Marcus Lalario, founder of Sugar Shack Unlimited and the burger chain Lil Woody's, with the Bellevue outpost marking his sixth Lil Woody's and the brand's first Eastside location; the venue includes three food counters and a full-service bar called The Bar @ Willie Burton's, and outside, a reimagined shipping container bar anchors a 100-seat patio, joined by James Beard Award winner Brady Ishiwata Williams, owner of Tomo in White Center and former executive chef at Canlis.
The Williams pairing is the part worth reading twice. Two casual counter concepts from the chef of Tomo, sharing a roofline with a burger-and-shake counter and a container bar, is not a formula that shows up on the Eastside often. It'll have two casual counter spots from the chef-owner of Tomo, a new outpost of Lil' Woody's, a 100-seat patio, and a bar transformed from a large shipping container, all within a short walk from the Wilburton light rail station.
For the practical version, here is what you can expect to find on site once the doors open:
- Lil Woody's, the burger-and-shake counter making its Eastside debut
- The Bar @ Willie Burton's, with beers and batch cocktails on tap
- Two casual concepts from Brady Ishiwata Williams, still to be named
- A 100-seat patio anchored by a shipping-container bar, with a beer garden and a children's play area planned near the Eastrail edge
Additional planned features include a beer garden and a children's play area near the Eastrail corridor. If you have been quietly frustrated that Bellevue's dinner-out options either require a downtown parking garage or a drive to Old Bellevue, this is the first Wilburton block designed around not needing one.
The Trestle You Can See From The Patio
The other reason to pay attention to this particular address is what runs alongside it. Look east from Willie Burton's and you are looking at Eastrail, the corridor that is quietly becoming the Eastside's spine for anything not done in a car.
The centerpiece is a century-old wooden bridge most Bellevue residents have driven under a hundred times without registering. King County is transforming the 1,000-foot-long Wilburton Trestle, the longest wooden trestle in the Pacific Northwest, into a trail bridge for the 42-mile Eastrail, with crews installing a 20-foot-wide trail surface, railing, and three expansive viewing platforms atop the 122-year-old structure; once complete, the 100-foot-tall trestle is expected to be among the most popular segments of Eastrail, offering scenic views of the Bellevue skyline with connections to Sound Transit's Wilburton Station.
That opening is not this summer. The transformation of the century-old Wilburton Trestle into an elevated trail in Bellevue is expected to open in mid-2027, modernizing the historic structure while preserving its character. What is walkable now are the segments on either end. In north Bellevue, 2.3 miles of the Eastrail is open from NE 4th Street to the Kirkland city limit as an interim gravel trail, and in south Bellevue, 2.4 miles of paved trail is open from Coal Creek Parkway to Ripley Lane in Renton; in between, a three-year project started in May 2024 to convert the historic Wilburton Trestle to trail use. This summer you can walk the northern segment straight out of Wilburton and be in Kirkland without touching a car. Next summer you will be able to keep going, up over the trestle, past Willie Burton's patio, and south toward Mercer Slough.
The Bridge That Isn't Built Yet
The other piece worth tracking is the one you cannot walk yet, because the reason it exists is exactly the walk you cannot currently make. If you have ever tried to get from downtown Bellevue to Wilburton on foot, you know the problem. Eight lanes of I-405 sit between the two, and the overpasses were engineered for cars.
That is what the Grand Connection Crossing is meant to fix. The City of Bellevue has received approval from all five required local taxing authorities to move forward with a key funding strategy for the Grand Connection Crossing, a planned pedestrian and bicycle bridge over I-405 that would connect Downtown Bellevue with Wilburton; participation agreements from the King County Library System, the Port of Seattle, Sound Transit, King County, and the King County Flood Control District now let the city move ahead with tax increment financing, with the bridge estimated to cost between $175 million and $230 million. If the full financing package can be assembled, Bellevue is hoping to fully complete the new bridge by 2030.
Four years out is not tomorrow. What matters for a resident thinking about the neighborhood right now is that zoning changes intended to unleash development in Wilburton more broadly are expected to add thousands of new units of housing over the coming decades, letting buildings grow as tall between I-405 and Eastrail as they are downtown, and the Grand Connection Crossing is Bellevue's way of making that Wilburton development appealing to builders looking to capitalize on multimodal amenities. Translation: the reason a food hall is landing on 116th right now is that a much larger set of decisions has already been made about what this side of the freeway is going to become.
A Weekend That Only Works Starting This Summer
Here is a Saturday plan that would not have been possible in Wilburton a year ago, and that gets better every quarter as the pieces land:
- Take the 2 Line to the Wilburton Station. The station and the food hall site sit on the same block; the Wilburton Station for Sound Transit's 2 Line is just north of the Willie Burton's site.
- Coffee or a late breakfast at one of the counters at Willie Burton's, then a walk out to the 100-seat patio to see how the container bar reads at midday.
- From the patio, head north onto the open Eastrail segment. You can go as far as the Kirkland line without crossing a single arterial.
- Loop back for a beer at The Bar @ Willie Burton's and a Lil Woody's burger, ideally on the patio while the light shifts west over downtown.
- If you have out-of-town guests, this is the walk to give them. It is the one that explains what Bellevue is trying to become in a single afternoon.
The reason to run this loop this summer, and not wait, is that the raw version of a neighborhood is often the interesting one. Once the trestle opens in 2027 and the Grand Connection lands in 2030, Wilburton will be full. The summer of 2026 is the window when a resident can watch the block still deciding what it wants to be.
The Resident's Read
For anyone who already lives in Bellevue, the Wilburton story this summer is not about a new restaurant. It is about a single address doing the work of a neighborhood pitch. A food hall built by a Seattle burger operator and a James Beard chef. A wooden trestle from 1904 becoming an elevated trail. A pedestrian bridge that has cleared its hardest funding hurdle. And underneath all of it, a rezone that has already changed the rules for the next 20 years of construction on this side of I-405.
The best time to know a neighborhood is the summer it starts to change. That is now, and Wilburton is the one to walk.
If you own a Bellevue home and are curious how a shift like Wilburton's might read against the block you already live on, or how Eastside waterfront values move when a nearby district densifies, Margo Allan is happy to talk it through. Contact Us.
