"The space is almost unrecognizable from when it was Hopworks," one early diner wrote after the first look inside Amaro's Table Eastside. That single line says more about what happened to the Fisher's Landing Marketplace over the past two years than any list of new store names could.
If you have lived here through it, you already sense that something shifted along Mill Plain and 164th. You may not have clocked exactly what. It was not one big renovation or a single anchor tenant. It was a sequence, and the sequence has a shape once you line it up: the loud, bulk, high-volume tenants left, and quieter, more deliberate ones took their spots. That is the real story of the Marketplace right now, and it is worth understanding if you eat, shop, or spend a Sunday morning anywhere near here.
A Brewery-Sized Echo, Gone
Start with the building at 17707 SE Mill Plain Blvd, inside the Columbia Tech Center. For years it held Hopworks Urban Brewery, known locally as HUB, a big-format taproom with high ceilings, hard floors, and a wall of beer taps. It closed its Vancouver location on August 9, 2025, as the company shifted its attention back to its Portland flagship.
Northwest Hospitality Group, the outfit behind downtown Vancouver favorite Amaro's Table as well as Gustav's and Cecelia, had already signaled interest in the space. The Columbian reported in September 2025 that the group planned to open its fourth Amaro's Table location there the following month, complete with quick lunch service and the chain's happy hour. October came and went without an opening. The doors finally opened on November 10, 2025, as ExploreTheCouve confirmed after months of a "coming soon" sign on the same storefront.
What changed inside matters as much as what moved in. The beer taps came out, replaced by a white-illuminated cocktail bar. Chandeliers went up, including one large enough to serve as the room's centerpiece. Carpet and acoustic tiles went in specifically to kill the gym-like echo that made conversation at Hopworks a shouting match. The exterior looks almost the same. The interior is a different building entirely.
"The space is almost unrecognizable from when it was Hopworks."
That is not a small design note. It is the clearest evidence available that the Marketplace's whole character is being rewritten room by room, and this room went from the loudest seat in Fisher's Landing to one of its quietest.
The Pattern That Predates the Chandeliers
Amaro's Table Eastside was not an isolated event. It was the last domino in a sequence that started closing gaps two years earlier. Lay the timeline out and the pattern is hard to miss:
- Shari's Restaurant closed its Fisher's Landing Marketplace location, and Big Lots announced its closure in the summer of 2024, as The Columbian noted at the time.
- Daiso opened on October 12, 2024, filling 9,280 square feet next to New Seasons Market, with a launch weekend giving the first 100 shoppers who spent thirty dollars a goodie bag.
- New Seasons Market completed a full renovation of its Fisher's Landing store the following month, overhauling the lighting, adjusting the layout, and adding a house-made sushi section.
- Shake Shack opened on April 16, 2025, its sixth Washington location and the first to land in Fisher's Landing, after signing its lease in the summer of 2024, as The Columbian covered that morning.
- Hopworks closed in August 2025.
- Amaro's Table Eastside opened in November 2025.
None of these moves involved the same category of business leaving and returning. A discount retailer and a diner chain left. A Japanese variety store, a renovated grocer, a burger chain built around order-at-the-counter speed, and a full-service restaurant group with a cocktail program moved in. The businesses that left ran on volume without much curation. The ones that arrived either compress the wait into something orderly, like Shake Shack's counter service or Daiso's browse-and-go layout, or slow the room down on purpose, like Amaro's Table's happy hour built for lingering.
Why the Home Team Got the Best Seat
It would have been easy for that former Hopworks space to become another national chain's Vancouver outpost. Instead it went to a company that already had two other restaurants operating a few miles away and a coffee counter tucked behind one of them.
Northwest Hospitality Group runs Cecelia and Gustav's along with Amaro's Table's four locations, which now span downtown Vancouver, Hazel Dell, Castle Rock, and Fisher's Landing. That is not a national real estate strategy picking convenient square footage off a site plan. That is a local operator who already knew the neighborhood's dinner habits well enough to bet on a fourth location a short drive from its third.
The wager appears to be paying off early. One reviewer who has eaten at both the downtown and Eastside locations wrote that the newer spot "has a more sophisticated vibe" and admitted the shorter drive means squeezing in happy hour more often than the trip downtown ever allowed. That is the kind of loyalty a chain expansion rarely earns this fast, and it is happening because the group built something residents were already inclined to trust before the chandeliers went up.
Sunday Still Starts the Same Way
Not everything about Fisher's Landing changed on a corporate timeline. Some of it just kept happening on the same Sunday mornings it always has.
The Fisher's Landing Cars and Coffee meetup runs the first and third Sunday of the month, June through September, from 9 to 11 a.m., gathering in the lot at Kiddie Academy Vancouver-Fisher's Landing on SE 167th Avenue. The routine is simple enough that it has not needed a redesign: grab a drink from Black Rock Coffee at 1801 SE 164th Ave, tucked behind Gustav's, then walk it over to look at whatever showed up that week.
It is worth noticing that this small ritual sits a few blocks from the same corridor that just absorbed a burger chain, a Japanese variety store, and a restaurant group's flagship expansion. The Marketplace can turn over storefront by storefront and the neighborhood's actual rhythm barely notices, because the rhythm was never about which sign hung over the door. It was about a coffee stop before a slow morning looking at cars, which is exactly the kind of thing a resident keeps doing regardless of what happens to the strip mall down the street.
What the Quiet Actually Tells You
None of this is a story about Fisher's Landing becoming a destination. It is a story about a specific stretch of Mill Plain and 164th trading volume for polish, one lease at a time, while the neighborhood's actual weekend habits kept running underneath it. The next time you walk into Amaro's Table Eastside and notice how easy it is to hear the person across the table, you are standing in the clearest evidence of that trade the Marketplace has to offer.
If you are curious how changes like these show up in what a Fisher's Landing home is actually worth, or you are weighing a move within the neighborhood yourself, the team at Oxford Street Partners tracks this corridor closely enough to talk specifics, not generalities. Book a consultation whenever you are ready to talk through what is happening on your particular street.
