Crêpe Café Sisters started as a folding table at the Liberty Lake Farmers Market in 2000. It grew into one of the anchor tenants of Kendall Yards, the Spokane neighborhood that became shorthand for what a walkable, food-first district could look like on this side of the state line. Now, a little over two decades later, the business is opening a second location back where it began, in the space along Liberty Lake's Harvard Road corridor that used to belong to TT's Brewery & Barbecue.
That is not a coincidence, and it is not an isolated story. If you have walked through the NoLL town center in the last year and noticed the same names you associate with Spokane's best food scene showing up on your side of the border, you have spotted the actual pattern. NoLL is not just filling vacant storefronts. It is becoming the place where Spokane's most established local food businesses open their second locations, and that says more about how this neighborhood is being built than any list of new restaurants could on its own.
A town center designed to poach, not compete
NoLL, short for North Liberty Lake, sits inside the 900-acre River District development that Liberty Lake-based Greenstone Corp has been building along the Spokane River and the Centennial Trail. Jim Frank, Greenstone's founder, has been explicit for years about what he wants the 40-acre town center to become and, just as importantly, what he does not want it to become.
"The center will focus on locally owned businesses, restaurants, food artisans, and service providers, and it will have a similar environment to Greenstone's Kendall Yards neighborhood in Spokane's West Central area," Frank said, adding that part of NoLL would lean into food artisans including a brewery, restaurants, and a bakery, something he said Kendall Yards did not have at the time.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. Frank was not describing a copy of Kendall Yards. He was describing a district built to fill the gap next to it, stocked with businesses that already have a following on the Spokane side of the line and are looking for a second home rather than a first shot.
The roster backs him up. In the past two years, NoLL has brought in:
- Tamale Box, which opened its second location and a production facility in the Artisan District after five seasons of building a following at farmers markets
- Emrys Beer & Mead Works, a Spokane Valley brewery and meadery that opened its NoLL taproom in a 4,600-square-foot building
- Crêpe Café Sisters, taking over the retail space TT's Brewery & Barbecue vacated
- The Grain Shed, the Spokane bakery known for its Kendall Yards storefront, which brought a second location to NoLL after building its name on the other side of the river
None of these are chains. None of them needed Liberty Lake to survive. They chose it, and they chose it after already proving themselves somewhere else first.
The timing was not an accident either
Frank has also been candid about why this wave of retail is happening now rather than five years ago. NoLL sat mostly quiet through its early phases while the surrounding neighborhood filled in with rooftops. By the fall of 2025, Greenstone confirmed that the River District had crossed 1,000 completed residential units, a mix of single-family homes, cottage-style properties, townhomes, and apartments woven through the district rather than segregated into a single subdivision.
Frank has said plainly that the population needed to reach a certain threshold before a real business district made sense to build. That is a useful thing to know if you live here and have wondered why the town center felt half-finished for so long and then suddenly did not. The retail did not lead the neighborhood. The neighborhood earned the retail.
The next phase was already taking shape as of last winter, when Greenstone confirmed two more mixed-use buildings underway at the corner of Harvard Road and Indiana Avenue, set to bring in more apartments, a locally owned bookstore called Pages and Paragraphs, and a real estate office. A few hundred feet away, crews had broken ground on a small cinema, shown in renderings under the working name New River Theater, with four intimate auditoriums seating 45 people each in reclined seating. No opening date had been confirmed for the theater at the time, but the ambition was specific: a small-format cinema built to also host screenings for local filmmakers, something Frank called unusual to attempt in an era when most theater chains are pulling back rather than expanding.
The infrastructure that makes the food scene walkable
None of this works if the only way to reach it is by car, and Greenstone has treated the connective tissue as seriously as the tenants. A couple of summers ago, crews widened the parking lot at the Harvard Road Trailhead, added a children's play area, and cut a new path so that anyone walking the Centennial Trail could head straight into the Artisan District without doubling back the way they used to. Parking throughout NoLL sits behind the buildings rather than in front of them, a deliberate choice meant to keep storefronts facing the street the way they do in Kendall Yards.
The district's least conventional amenity is the River District Farm, a community orchard at 20291 E. Indiana, across from Orchard Park. Forty volunteers manage 60 fruit trees, mostly apples, pears, and plums, alongside a greenhouse, a flower garden, and vegetable beds. The farm store opens two days a week in summer, and in 2024 alone, volunteers donated 3,000 pounds of produce to area food banks through what they call the Edible Tree Project. It is a small detail, but it tells you something about what kind of neighborhood this is trying to be. Frank has called it one of the best community amenities Greenstone has ever built into a project, and it gets daily use in a way that a lot of planned-community perks never do.
What this actually changes on a Tuesday night
If you already live in Liberty Lake, the practical upshot is simple. A drive into Kendall Yards for Grain Shed sourdough or a Crêpe Café Sisters dinner used to be the price of admission for that particular flavor of Spokane food culture. That price is dropping. You can walk the Centennial Trail from Orchard Park, cut into the Artisan District through the new trailhead connector, and end up at a table that serves the same recipes, run by the same people, without crossing the state line.
That is worth paying attention to even if you have no plans to move anywhere. Neighborhoods that can pull established, proven businesses away from a neighborhood as well regarded as Kendall Yards are doing something right with density, walkability, and the basic economics of foot traffic. It also means the next year or two of NoLL's build-out is worth watching. If the cinema opens on schedule and Pages and Paragraphs fills its space, this stretch of Harvard Road will look less like an emerging project and more like a finished one.
For now, the honest version of the story is that Liberty Lake did not build a generic town center and hope people showed up. It built one, waited for enough neighbors to move in to support it, and then went and got the specific businesses that had already earned Spokane's trust. That is a different kind of growth than most fast-expanding suburbs manage, and it is worth knowing before the next wave of tenants makes it old news.
If the changes happening in your own neighborhood have you thinking about what your home is worth in today's market, or what your next move in North Idaho or the Spokane area might look like, Robert Jacobs II & Associates offers a free home valuation and knows this stretch of the map block by block. You can also browse more on what makes Liberty Lake worth watching, whether you are settled here for good or just starting to ask questions.
