For years the Garland District ran on a two-stop rhythm. Dinner at Ferguson's or a patty melt at Mary Lou's Milk Bottle, then a $5 movie at the Garland Theater. If you lived within walking distance in North Spokane, you had the routine memorized by the third summer.
The 2026 openings quietly rewrote it. The evening's center of gravity moved a block west, then spilled south onto North Monroe, and the practical effect is that a resident can now build a real Friday night, dinner through nightcap, without ever getting back in the car.
What actually changed on Garland Avenue
The headline change is Temple Tavern, a casual Italian restaurant that opened Feb. 13 at 706 W. Garland in the historic Masonic Temple building constructed in 1922. Owner Taylor Rainwater is filling a gap that longtime residents have been complaining about for years. The Garland District has limited pizza and Italian food options, which is a polite way of saying that if you wanted a red-sauce dinner within walking distance of the theater, you were driving.
A block west, at 828 W. Garland, tenant improvements are underway on Red Rose Social, a craft cocktail bar from Aaron Fiorini, the operator behind Market Street Pizza. The bar is replacing the previous tenant, the Garland Drinkery, which closed in 2025. Red Rose Social will serve craft cocktails, beer, and other bar food. That location matters more than the concept. The Drinkery had been a dim, uneven presence at the west end of the strip. A polished cocktail room in the same footprint pulls foot traffic past the theater instead of stopping at it.
Read the two openings together and the shift is obvious. Garland has always been a diner-and-theater neighborhood with a brewery attached. As of this summer it has a proper Italian dinner spot on one end and a proper cocktail bar on the other, with the Garland Theater and BonBon still sitting in the middle. The block is finally symmetrical.
The North Monroe spillover
Three blocks south, North Monroe is doing its own version of the same story. More food expansions are coming to North Spokane this year. This summer the North Monroe Business District is set to welcome The Scoop and its sister spot Hidden Bagel inside the former home of Dan's Barbershop. Right next door, in a 1899 Victorian home, the Velvet Fox wine bar is getting ready to open in the coming months.
An ice cream shop, a bagel counter, and a wine bar clustered in adjacent buildings is not accidental. Two of the three lean evening. Combine that with Garland Avenue's new anchors and the walkable district effectively doubled in size this year, without a single new building going up.
There is also a smaller story worth flagging for anyone who drives up North Ash. A popular drive-thru sandwich shop on North Ash Street has gotten a second chance. Sandos closed suddenly in late 2025 but recently reopened under the new ownership of Betty Jessup and Paige Cunningham. The two also own Maple Street Bistro and Fresh & Foraged Cafe, and a full espresso bar is a new addition to the stand, as well as pastries from Maple Street Bistro. If your Saturday morning ran on Sandos coffee before it went dark, it runs on Sandos coffee again.
A block-by-block map for the summer
Here is the district reset for how it actually reads on foot this year.
| Where | What | Status for summer 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| 706 W. Garland | Temple Tavern (casual Italian) | Open since February |
| 828 W. Garland | Red Rose Social (cocktails) | Tenant improvements underway |
| 924 W. Garland | Garland Theater + BonBon cocktail bar | Full summer lineup |
| Garland Ave. anchors | Ferguson's Cafe, Mary Lou's Milk Bottle, Brown Derby, Garland Brew Werks | Open, unchanged |
| Garland Ave. shops | Vintage Print & Neon, Chaise & Home, Groove Merchants, Time Bomb Collectibles | Open, unchanged |
| N. Monroe (former Dan's Barbershop) | The Scoop + Hidden Bagel | Opening this summer |
| N. Monroe (1899 Victorian) | Velvet Fox wine bar | Opening in the coming months |
| N. Ash | Sandos drive-thru + espresso | Reopened April |
The point of the table is not the count. It is the geography. Almost every new or renewed dot on this map sits inside a five-block walking radius from the Garland Theater marquee.
The Garland Theater is still the anchor, and it earned it
The theater kept pace with the block. The regular calendar is the usual mix of classics and repertory picks. When the Garland Theatre opened on November of 1945, it was the premier movie house in the west. Today it hosts Spokane-centric films like "Vision Quest," "Dreamin' Wild," "Smoke Signals", movie classics, and themed nights with costume competitions, and other events.
The one-off worth marking on a calendar is the 50 Hour Slam Film Fest on Saturday, June 20, which screens the judges' top films of the competition plus a secret pick. It is the kind of event that used to require a drive downtown and now happens six blocks from a lot of North Spokane front doors.
The theater also still runs weekday programming that most residents forget about until they walk past the marquee. Wednesday trivia and the Thursday Garland Brew Werks Run Club both start on the same block, which means the district has a low-effort weeknight rhythm that predates the 2026 changes and pairs well with them.
How the evening rearranges itself
The practical question is what a Friday looks like now that the block has filled in. A few ways to string it together:
- Early dinner at Temple Tavern, walk east to the 7:30 show at the Garland, close with a cocktail at BonBon without leaving the building.
- Skip dinner, do the movie first with beer and wine at your seat, then walk west to Red Rose Social when it opens for the second half of the night.
- Start on North Monroe with a scoop from The Scoop, drift up to Velvet Fox for a glass of wine, then decide whether the night wants a theater or a cocktail bar to close it out.
- Saturday morning version: Sandos coffee and a sandwich, browse Vintage Print & Neon and Groove Merchants, lunch at the Milk Bottle patio.
None of these routes existed in this form a year ago. The old version required either a car hop between clusters or an early bedtime because the block ran out of options after the movie let out.
What this actually means if you live here
Two things, both small but real.
The first is that Garland has quietly stopped being a lunch-and-early-dinner district. The addition of a cocktail bar on the west end and a wine bar on North Monroe pushes the district's usable hours past 10 p.m. in a way it has not managed consistently since the Drinkery's better years. If you have been driving downtown for a late drink because Garland closed too early, that trip is now optional.
The second is that the walking radius matters for anyone thinking about the neighborhood in real estate terms. Home value in a district like this tracks how many worthwhile stops sit inside a fifteen-minute walk. That number went up this year without a single new construction permit, which is the cheapest kind of neighborhood improvement there is. The homes north and east of the theater, the older bungalows on the streets feeding into Garland Avenue, are the ones that quietly benefit most.
The short version is that summer 2026 is the first one in a while where the honest answer to "what's new on Garland?" is a list longer than one item. If you have not walked the strip in a few months, start at Temple Tavern and go west. You will hit the whole story in under an hour.
If you are curious what your own walking radius does to your home's value in this market, or you are eyeing a bungalow within a few blocks of the marquee, Kristin Vanos can talk through the block-by-block story before it shows up in the comps. Get your free home valuation and start there.
