Ask someone who eats downtown every week what changed in Holland this year and they will list restaurant names before anything else. Shore by deBoer where Jackie's Place used to be. Tulip City Bar & Grill where the Brewstillery used to pour its own beer. Lovejoy where Poquito served tapas. A Playa Bowls that did not exist on West 9th Street a year ago. Four storefronts, four new operators, all within a short walk of each other.
Ask what is actually driving that turnover and most people shrug, or point to rent, or say restaurants just come and go. The more interesting answer sits about half a mile west, at the end of the same street, where a dock company and a shuttered power plant have kept downtown Holland from touching the water it is supposed to be built around.
Four Storefronts, One Corridor
The churn this year has been concentrated and specific. Shore by deBoer is the deBoer family's newest venture, a breakfast and lunch spot built on a bakery legacy that traces back to 1956 and, before that, a grandfather who baked in the Netherlands. The current generation splits the work: Samuel handles creative direction as a classically trained baker, Mitchiel runs the kitchen after training at the Florida Culinary Institute, and Jacob manages operations. The restaurant is open Tuesday through Saturday, 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., with alcohol service expected to be added later.
A few blocks over, Tulip City Bar & Grill opened in February after nearly two years and roughly $850,000 in renovations. Father-and-son owners Carlos Mendoza and Carlos Mendoza Jr. took over the space from the old Tulip City Brewstillery, expanded it from about 5,500 to 8,500 square feet, and shifted the concept away from in-house brewing toward a full-service Mexican-American fusion kitchen. Neighborhood Facebook groups had been asking for an opening date for most of a year before the doors finally opened.
Lovejoy took over the former Poquito space with scratch-made comfort food and shareable plates, a more casual, family-oriented replacement for the Spanish-style menu that came before it. And Playa Bowls, the surf-inspired açaí and smoothie chain that had already landed in Grand Rapids, Grandville, and Kalamazoo, opened its Holland location on West 9th Street.
Every one of those four addresses sits inside the same downtown grid Holland has had for decades. None of them sit on the water. That is not an accident of leasing. It is the current shape of downtown Holland's food scene, expanding within a footprint that has not physically reached Lake Macatawa in any meaningful way for years.
The Two Weekends That Already Point West
Downtown does not wait for buildings to catch up with its own instincts. Two of the year's biggest civic gatherings already treat the western edge of downtown, the stretch nearest the water, as the destination.
The Labor Day Truck Parade runs Monday, September 7, with more than 75 trucks departing MillerKnoll in Zeeland at 9:15 a.m., rolling west through Chicago Drive and 8th Street, and arriving at Holland Civic Center Place around 9:45 for a free ice cream social. Linda Hart, executive director of the Holland Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, has described the Civic Center and the Farmers Market as downtown's "west end book end." That is the language of someone who already thinks of the corridor as running toward the water, even though the water itself is not yet part of the route.
Fall Fest follows a few weeks later, on Friday and Saturday, October 2 and 3. The headline draw is professional pumpkin carving along 8th Street, but the programming spreads out from there: a Fire Truck Parade down 8th Street on Friday evening ending at the Civic Center, community tulip planting at Window on the Waterfront, a Touch-a-Truck event with hayrides at Windmill Island Gardens, and an Artisan Market at the Civic Center hosted by Tulip Time.
| Event | Date | Starts | Ends |
|---|---|---|---|
| Labor Day Truck Parade | Monday, September 7 | 9:15 a.m., MillerKnoll in Zeeland | Holland Civic Center Place, free ice cream social |
| Fall Fest | Friday-Saturday, October 2-3 | 8th Street pumpkin carving and Friday Fire Truck Parade | Windmill Island Gardens hayrides, Window on the Waterfront tulip planting, Artisan Market at the Civic Center |
Both events funnel people toward the same western stretch of downtown that the new restaurants have not reached. That is worth sitting with. The city's biggest annual gatherings already stage themselves around a waterfront connection that, on the ground, does not fully exist yet.
What's Actually Waiting at the End of the Street
The reason it does not exist yet has a name: the Verplank Dock Company site. Voters approved a land swap back in May 2023 that would move Verplank's operations to the site of the former James De Young power plant, freeing up the current dock property for redevelopment. As of this summer, the city is still working through that plan, and a proposal is moving forward that would turn the freed-up waterfront parcel into a mix of marina, shops, restaurants, and residential housing.
Hart put the goal plainly: the project would connect downtown with Kollen Park and Lake Macatawa in a way it currently does not. Mayor Nathan Bocks described the same idea back when the land swap first went to voters, saying the plan would let people "come from downtown, right directly to the water from the water right directly into downtown."
Right now, that direct connection does not exist. Boatwerks Restaurant is the only waterfront dining option in town, a detail Bocks himself pointed to as evidence of how little of downtown Holland's food and hospitality scene currently touches Lake Macatawa. One piece of the redevelopment plan even includes a dock built to handle a Great Lakes cruise ship. Holland had that kind of traffic a decade ago before losing it to Muskegon, and while one ship has started anchoring in Lake Macatawa again, visitors are still bused in from Muskegon rather than docking here directly.
None of this is finished. The plan is a proposal moving through the city's process, not a groundbreaking. But it explains something the restaurant openings alone do not: why four new operators chose to invest inside the existing downtown footprint this year rather than waiting for a waterfront district that has been years in the making and is still not built.
The Pattern Underneath the Menus
Put it together and downtown Holland looks like a corridor rehearsing a future it has not built yet. The new restaurants are safe bets inside a downtown grid that already works. The Labor Day Truck Parade and Fall Fest both stage their biggest moments at the Civic Center and Window on the Waterfront, treating the west end as downtown's natural terminus even though the actual waterfront redevelopment is still a proposal working its way through city hall. And the one project that would close that gap, the Verplank site swap, has been moving for three years now, from a 2023 ballot measure to a plan the city was still describing as "in progress" this summer.
If you already live here, this is the year to notice the difference between a restaurant scene renewing itself and a downtown physically extending toward the lake. Right now, Holland is doing the first. The second is still on the drawing board, and whoever builds on that former Verplank parcel will be building the one thing this town's own civic calendar has been pointing toward for years.
If you are watching that stretch of waterfront and wondering what it might mean for property near the west end once the marina project actually breaks ground, that is exactly the kind of local shift David Isljamovski tracks for clients across the Holland and greater lakeshore market. Let's Connect.
