MorningSheetWhat a new Seattle restaurant looks like in the public record
198 food businesses in Seattle got their license between March and August 2026. We counted what the record says about them on the day they got their license. A few of the numbers change how you'd go about selling to them.
Every number below comes from the public record we track for Seattle, taken on September 5, 2026. The group is every food business inside the city limits whose license record flipped to operating between March 1 and August 31. That's 198 businesses. Where the record can't tell us something, we say so.
One in three is a full-service restaurant. One in four is on wheels.
Source: MorningSheet, from the public record. n = 198.
The full-service share is about what you'd expect. The mobile share is the surprise: 54 of the 198, a little over a quarter, are trucks, carts, and trailers. Across the whole state the mobile share is a third. If your product needs a fixed address, a lease, or a dining room, a quarter of the new Seattle "restaurants" you'll hear about are not your customer, and the record tells you which ones on day one.
Nine in ten are somebody's first location
We match every new license against the businesses already operating in Washington. Of the 198, 21 are a second location of an existing local operator, and one is a national chain. The other 176 are first locations. That's the group with no card processor chosen, no insurance broker, no linen contract, and no habit of picking up the phone for a vendor, because nobody has called them yet.
Almost all of them have a phone in the record. One in eight has a website.
On the day the license flipped, the public record carried a phone number for 193 of the 198. It carried a website we could find for 24. An email for 18. An Instagram account we could match with confidence for 5. Some of those businesses have websites and accounts we didn't find, so treat the website and Instagram numbers as floors. The phone number is not a floor. It is close to the whole group.
The practical version: if you wait for a new restaurant to have a website before you reach out, you're waiting past opening day for seven out of eight of them. The phone is there from the start.
Half show up in more than one record
92 of the 198 appear in at least two independent public records, and 30 appear in three or more. The rest are, so far, a single license entry. This is why we hold to the two-record rule before we call something a real opening: a business that only exists as one line in one system is right about half the time, and a business that shows up in two systems at the same address is almost always real.
Fewer than one in ten had a build-out permit on file first
Only 16 of the 198 had a build-out or building permit in the record before their license. Read that with the mobile share in mind: trucks don't pull tenant-improvement permits, and neither do the many first-time operators who take over a space that was already a restaurant. The permit is the best early signal we have for a ground-up build, and it's a rare one. Most new Seattle food businesses arrive by other doors: the health department's plan review, the liquor application, and the license itself. If you're only watching permits, you're watching about ten percent of the market.
Seattle against the rest of the state
| Newly licensed, March to August 2026 | Seattle (198) | All Washington we track (354) |
|---|---|---|
| Mobile vendor share | 27% | 33% |
| Second location of a local operator | 11% | 9% |
| National chain | 0.5% | 1% |
| Phone in the record | 97% | 56% |
| Website found | 12% | 10% |
| Instagram matched | 2.5% | 7% |
The phone gap is a records gap, not a business gap. Seattle's own license record carries the number; most other jurisdictions in the state don't publish one, so it has to be found another way. That one column is the difference between a list you can call tonight and a list you have to research first.
What we didn't publish, and why
We have the dates for how long it takes a Seattle restaurant to go from its first record to its license, but only 16 businesses in this group have both ends of that trail, which is too few to put a median on. We also can't tell you the neighborhood mix from the record alone; the addresses are there but we don't print them. When the trail count passes a hundred we'll publish the timing.
The takeaway
A new Seattle food business, on the day its record says open, is most likely a first-location independent with a phone number on file, no website, and a one-in-four chance of being a truck. It probably didn't pull a build-out permit. It shows up in two public systems about half the time. If you sell to restaurants, that profile is the whole pitch for reading the record instead of waiting for the map apps.