Trino's Barbershop used to sit at 111 W. 3rd Ave. If you got your hair cut there, you knew the chairs, you knew the wait, you probably knew Trino. Late last year that space became Plai Jawak Thai Food, and the smell coming out the front door changed from clippers and aftershave to lemongrass and galangal.
That single swap is a small thing on its own. But line it up against the other storefronts that have changed hands around Moses Lake since then and a pattern starts to show. This is not a town filling in empty buildings with chain drive-thrus. It is mostly first-time owners, family crews, and people who already run one small business deciding to open a second. If you have been keeping half an eye on what is new to eat or where the old shop on your block went, here is the fuller picture.
A Barbershop Becomes a Thai Kitchen
Plai Jawak Thai Food is owned by Attichar Lapra and Watchirathorn Pookun, who already run an established Thai restaurant in Chehalis and decided to bring a second location east to Moses Lake. The menu leans traditional: Tom Yum Kung, the hot-and-sour shrimp soup built on chili paste, lime leaf and galangal, sits next to Tom Kha Soup's coconut-milk base. The noodle list runs from Pad See Ew to Yum Woon Sen, a glass noodle salad with shrimp and peanuts, and the curry section covers Green Curry over jasmine rice and a coconut-based Panang. If you want dessert and it is the right season, Mango Sticky Rice shows up on the menu.
The restaurant runs Wednesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., plus Sundays, at 111 W. 3rd Ave, right where Trino's used to be.
Division Street's New Kitchen
A few blocks over, at 212 S. Division Street, Suced Yusso opened Cactus in early August, her first restaurant after years of wanting to run one. The building got a full renovation and a newly built kitchen, and Yusso brought on two cooks, Rufina Sanchez and Maria Teresa Salazar, each with 18 years of experience cooking Mexican food. The menu mixes Mexican and American dishes, seafood, beef and chicken, and the whole operation is a family one. Yusso's husband, Luis Guerrero, works behind the scenes, their three sons help with everything from cooking to dishes, and a longtime family friend works the front of house. Yusso told the Columbia Basin Herald she wanted "to offer a little bit of my Mexican food for the residents of Washington."
One detail worth sitting with: one of Yusso's sons recently opened his own barber shop in Moses Lake. In the same stretch of months a barbershop's old space turned into a restaurant across town, a new one opened somewhere else. Downtown does not lose services so much as it reshuffles them.
If you want to go:
- Cactus, 212 S. Division Street, downtown Moses Lake
- Plai Jawak Thai Food, 111 W. 3rd Ave, Wednesday through Saturday and Sundays
It Is Not All Food
The new arrivals were not limited to restaurants. On East Broadway Avenue, Guillermo Hermosillo opened Decoraciones Hermosillo this spring, an event and quinceañera rental business. Hermosillo told the Herald the shop handles design work from start to finish, chairs and thrones sized for quinceañeras, plus flowers and balloons for weddings and other events. If you have a quinceañera or a wedding on the calendar, that is now a local option instead of a drive out of town.
On the north end of the city, a newly built Baskin-Robbins opened at 607 N. Stratford Road on July 29, serving its first scoop at 10 a.m. after final permits came through. The grand opening followed on Aug. 1, with single scoops sold for $1.31 and a DJ running the celebration through the afternoon.
What the Turnover Actually Shows
Take stock of what has happened on Moses Lake storefronts since late last year. A barbershop's space became a Thai kitchen. A downtown building got gutted and reopened as a family-run Mexican restaurant. An event rental shop moved onto Broadway. A national ice cream chain rebuilt on Stratford Road. None of that is a story about vacancy. None of it is a story about a national chain rolling into a town and flattening what was there before, either, aside from one franchise location. Almost every name on this list belongs to a person who lives here, cooked here, or already ran something else here first.
That matters if you have watched a storefront sit dark for a few months and assumed the worst. In Moses Lake right now, dark for a few months tends to mean somebody is gutting the kitchen, not that nobody wants the space. The churn on Division Street and 3rd Avenue has mostly gone from one working small business to another, sometimes inside the same walls the last owner used.
It also says something about who is willing to bet on this town. Suced Yusso is a first-time restaurant owner. Guillermo Hermosillo built a niche business around a specific cultural tradition rather than a generic storefront concept. Attichar Lapra and Watchirathorn Pookun looked at their existing Chehalis restaurant and decided Moses Lake was worth a second location. Every one of those decisions is a small vote that this is a place worth opening a business in, not just a place to drive through.
If you already live here and pay attention to what fills the fall calendar downtown, you have probably noticed the crowds. What is easy to miss is that the storefronts themselves are doing similar work all year, just quieter. A new restaurant opening in August does not get the same foot traffic as a festival weekend, but it is the same underlying signal: people keep choosing to build something here.
Next time you walk past a dark storefront on Division Street or 3rd Avenue, it is worth checking back in a few weeks before assuming it is gone for good. Lately, more often than not, someone was already inside with new paint and a new menu.
If you are curious what any of this means for home values in your part of Moses Lake, whether it is the pace of downtown or the mix of what is opening around you, Luxury Home Realty is happy to walk through it. Request Your Free Home Valuation and we will tell you what we are actually seeing in your neighborhood, not a generic script.
