Hours-long lines wrapped around Tendon Kohaku’s downtown Bellevue building for months after the Singapore-based chain opened here in 2024, with diners enduring the endless waits for their turn to sample delicate tempura shrimp, Wagyu beef, and yuzu-marinated salmon. Not long after, a few blocks away, the Japan-based LeTao opened in the Bravern, its imported cheesecakes arranged like fine jewelry in the case of Van Cleef & Arpels.
Both Tendon Kohaku’s and LeTao’s Bellevue outposts were each company’s first US locations. The previous year, the city hosted stateside debuts of Indian chains Farzi Café and Mavalli Tiffin Rooms. Already in 2026, BA Bakehouse, from China, opened its first US store in Bellevue. Chinese skewer shop Mama Xita BBQ is slated to open shortly, with Singapore-based Japanese restaurant Sushi Tei arriving later this year.
Bellevue’s population—wealthy, worldly, and heavily Asian—makes for an appealing demographic mix for big-name restaurant chains from across the Pacific looking to plant a flag(ship) in the US market. But chalking the trend up solely to who lives here oversimplifies the full scale of just how much of Bellevue seems lab-designed as an ideal landing spot for incoming chains.
One of the fundamental characteristics of suburbs is that they inherently look elsewhere, a piece of their identity always fixed to the city in whose economic shadow they sprang up. That outward gaze has long manifested in the droll sameness of corporate and chain restaurants; in cookie-cutter copies of other places that crowd out originals. Applebee’s, Chili’s, Olive Garden. That equation changes for chains from overseas, which combine the allure of uniqueness with pre-proven concepts—and their associated, well-established capital.
On the gold-trimmed marble counter of LeTao, each of the signature cakes in the front row (two fromage, two chocolate) has one piece cut and slid away until the tip just meets the perimeter of the remaining cake. Behind each one sits a matching, unsliced cake. The cakes are sold packaged in a round wood box, mimicking a triple-cream brie. Marketing materials boast of French inspiration, Japanese cream, Italian mascarpone, and Australian cream cheese…