The Fair Just Left Spokane Valley. In Four Days, Sprague Avenue Closes Again.

"We saw a lot of potential here for what we can turn it into."

That's how Turhan Erdem described the building at the corner of Appleway Avenue and Barker Road before he opened Capitol Bar & Grill there in August, his fourth restaurant in the Erdem family's small, politically named chain that also includes White House Grill and the Oval Office Bistro in Post Falls and the Pentagon in Liberty Lake. He wasn't describing the neighborhood. He was describing a building. But the timing says something about the neighborhood anyway.

Yesterday was the last day of the Spokane County Interstate Fair. The ten-day run at the Fair and Expo Center on North Havana Street, a fairgrounds that has hosted the event since 1952, closed out its midway and grandstand shows on September 20. Four days from now, on Friday, September 25, a different kind of crowd takes over a different street. The Hearts of Gold Parade shuts down East Sprague Avenue between University and Pines starting at 6 p.m., kicking off Valleyfest's three-day run through Mirabeau Point Park, CenterPlace Regional Event Center, and Plantes Ferry Sports Complex.

If you live here, you already sense the rhythm even if you've never mapped it out: the fair leaves, and before the last funnel cake grease has cooled, the valley's biggest street party of the year takes its place four miles east. What's easy to miss is how tight that turnaround actually is this year, and how many of the places you'd naturally end up afterward, a beer, a plate of food, a reason to linger, are new enough that you haven't tried them yet.

Four Days, Not a Season

Most years, Spokane Valley's fall calendar has some breathing room between its two anchor events. This year it doesn't. Here's what the next week actually looks like on the ground:

The free shuttle matters if you've never tried to find parking near CenterPlace on a festival Saturday. It runs every fifteen minutes from three lots: the Spokane Valley Mall lot near Red Robin, the Mirabeau Station Park and Ride, and the Pinecroft Business Park on Cherry Street. None of that is complicated once you know it, but nobody posts it anywhere you'd stumble across by accident.

The River Run itself starts at the Mirabeau Trailhead and heads east along the Centennial Trail before looping back, which means for one Saturday morning a paved path that's usually a quiet stretch for dog walkers and commuting cyclists turns into a timed 5K course with a starting gun.

A Restaurant That Bet on the East End

Capitol Bar & Grill opened its doors on August 7 and, according to the Spokane Journal of Business, has stayed packed with patrons every day since. It's Erdem's fourth restaurant and the first time he's brought in a partner: his nephew and longtime employee, Emre Basar, joins as co-owner after fifteen years working alongside him. The lineage matters here because it's a genuinely local story. White House Grill started as a seven-table restaurant in Post Falls in 1996. It outgrew that space, moved into the old Wells Fargo building on Spokane Street in 2004, and the original location was later demolished, rebuilt, and reopened as the Oval Office Bistro in December 2024. The Pentagon followed in Liberty Lake about seven years ago. Capitol is the newest sibling in a family of restaurants that, by Erdem's own estimate, draws an estimated 40 to 45 percent of its customers from the Washington side of the state line.

The restaurant serves lunch and dinner seven days a week, and during football season the doors open at 10 a.m. on weekends for NFL games, which is a small but telling detail about what kind of place it's built to be: casual enough for sweats, dressed-up enough for a date, and timed to a fall sports calendar that overlaps almost exactly with the week Spokane Valley is busiest.

Greenacres Gets Its Own Dinner Spot

A few miles away, in the Greenacres neighborhood on the east side of Spokane Valley, a different kind of restaurant story has been quietly building since last December. Chef Joe Absolor and his childhood friend Todd Zyph opened Dodos at the High Spot in the space that used to house Stupid Cow, a longtime breakfast spot with a rustic, red-barn feel. Absolor had told himself years earlier, according to reporting in the Inlander, that if he ever moved back to Spokane, that building on East Sprague Avenue was the one he'd open in.

What makes Dodos worth mentioning here isn't just the modern American menu, it's the choice the owners made about how people get there. In partnership with the Spokane Conservation District, Dodos installed bike racks specifically so patrons could ride in on the Appleway Trail, the paved, 5.8-mile former railroad corridor that runs just south of Sprague Avenue and connects the heart of Spokane Valley all the way to Liberty Lake. That's a deliberate bet that this stretch of the city is becoming a place people bike to on a Tuesday night, not just drive to.

Reservations at Dodos are limited to parties of six or more, so if you're going with a smaller group, plan to walk in and wait. Absolor has said there's been a line most days since opening.

What the Corridor Actually Tells You

None of this means the fairgrounds, the parade route, and these two restaurants sit on one continuous walkable loop. They don't. The Fair and Expo Center is west, off Havana Street. The parade closes a stretch of Sprague near the city's center. Capitol Bar & Grill sits out toward Barker Road, and Dodos is a few blocks from it in Greenacres. What connects them isn't geography so much as timing: this is the one stretch of the year when Spokane Valley's civic life and its dining scene are both doing something new at once, and residents who've lived here through quieter Septembers are noticing the difference.

The Appleway Trail didn't fully connect end to end until 2020, and a further link to the Spokane Valley Library and the newly opened Balfour Park has been under construction more recently. That's part of why a restaurant deliberately courting bike traffic off that trail is a 2026 story and not a 2016 one. The infrastructure to support it only recently finished catching up.

The Practical Version

If you're mapping out the next week, here's the short version: the fair is done, so don't drive past Havana Street expecting carnival lights. Friday evening, avoid Sprague between University and Pines after 6 p.m. unless you're going to the parade. Saturday, if you're headed to Valleyfest, park at the mall or Pinecroft and take the shuttle rather than fighting for a spot near CenterPlace. And if you're looking for something to do after the festival winds down each night, both Capitol Bar & Grill and Dodos at the High Spot are new enough, and busy enough, that a reservation or an early arrival isn't a bad idea.

This is what living in Spokane Valley in late September actually looks like this year: a fairground going quiet, a parade route about to fill in, and a couple of new kitchens on the east side of town that opened at exactly the right moment to catch the crowd walking home from all of it.

If weeks like this are part of what makes you glad you live here, or part of what's got you thinking about where you'd want to put down roots next, the team at Cross Realty knows this stretch of the Inland Northwest block by block. Schedule a Free Consultation whenever you're ready to talk it through.