The Diamond Knot restaurant on the waterfront will be closed for about two months starting in January as it undergoes expansion into what used to be Woody’s.

Diamond Knot Brewery & Alehouse, at 621 Front Street, will expand its kitchen and add restaurant seating and a coffee and ice cream café to the south side of the building. It will be closed starting Jan. 7.

Founder and President Bob Maphet signed the lease for the other half of the building in July. He said he expects to reopen Diamond Knot with its “family friendly” and café additions in March.

“Our kitchen is extremely small,” he said. “We hope to keep the existing bar the same as much as possible, but expand the kitchen.”

Maphet said the expansion will help meet the demand of visitors to Lighthouse Park and the waterfront for Diamond Knot fare – and now that Woody’s is gone – coffee and ice cream. Woody’s closed in October of last year.

Construction on the south side, where restaurant and café seating will be located, has been ongoing for several weeks. Starting Monday, crews will demolish and then rebuild the alehouse.

“We weren’t looking forward to this phase,” Maphet said. “Disrupting service at the alehouse is the last thing we want to do, but it will be 100 percent better when we reopen. We are all excited about finishing this project.”

However, Maphet said the disruption comes at Diamond Knot's slow time of the year: January and February.

Diamond Knot’s Production Brewery and Taproom, at 4602 Chennault Beach Rd., Suite B2, and Pizza House, at 403 Lincoln Ave., will extend their hours in the meantime.

Since the Brewery & Alehouse opened in 1999, it has become a popular Front Street fixture – so popular, in fact, that the kitchen and alehouse cannot keep up with demand.

"If there was a way to pour beer at the alehouse sooner, we would," said Andy Eason, vice president of Retail Operations.

Fans of the alehouse need not worry, Eason said. The existing side will look about the same as it does now. He said it’s the other side that will be new and unrecognizable.

"We know our customers don't want the alehouse to change from its current state," Eason said. "We don't want it to change, either. We are doing our best to minimally impact that side of the building."

When it reopens, the south side will have an ice cream and coffee café with walk-up window and seating in the front. In the back will be restaurant seating for visitors who don’t want to – or can’t – go into the bar.

There will also be two entrances: The current one for those 21 and over and another for the “family friendly” side.

Diamond Knot was co-founded in 1994 by Maphet and the late Brian Sollenberger. It was the first microbrewery in the Mukilteo area. It now operates three restaurants and two breweries.

Maphet and Sollenberger started a brewery in the back of the former Cheers Too! on Mukilteo’s waterfront – a definite microbrewery at just 350 square feet. They brewed beer together in what used to be their spare time.

They soon purchased Cheers Too!, and renamed it the Diamond Knot Brewery & Alehouse.

The company has expanded ever since: It also has another brewery on Chennault Beach Road, Diamond Knot Camano Lodge on Camano Island and Diamond Knot Pizza House in Mukilteo’s Lincoln Courtyard.

See how the construction at Diamond Knot is going at www.diamondknot.com and on Facebook.