Walk the two blocks of Olentangy Street this week and you will pass at least three restaurants operating out of buildings that used to be a different restaurant. That has been the pattern in downtown Powell for years: a concept closes, a new one moves into the exact same four walls, and the total number of places to eat downtown stays roughly the same. What changed in 2026 is that the pattern finally broke, and it broke in a way that tells you something real about where this neighborhood's dining scene is headed next.
The turnover you already knew about
If you have lived in Powell for a while, you have watched this happen at least three times without necessarily naming it as a trend.
- 230 W. Olentangy St. went from Doaba Indian Restaurant to Khaab Indian Kitchen & Bar, the second location for Bexley owner Dalbir Mavi, who opened his first Khaab in 2021.
- 345 W. Olentangy St. went from Monte Carlo Italian Kitchen to Three Brothers Diner, a Cuban, Mexican, and American concept from the Cruz brothers, who also run a location in Grove City.
- 240 N. Liberty St. went from Gallup's Bar & Kitchen to Liberty Social Bar & Kitchen, a two-level space with a full bar upstairs and a lunch-and-dinner menu that runs through the weekend.
Three storefronts, three new operators, zero net new square footage. This is what downtown Powell's restaurant growth has looked like for most of the past decade, and it makes sense given the geography. Historic downtown Powell is small and mostly built out. If you want to open a restaurant here, your fastest path is often to wait for someone else's lease to end.
That is still true for CoccoKay Bites, the modern Indian and Sri Lankan street food spot that opened at 170 W. Olentangy in a space that has cycled through more than one tenant. It is the same story, one more time.
The building that broke the pattern
Then COhatch opened its Powell campus in March 2026, and the math changed for the first time in a while.
The 14,000-square-foot building at 50 and 60 E. Olentangy St. is not a repurposed storefront. It is new construction, the company's 38th building restoration project and its 11th location in the Columbus area, anchored on one end by coworking space and a restored historic home called the Middlebury Member House, and topped by an entirely new restaurant that did not exist in any form downtown before this year.
Lani Rooftop Lounge opened to the public on April 9, serving small plates with Japanese, French, and Italian influences under culinary director Lingo Quichocho and Columbus-based head chef Michael Gadd. The menu leans into tuna tartare, smoked fish spread, and wagyu meatballs, which is a different register than anything else on Olentangy Street. It is also, notably, downtown's first rooftop bar, a category of venue that a small historic downtown simply had not had room for until a three-story building gave it a top floor to put one on.
COhatch CEO Matt Davis, a Powell resident for more than 20 years, framed the project as a hometown project rather than an outside developer parachuting in, and the city's own account of the build points to years of unglamorous groundwork, sidewalk construction, on-street parking, and utility work along East Olentangy Street, that had to happen before a building like this was even possible.
The vacant house that is finally becoming something
The more interesting story, if you want to understand where downtown Powell goes from here, is the property at 147 and 173 W. Olentangy St., on the other side of the CSX tracks.
The site includes what the city's own planning records call the Dr. Campbell House, a historic home that was gutted years ago and sat vacant while a development team worked through renovation options starting around 2020. That slow timeline is exactly why the current project matters. Transform Construction is now planning a two-story, roughly 4,600-square-foot restaurant building at 147 W. Olentangy, and a three-story building at 173 W. Olentangy that would combine ground-floor commercial space, likely another restaurant, with 16 units upstairs configured as a boutique hotel. The city signed off on the final development plan for the restaurant parcel in August 2025, and by that November, the city's Development Committee was weighing 75 percent property tax abatements over 15 years to help both projects pencil out, a combined investment of about $7.8 million.
The reasoning the city gave is worth sitting with, because it is the clearest evidence yet that downtown Powell's growth has outpaced its ability to host visitors overnight. Economic Development Administrator Sean Hughes told the committee that downtown Powell is already generating close to 48,000 overnight trips a year, and that those visitors are currently staying with relatives or driving back home rather than booking a room in town. If the 16-room hotel filled every night of the year, the city's own estimate puts the added visitor spending at roughly $1.9 million annually, based on state figures for average overnight visitor spending.
None of this has been simple. When the project came before council in mid-2025, the owners of the neighboring Powell Crossing apartments objected, arguing that shared parking and drive-through traffic between the sites would create real conflicts for their residents. Mayor Tom Counts also pushed back on the hotel piece specifically, asking the developer what market research supported the need for hotel rooms rather than an Airbnb-style alternative. The developer's answer was that no formal study existed, but that city staff had flagged a hospitality gap based on visitor demand. That back-and-forth is still working its way through the approval process, which is a useful reminder that a rendering and a tax abatement discussion are not the same thing as an open door.
What this actually adds up to
Put the two threads together and the shape of the next year or two downtown gets easier to read. The storefront-swapping pattern, Khaab into Doaba's old space, Three Brothers into Monte Carlo's, Liberty Social into Gallup's, keeps the number of restaurants roughly flat even as the names change. The two genuinely new projects, COhatch's completed building and the still-in-progress Campbell House and Milano Florist redevelopment, are the first real additions to downtown's restaurant capacity in years rather than a reshuffling of it. One of those additions is already open. The other is still moving through the kind of local approval process that can take a while to resolve.
If you are trying to plan an evening out this fall, the practical version of all this is simple. Lani Rooftop Lounge is open Wednesday through Saturday with reservations through OpenTable, and it is the first place downtown with real skyline-adjacent outdoor seating. Khaab has taken over the old Doaba space with a similar menu built around Punjabi-inspired dishes and a bar that the previous tenant did not have. The Powell Farmers Market runs its final Saturdays of the season through October 3 at Liberty Square Plaza on North Liberty Street, so there is still time for a walk-through if you have not made it this summer.
The two vacant Olentangy Street parcels are worth watching for a different reason. If the Campbell House and Milano Florist buildings move from approved plans to open doors, downtown Powell will have added a genuinely new restaurant building, a boutique hotel, and a second wave of foot traffic all in the same stretch of street where nothing had been built new in years. That is a bigger shift for daily life downtown than any single restaurant opening, because it changes what the corridor can hold rather than just who is holding it.
If you want the fuller picture of what living in Powell looks like day to day, from the school district to the trail network, our Powell neighborhood guide is a good starting point. And if any of this downtown momentum has you thinking about your own next move here in Powell, whether that is buying, selling, or just talking through timing, The Laumann Group is always glad to help. Let's Connect.
