"Why more restaurants? Quite simply, it's because our residents want them. They want to see more choices and restaurants here in our downtown in particular, and Powell in general."
That's Powell's economic development administrator, explaining to the city's Development Committee last November why a local developer wanted to build a boutique hotel and two restaurants on West Olentangy Street. It sounds like a simple answer to a simple question. It isn't. If you've walked downtown Powell any time in the past year, you've probably noticed the sidewalk work, the new coworking building with the rooftop bar, and now a second construction project two blocks away. The instinct is to read all of it as one wave of momentum. It's actually two separate builds, run eighteen months apart, on opposite ends of the same short street, using the same public-investment-first strategy each time.
Once you see the pattern, the rest of downtown Powell's changes stop looking random.
East Olentangy Went First
The clearest evidence is the block that's already finished: 50 and 60 East Olentangy Street, where COhatch broke ground in late 2024 on a 14,000-square-foot coworking and event campus, its 38th building restoration project as a company. The coworking space and meeting rooms opened to members on March 2, 2026. Five weeks later, on April 9, the third-floor Lani Rooftop Lounge opened to the public, becoming Powell's first rooftop bar, one of only about ten in Central Ohio. Lani seats guests across three distinct areas, a patio, a main dining room, and a sky room, with a menu of small plates that pull from Japanese, French, and Italian technique under culinary director Lingo Quichocho and local head chef Michael Gadd. In May, the restored Middlebury Member House, a historic home on the same site, opened as a lodge-style space for members and private events.
None of that happened in isolation. Before COhatch poured a foundation, the city had already coordinated sidewalk construction, on-street parking, and utility upgrades along East Olentangy Street, and it's extending Scioto Street to add more public parking near the site. Public works arrived first. Private capital followed once the block could actually support foot traffic and cars. That sequencing matters if you're trying to guess what happens next, because it just repeated.
West Olentangy Is Running the Same Play, Later
In November 2025, Transform Construction filed plans with the city for two buildings on the opposite end of downtown: a two-story restaurant at 147 West Olentangy Street and a three-story building at 173 West Olentangy Street combining retail space with a 16-room boutique hotel. Combined, the two projects total about $7.8 million in investment, and the city has been weighing 75 percent property tax abatements over 15 years for both. Under that structure, the developer would save roughly $190,000 on the restaurant building and about $1.5 million on the hotel, a combined public cost of close to $1.69 million in forgone tax revenue over 15 years. Against that, the city's own projection, built on the Ohio Department of Development's estimate that an overnight visitor spends about $327 a day, puts the hotel's economic impact at roughly $28.7 million over the same 15 years if it runs at full occupancy. That's about seventeen times the size of the abatement. Whether the hotel actually reaches full occupancy is a separate question, but the ratio explains why the city was willing to negotiate.
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only read the November headline: by this spring, 173 West Olentangy Street was already listed on commercial property databases as a newly constructed building, marketed as sitting inside Powell's entertainment district and Designated Outdoor Refreshment Area, with retail space from 1,000 to 6,110 square feet available above the ground-floor hotel. The building went up fast. The tenants haven't been named publicly. Nobody has announced who's running the hotel or opening in either restaurant space. If East Olentangy is the finished half of this story, with a working rooftop bar and a members' lounge inside a restored farmhouse, West Olentangy is the unfinished half: concrete and framing that's ahead of any signed lease.
That gap between construction and occupancy is normal in commercial real estate, but it's worth knowing if you've been wondering why the buildings look done and the storefronts still look empty.
The Restaurant Growth That Has Nothing to Do With Either Project
Downtown's two anchor sites explain some of what's new in Powell, but not all of it, and conflating the two stories misses something. The city's food scene has been expanding independently of the Olentangy Street corridor entirely.
Khaab Indian Kitchen & Bar, which built its reputation at a Bexley location, announced a second Powell location this year, bringing what the company describes as elevated Indian cuisine and handcrafted cocktails to the community. Cava opened its Mediterranean fast-casual concept in August at 9711 Sawmill Parkway, expected to employ between 25 and 40 people. One quirk worth knowing if you live nearby: the Sawmill Parkway address technically sits in Liberty Township, not inside Powell's municipal boundary, even though the coverage and the mailing address both say Powell. It's the kind of distinction that only matters if you're checking which jurisdiction actually issued the permit, but it's a good reminder that "Powell" as a mailing address and Powell as a city line aren't always the same thing.
Closer to the center of town, Glazed Over opened inside Liberty Plaza at 240 North Liberty Street on February 26, bringing hand-rolled, hand-cut donuts made in small batches through the day. And Novella Osteria has settled into downtown as a locally owned, chef-driven Italian spot built around the idea that less is more, aiming to be the kind of neighborhood restaurant where people linger over a shared plate rather than rush through dinner.
None of these four openings needed COhatch's rooftop bar or Transform Construction's hotel to succeed. They're evidence that Powell's dining demand was already real before either redevelopment project broke ground, which is worth remembering the next time a press release credits one building for an entire neighborhood's momentum.
What's Actually Changed, Block by Block
| East Olentangy (COhatch) | West Olentangy (Transform Construction) | |
|---|---|---|
| Groundbreaking | Late 2024 | Proposed to city council, Nov. 2025 |
| Public infrastructure | Sidewalks, parking, utilities completed ahead of opening | Tax abatement (75% over 15 years) under negotiation |
| Status | Fully open: coworking (March 2026), Lani Rooftop (April 2026), Member House (May 2026) | Building at 173 W. Olentangy listed as newly constructed; no named restaurant, retail, or hotel tenant found in public filings |
| What you can walk into today | A rooftop bar, a restored 1889 member house, coworking space | Storefronts and hotel rooms, still unleased as of the most recent public listing |
The Rest of the Fall Calendar Still Runs on Its Own Clock
Not everything downtown is tied to a construction schedule. The Powell Street Market & Business Expo filled downtown streets earlier this month, on September 13, with more than 60 local vendors, food trucks, and a chance to meet Powell Chamber members face to face, the kind of event that doesn't need a ribbon-cutting to matter. And the Powell Liberty Historical Society has been opening the Martin-Perry House, a restored 1889 farmhouse at 103 East Olentangy Street, for free tours on the first and third Sundays this month, giving residents a look at the antiques and Victorian furnishings that predate every building discussed above by more than a century.
That contrast is worth sitting with. The same half-mile of Olentangy Street that's hosting a rooftop bar with a sky room and a hotel project still waiting on its first tenant also runs a 137-year-old farmhouse that opens its doors twice a month for free. Downtown Powell isn't choosing between its past and its next construction phase. It's running both at the same time, on the same street, and neither one is waiting for the other to finish.
If you're watching this corridor because you're curious about where Powell is headed, or because you're thinking about what a home near downtown might be worth once West Olentangy fills in, that's exactly the kind of block-by-block read the Anne DeVoe Group tracks for clients across Powell and the rest of central Ohio. Schedule a free consultation if you'd like to talk through what any of this means for your own address.
