Walk High Street this week and you'll notice the windows at 649 North High are lit again, something that wasn't true for the better part of seven years. That's the Worthington Inn, dark since December 2018, now running as Wolf's Ridge at Worthington Inn, and it's not the only address on the block that's changed hands recently. Between the Inn's spring reopening, a café that just won approval to serve dinner for the first time, and two bookstores that opened blocks apart this year, Old Worthington's newest wave of businesses shares a trait that's easy to miss if you're only counting storefronts: none of them are built for someone who wants to run in, grab something, and leave.
That's worth noticing before Saturday. Old Worthington Market Day, the neighborhood's biggest single day of the year, closes High Street to traffic on October 3, and the Fall Crawl follows five days later on October 8. Anyone walking that stretch for either event will pass a noticeably different lineup than they would have a year or two ago.
A Building That Spent Seven Years as Condos
The Worthington Inn has stood at 649 North High since 1831, first as a private residence, then as an inn and restaurant starting in the 1850s. When it closed at the end of 2018, the plan at the time was for a mixed-use redevelopment that would eventually bring the restaurant back. Instead, the building sat as twelve separate condominium parcels under ten different owners, all still legally described as the Worthington Inn Condominium, while the storefront everyone in town still called a restaurant stayed dark.
A group calling itself 1831 Ventures LLC bought the building back and brought in Wolf's Ridge Brewing, the Columbus-based brewery known for pairing craft beer with chef-driven food, to run it as a restaurant again. The ownership group includes longtime Worthington builders Matt and Glen Sullivan, attorney Sarah Perez, and Kat and Jerry DePizzo, with Jerry playing saxophone and guitar for the band O.A.R. Co-owner Bob Szuter described the project as being about more than just the building itself, saying it had "always been about more than reopening a historic building."
Wolf's Ridge at Worthington Inn opened to the public on April 29 with a ribbon-cutting that drew Mayor Scott Green and members of city council. Executive Chef Kris Ludwig and Sous Chef Brian Breslin built a menu of tavern fare: Blonde French Onion Soup, fish and chips, and a WRB Burger for lunch, with Innkeeper's Mussels, Confit Cod Cheeks, and a bone-in pork chop showing up on the dinner side. The building went from a place nobody could walk into back to one designed for a long lunch or a slow dinner, which is a different kind of comeback than a simple reopening.
The Café That Decided Breakfast Wasn't Enough
A few blocks south, Joya's Café has been an Old Worthington fixture since 2022, known for Bengali-American breakfast and lunch and for a chef who competed on season 18 of Bravo's Top Chef and later landed a spot on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. On September 10, the Worthington Municipal Planning Commission approved Joya's expansion from its current storefront at 657 High Street into the neighboring space at 661A, formerly home to Grid Furnishings.
The expansion adds roughly 60 indoor seats, a bar, a private dining space, and new restrooms and prep areas, a significant jump from the café's current handful of tables. The bigger change for regulars is the schedule. Joya's has run as a daytime spot, serving breakfast and lunch from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. The expanded restaurant plans to reopen for dinner service from 5 to 11 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday, its first regular evening hours since the café opened. A place people used to treat as a quick breakfast stop is turning itself into somewhere to come back to at night.
Two Bookstores, Neither One a Quick Browse
Old Worthington gained two independent bookstores in 2026, and both were built around lingering rather than a fast in-and-out.
Celestielle opened May 22 above Denig Jewelers at 677 High Street. Owner Emily Byorth built the shop around romance and fantasy, with a small kids' section and a mystery corner tucked in for family members who wanted something else on the shelf. When asked why Old Worthington, Byorth pointed to the neighborhood itself: "It is so full of life and community and charm."
The Whispering Page followed on September 3, taking over a former gym space at 661 North High, tucked between Vernacular and Old Bag of Nails Pub. Owners Ashley and Devin McCoy built a two-level bookstore, café, and bar, with a downstairs bar and cafe and an upstairs lounge that includes a private Book Club Room seating ten. The bakery case runs on two local suppliers, Mrs. Goodman's and The Little Dot, and the bar pours from Zaftig, Wolf's Ridge Brewing, and Aardvark Wine & Beer, with a THC seltzer from the Southeastern Ohio company Appalachian Girls Cannabis Co. rounding out the menu. When the McCoys were scouting locations, they noticed something specific about Worthington: searching for bookstores on Google Maps turned up "a very obvious gap" in the neighborhood, which is part of what drew them there.
Neither shop is set up for someone who wants to grab a paperback and go. Both have seating, both serve drinks, and both are explicitly hosting book clubs and events on a recurring basis. A bookstore that includes a Book Club Room is planning for return visits, not single transactions.
The Same Pattern, One Storefront Over
It isn't only the newest arrivals. Shift Studios closed its location at 693 High Street in January and reopened at 633 North High on May 1, tucked between existing neighbors La Chatelaine and Fritzy Jacobs. The turnaround wasn't long, and it points to the same underlying condition that's letting Wolf's Ridge, Joya's, and the two bookstores all bet on square footage built for staying rather than passing through: High Street storefronts keep finding new tenants, and increasingly those tenants are designing around dwell time.
Put the four newest examples next to each other and the shape is consistent. A historic inn that sat empty for seven years came back as a full-service restaurant and tavern. A breakfast café is adding a bar and its first dinner hours. A bookstore built a lounge and a private event room into its second floor. Another bookstore put a full bar downstairs. None of these businesses are optimized for the fifteen-minute stop that used to define a lot of retail on this street.
What That Means for the Next Two Saturdays
Market Day closes High Street to vehicle traffic on October 3 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., with over 160 vendors, food, and live entertainment filling the street between the Village Green and New England Avenue. The Fall Crawl runs the following week, Thursday, October 8, from 5 to 8 p.m., with tickets covering harvest-themed treats at more than 15 Old Worthington merchants, starting from the Cohatch location inside the Worthington Library at 752 High Street.
Anyone walking either event this year will pass storefronts that didn't exist, or didn't look like this, the last time they walked the same stretch. The Worthington Inn's windows will be lit instead of dark. Joya's will either already be serving dinner or visibly under construction to start. The Whispering Page's downstairs bar will be open to browsers who wandered in for a book and stayed for a drink. High Street hasn't gotten longer. It's just started asking people to spend more time on it once they're there.
If you're getting to know Old Worthington from the outside, whether you're weighing a move here or just trying to understand what the neighborhood actually feels like day to day, The Anne DeVoe Group keeps a running sense of what's changed on High Street and elsewhere in Upper Arlington and central Ohio. Schedule a free consultation and we'll walk you through what's actually new, block by block.
