Houlihan's closed at Kingsdale in January without any announcement, any farewell post, or any explanation from the company. One week the booths along the front window were full of the same regulars who had been ordering the same appetizers for over a decade. The next week the lights were off and the sign was still up, because nobody had bothered to take it down yet.
That kind of quiet exit usually means nothing changes for a while. A restaurant closes, a for-lease sign goes up, and the space sits empty for a year or two until something forgettable moves in. That is not what happened here. Within six months, a well-known Columbus restaurant family had signed the lease. Half a mile away on Henderson Road, a national concept that had never operated in Ohio opened its doors. And underneath both of those storefronts, the redevelopment that began when the old Macy's building came down in 2021 kept moving forward on its own separate timeline. Three unrelated decisions, all landing on the same stretch of Upper Arlington in the same twelve months.
The Booth That Emptied in January
The Houlihan's space at 3150 Tremont Road had anchored that corner of Kingsdale for more than ten years before it closed. No cause was given publicly, which left the space open for speculation among neighbors who had watched it stay busy on weeknights for years.
By June, the replacement had a name and a pedigree. Rick Doody, the son of Lindey's founder Sue Doody and co-founder of what became the Bravo Brio Restaurant Group before it was acquired in 2018, is converting the old Houlihan's into The Arlington Grille through his current company, NCR Ventures. His group opened Bar Italia at Easton Town Center last year, and the plan for Kingsdale borrows its bones from two of NCR's existing Cleveland-area rooms, Cedar Creek Grille and 17 River Grille. Renderings show a wood-and-leather dining room and a year-round patio with a fireplace, and the Columbus-based firm Design Collective is handling the buildout. "Upper Arlington is a special community," Doody told WCMH when the plans were announced. A director at his company put the strategy even more plainly: "Houlihan's was such an institution in the area, and we're leaning into that."
The target is an opening before the end of 2026, which would put a full-service, sit-down restaurant back in that anchor space less than a year after it went dark.
Ohio's First Umi, Half a Mile West
While Doody's team was signing paperwork on Tremont Road, an entirely different kind of restaurant opened on Henderson Road without much fanfare. Umi Hotpot Sushi & Seafood Buffet began serving customers at 1841 West Henderson Road on April 1, its first location anywhere in Ohio. The chain runs roughly two dozen locations nationally, most of them clustered in the Mid-Atlantic, with a smaller footprint in the Midwest, Texas, and Florida. Its Upper Arlington menu runs past 200 items a day, snow crab legs, stone crab claws, whole baked crab, hot pot, ramen, and a full sushi and sashimi bar, priced at $26.99 for a weekday lunch and $39.99 for weekday dinners and all weekend service.
Henderson Road already had a following among diners who like the buffet format. The stretch was home to the kind of Asian takeout and serve-yourself spreads that build repeat customers slowly, and Umi is now competing there alongside newer arrivals like The Feast Buffet on Bethel Road and The City Buffet on Soldano Boulevard, both of which opened in 2025.
The contrast between the two bets is worth sitting with. Doody is putting a proven local name into an empty box on a block that has not had this much retail turnover in years. Umi picked a corridor that already had the customer base built in and simply added a bigger, splashier version of what was already working. One restaurant is betting on where the neighborhood is headed. The other bet on where it already was.
Why the Timing Makes Sense
The reason a seasoned operator like Doody would bet on an anchor space that just lost a decade-old tenant has less to do with restaurants and more to do with what has been rising, literally, on the block behind them.
The old Lazarus and Macy's building at Kingsdale sat vacant for years before it was finally torn down in 2021, over the objections of preservationists who had hoped to save its blue-glazed brick facade. Continental Real Estate took over the 6.23-acre site and has been building it out in pieces ever since. As of a late 2022 update from the developer, a seven-story, 143-unit senior living building called Coventry was already under construction on that footprint, with a companion plan for a roughly 325-unit apartment building further down the line.
The piece of that plan residents can already walk into is the city's new Bob Crane Community Center, which opened its doors in 2025 and marked its first full year of operation this past spring. It sits at 3200 Tremont Road, inside the same mixed-use footprint the city and Continental have been developing since the Macy's building came down, and it now draws daily foot traffic for its pool, gym, and fitness programs.
Put those pieces together and the restaurant math gets easier to follow. A seven-story senior building brings a fixed population within walking distance. A community center draws people through the block every single day, not just on weekends. A restaurant operator scouting Kingsdale in 2026 is looking at a very different customer base than one who might have scouted the same block five years ago, back when the anchor building next door was still an empty department store.
What Didn't Move
Not every part of this stretch of Upper Arlington is in flux. The Upper Arlington Farmers Market has run every Wednesday from 3 to 6 p.m. along Dorset Road, in front of St. Mark's Episcopal Church near Tremont Center, since May 13, and it will keep going through October 21. The market is a partnership between the city, the nonprofit Common Greens, and Littleton's Market, and it draws between 30 and 40 vendors selling produce, pasture-raised meat, cheese, and baked goods every week.
A few blocks away, the Upper Arlington Public Library's Tremont Road branch has held its corner for decades and keeps its regular calendar of talks and programs running, including a foreign policy lecture from a former NATO deputy secretary general scheduled for later this month.
And today, September 7, marks the 60th Labor Day Arts Festival at Northam Park, free to attend, with live music, food, and hands-on activities like felting and block printing running from morning into the afternoon. It is the same event, in the same park, that has closed out summer in Upper Arlington for six decades. The restaurants around it keep changing. The festival does not.
Reading the Two Timelines Together
The Kingsdale side of Tremont Road turned over its longest-running restaurant, welcomed a national dining concept that had never operated in this state, and kept a multi-building redevelopment moving forward five years after the old anchor store came down, all inside a single calendar year. A few blocks east, the market, the library, and a sixty-year-old festival did not budge. Both things are true about Upper Arlington right now, and neither one cancels out the other. The neighborhood is changing exactly where it makes sense to change, and holding steady everywhere else.
If you are the kind of person who tracks these shifts because you are curious about where you live, or because you are quietly wondering what it means for your own street, The Anne DeVoe Group spends a lot of time watching this exact corner of central Ohio. Schedule a free consultation whenever you would like to talk through what any of it means for you.
