Walk down Olentangy Street this week and count the storefronts you don't recognize yet. If you haven't strolled it end to end since last spring, the number will surprise you. A rooftop bar and a new kitchen opened along that stretch within about nine weeks of each other this spring, a second Indian restaurant announced it was coming to the same two blocks, and a boutique hotel proposed the fall before any of them still hasn't broken ground. A block over on Liberty Street, a gastropub that opened a full year earlier than all of it is still the anchor everyone forgets started this.
The order it happened in matters more than most write-ups let on, because it tells you something the individual openings don't: this wasn't one steady trickle of new restaurants. It was a year of quiet, then a burst, while the one project that could have led the whole thing, the hotel, is still waiting on the incentives it needs to move.
The Order It Actually Happened In
Here's the sequence, as it actually unfolded:
- April 2025 — Liberty Social Bar & Kitchen opened at 240 N. Liberty St, taking over the former Gallup's Bar & Kitchen space. Owner Syam Duddela built it as a two-level, 240-seat spot with a lunch menu of smash burgers and a dinner menu that runs to steak, salmon, and lamb chops.
- November 2025 — Developer Transform Construction brought plans to Powell's Development Committee for a two-story restaurant at 147 W. Olentangy St and a three-story building at 173 W. Olentangy St combining another restaurant, retail space, and a 16-room boutique hotel.
- March 2026 — Khaab Indian Kitchen & Bar announced a new location at 230 W. Olentangy St, its second after the original in Bexley, targeting a spring opening that hadn't been finalized at the time of the announcement.
- April 9, 2026 — Lani Rooftop Lounge opened on the third floor of COhatch's new building on East Olentangy Street, Powell's first rooftop bar. The space includes a main dining room, a sky room, and a patio, with a menu built around Japanese, French, and Italian small plates.
- June 10, 2026 — CoccoKay Bites opened at 170 W. Olentangy St. Founders Bala and Priya Somakandan built the menu around Indian, Sri Lankan, and European dishes, including a four-foot dosa meant to be shared, and the restaurant grew out of the couple's ghost kitchen operation at Clintonville's High Street Kitchens.
Line those up and the pattern is a year of near-silence followed by a sprint. Liberty Social had the block to itself for about twelve months. Then, in the space of roughly nine weeks this spring, Lani opened and CoccoKay Bites opened, with Khaab's announcement landing in between them. The hotel proposal, the one project that was on the table before any of this year's restaurants, is still the one thing on this list without a confirmed opening date.
Why the City Bet on Overnight Guests
The piece that explains the timing is the one still stuck in process. The combined Transform Construction project runs about $7.8 million, and the city was weighing 75 percent property tax abatements over 15 years for both sites, a structure that would save the developer roughly $190,000 on the restaurant building and about $1.5 million on the hotel. That proposal predates every restaurant that has actually opened since, and nothing in the public record since that November meeting confirms whether the abatement was approved or ground has broken.
The reasoning the city's economic development administrator gave at that meeting is worth sitting with. Downtown Powell is already pulling in an estimated 48,000 overnight trips a year, and the city doesn't have anywhere close to enough lodging to match that demand. A hotel running at full occupancy, using the state's average visitor spending figure of about $327 a day, could generate close to $1.9 million a year in visitor spending, or something like $28.7 million over the 15-year abatement window.
That's the mechanism behind everything you're now walking past on Olentangy Street. The restaurants aren't a coincidence sitting next to a coincidental hotel proposal. They're two pieces of the same bet: that downtown Powell already has more visitors than it has places for them to eat, sleep, or spend an evening, and the fastest way to catch up is to subsidize a cluster of projects into existence in the same few blocks at the same time.
What's Actually There Now, and What It's For
If you're deciding where to eat on a given night, the four new spots split cleanly by mood rather than by price point.
Liberty Social is the one built for a group that can't agree on what it wants. Two floors, a full bar upstairs available for parties, and a menu wide enough to cover a Reuben order next to a lamb chop order at the same table. It's also the one open the widest hours, running lunch through dinner most days with weekend brunch added in.
CoccoKay Bites is the one for a smaller table looking for something you can't easily order anywhere else nearby. The four-foot dosa is the headline, but the menu also runs through Indo-Chinese fried rice, Indian street food, and a long bubble tea list, all coming out of a business that started as a ghost kitchen before it had a storefront at all.
Khaab, once its Powell location is up and running, slots in as the date-night option. Its original Bexley location built a reputation on cocktails paired with traditional Indian dishes, and the Powell expansion is aiming at the same register, just closer to home for anyone who's been driving down to Bexley for it.
Lani is the one you go to for the view rather than the entree. It's Powell's only rooftop, and the seasonal small-plates menu, put together by a culinary director who's worked kitchens in California, Massachusetts, and Guam alongside a Columbus-based head chef, is built around cocktails and shared plates rather than a full sit-down dinner.
Four restaurants, four different reasons to pick one over the others on a given night, and only three of them arrived in this year's rush. That's the part a simple "new restaurants in Powell" list misses. This isn't four competitors chasing the same customer. It's a corridor that diversified in stages, with one long-running anchor and a fast, recent burst around it.
The Older Anchors Are Still Doing the Same Job
None of this displaced what was already working downtown. Kraft House No. 5, at the corner of Powell and Liberty Roads, and Local Roots are both still running the same craft-food, half-price-appetizer routine that made them neighborhood regulars before any of the new construction started. If your Thursday evening run club route runs past Nocterra Brewing Co., that route now also passes within a block of three of the new openings without you having to add a single turn.
The city's older institutions are keeping their own pace, too. The Powell Liberty Historical Society opened the Martin-Perry House, a restored 1889 farmhouse at 103 E. Olentangy Street, for free fall open-house tours on the first and third Sundays starting this month. The next one lands September 20.
This Weekend Is Actually a Good Test Drive
If you want to see the new corridor and the older Powell in the same afternoon without planning much, this Sunday does it for you. The Powell Street Market & Business Expo runs downtown on September 13 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., which puts you within walking distance of every new opening on this list while local vendors set up around you. The day before, Echo Spirits on the Vine is hosting a free outdoor Barre3 class paired with a wine social, if you'd rather start the weekend with something slower before the market crowd shows up.
None of this requires a plan. It's a few blocks, a Sunday morning, and a downtown that added more in nine weeks this spring than it had in the year before it.
If you're weighing a move to Powell rather than just wondering what's new for dinner, that's a different conversation, and one Megan S. Bell has walked plenty of Central Ohio buyers and sellers through before. Let's Connect when you're ready to talk through what a neighborhood like this actually looks like from the buyer's side.
