Downtown Powell Crossed A Line In 2026: What Changed On Olentangy Street

For years, downtown Powell worked as a collection of good independent restaurants strung along a state route. You picked a place, drove to it, parked in front, ate, and left. In 2026 that pattern quietly broke. A three-story mass timber building opened on East Olentangy, a rooftop bar started taking reservations above it, a coworking house next door filled with weekday traffic, and a boutique hotel proposal landed at City Council. The result is that Powell now has something it did not have twelve months ago: a walkable evening block where the parking lot is the beginning of the night rather than the whole plan.

This post is the resident's map to what actually shifted, which businesses are worth knowing by name, and which pieces of the plan are still on paper.

The Three-Block Shift

The center of gravity has moved a few hundred feet east and west of the Olentangy–Liberty intersection. The clearest way to see it is by address.

Four of those addresses did not exist as active hospitality in January 2025. Two more are pending. That is the shift in one table.

Why A Rooftop Actually Matters

Lani Rooftop Lounge, located on the third floor of COhatch's new building on East Olentangy Street, opened to the public on April 9, marking Powell's first rooftop bar and restaurant. The menu leans on globally-inspired small plates drawing from Japanese, French and Italian cuisines, along with handcrafted cocktails, developed by chef Quichocho Lingo and mixologist Alex Johnson. It runs Wednesday through Saturday, with reservations through OpenTable and parking at street level and in Powell's public parking lots.

The information gain is not the cocktails. It is the second seating. A rooftop with reservations gives the downtown a place people go after dinner at Local Roots or Kraft House No. 5, which means an evening on Olentangy Street can now sustain two stops without a car in between. That is the definition of a district rather than a strip.

The building itself is worth knowing. It is a three-story, 14,000-square-foot space with meeting rooms, private offices, a shared kitchen, and the 11th COhatch location in the Columbus area, the 41st nationwide. Next door, the Middlebury Member House is a restored historic home designed as a lodge-style setting for members to work, meet and host private events. Together they generate weekday foot traffic that Olentangy has never had at scale before.

The 48,000 Number

The most useful figure in Powell's 2026 downtown story is not a median price or a permit count. It is a visitor number the city put on the record in November 2025, when a developer walked into a Council committee meeting with plans for a hotel.

Transform Construction submitted plans for a two-story restaurant at 147 W. Olentangy St. and a three-story building at 173 W. Olentangy St. that would house another restaurant, retail space, and a 16-room boutique hotel, at a combined investment of about $7.8 million.

Why here, why now? Economic Development Administrator Sean Hughes gave the answer on the record:

"Boutique hotels will do a lot of things for our downtown. We realized that we're already seeing 48,000 overnight trips per year in our downtown, so where are those people staying right now?"

Read that as a resident, not an investor. It says Powell already draws roughly 130 overnight visits a night, most of whom currently sleep somewhere else and drive back out. If the proposal moves forward with the 75% property tax abatements over 15 years the City is weighing, the developer would save about $190,000 on the restaurant project and roughly $1.5 million on the hotel building. That is the incentive structure sitting under everything else on the block.

The plan also comes with jobs and payroll numbers the City has published: more than 70 full-time jobs and about $1.95 million in new payroll to downtown, generating around $39,000 annually in payroll taxes. Whether those pencil out is a separate question. What matters for a resident this month is that the two empty lots between the coffee shops are not going to stay empty.

The Food Openings, In Order

A few names to keep straight, because they arrived close together and get confused:

• CoccoKay Bites, at 170 W. Olentangy St., is the multinational spot founded by husband-and-wife team Bala and Priya Somakandan, featuring food and drink options from India and Sri Lanka as well as other European and Asian cuisines. The signature is a four-foot-long dosa, designed for sharing, alongside biriyani, Indo-Chinese fried rice, and bubble tea.
• Khaab Indian Kitchen & Bar is the second location of the Bexley original, coming to 230 W. Olentangy Street in Powell. Owner Dalbir Mavi told What Now Columbus he is hoping for a soft opening in April or May. It sits in the Village Pointe Center shopping area, in the same plaza as Pizza Twist, near Kobe Grill and Construction Corner, just west of downtown Powell.
• Glazed Over joined the downtown mix earlier in the year, with a February 26, 2026 opening date.

Alongside these newcomers, the anchors that made downtown Powell worth a drive in the first place are still doing their work. Local Roots holds down the farm-to-table role off East Olentangy. Kraft House No. 5 runs the gastropub side. Nocterra Brewing Co. is still the beer garden with the food truck out back, and it hosts a run night worth putting on your calendar.

What Is Actually On This Season

If you already live here, the useful list is not "top restaurants." It is what recurring things you can walk to this week. From the City of Powell and Visit Powell calendars:

• Nocterra Run Club, every Thursday at 6:15 p.m., partnered with Columbus Running Company, followed by a hangout in the taproom or beer garden.
• Powell Street Market & Business Expo, Sunday, September 13, 2026, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., with 60-plus vendors filling downtown along with food trucks.
• Movie Night on the Green at the Village Green Amphitheater, shown on a large LED screen, free, with sponsors including Niehaus Insurance, the Powell Development Corporation and the City of Powell.
• Downtown walking tour with Sherry Carmichael, leaving from the Martin Perry House at 103 E. Olentangy Street, focused on the historic buildings and her own remembrances of the 1950s and '60s. Reservations required through the Powell-Liberty Historical Society.
• Summer DORA music nights on the Village Green, where you can grab dinner from a downtown restaurant, carry a DORA beverage from a participating business, and stay for live music.

None of these require you to leave the district once you have parked.

The Streetscape Under Your Feet

The block only works as a district because the plumbing changed underneath it. Along East Olentangy, the City coordinated sidewalk construction, on-street parking and utility work, as well as plans to extend Scioto Street and add public parking. Behind the COhatch site, a new public parking lot is also planned, along with an extension of Scioto Street so that it connects North Liberty Street and Grace Drive.

That extension is the quiet piece that will do more for a Saturday night than any single restaurant. It converts the northeast quadrant of downtown from a place you drive past into a block you can circle on foot. City Manager Andrew White has framed the strategy publicly as blending modern development with historical preservation, and the two-address pattern at 50 and 60 East Olentangy, a new mass timber building next to a hundred-year-old house, is that policy in physical form.

What This Means For Someone Who Already Lives Here

You do not need to do anything different this month. The point is that a year from now, the default weekend in Powell will look different than it did a year ago, and the change is happening on a specific three-block stretch you can walk. The rooftop is open. The Indian restaurant is opening. The hotel is in the pipeline. Scioto Street is coming. The events calendar is filling in around them.

If you are the neighbor who tracks these things because you own on Liberty or Grace or somewhere off Olentangy Orange Road and you want a sense of what the downtown shift means for your street specifically, that is the sort of question we like getting. Talk with a local agent at Michael Bradley Gibson and we will walk it through with you, block by block.