Walk Forest Avenue right now and you'll pass three storefronts that didn't exist under their current names twelve months ago. No ribbon cuttings. No Instagram countdown reels. Just new signage, a soft open on a random Friday, and regulars figuring out the new menu by walking in.
Meanwhile, across town in the Old Port and the Arts District, Portland has been throwing itself a party. A four-star review. A grand opening with a dual turntable DJ booth. A waterfront restaurant that took ten months and a well-known ownership group to rebuild. Those openings get covered because they're built to be covered. Forest Avenue's turnover is doing something quieter and, if you're paying attention to what actually fills storefronts in this city, more telling.
Three Storefronts, One Long Block
Start at 865 Forest Ave. For years this was Mekong Asian Bistro. It's now Pho Viet, opened by owner Chau Dang, serving ten variations of pho alongside bun bo hue and a rotating list of noodle salads, open daily from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. with a bar and second-floor dining room overlooking the avenue.
A few blocks down, the building that housed Loco Taco is now Zaitun, Portland's first Somali restaurant, launched by owner Abdulrahman Idow on August 1. The menu runs from hummus topped with Somali spiced beef jerky to injera-based dishes and sambusas, a genuinely new cuisine category for that stretch of road.
Then there's 448 Forest Ave, the longtime home of Pizza Joint before it closed in 2024. Owners Kara Picone and Owen Price spent nearly a year building out the space, aiming to open by September 1, 2025 in time for football season, according to reporting in the Portland Press Herald. The actual opening didn't happen until February 5, 2026, five months later than planned. Salvatore's Hoagie Shop had been operating out of Howie's Pub's kitchen on Washington Avenue since 2023 before making the jump to its own address, bringing Philly-style hoagies, Sicilian and New York-style pizza, and malted milkshakes to a spot that had served pizza under one name or another for years.
Three different cuisines. Three different owner-operators, none of them chains, none of them backed by a hospitality group. Three storefronts that turned over in less than eighteen months without a single one of them making it into a citywide trend piece before now.
| Address | Former Tenant | New Tenant | Cuisine | Opened |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 865 Forest Ave | Mekong Asian Bistro | Pho Viet | Vietnamese | August 2026 |
| Forest Ave (former) | Loco Taco | Zaitun | Somali | August 1, 2026 |
| 448 Forest Ave | Pizza Joint | Salvatore's Hoagie Shop | Philly/Sicilian | February 5, 2026 |
The Old Port Got the Press Release
Compare that to what's happened downtown this month. On August 19, the team behind Arcadia, Dave Aceto, Nicole Costas and Dennis Gaines, opened Bad Neighbors at the corner of Congress and Brown Streets in the Arts District. The former Soakology space got a full renovation into a 75-seat listening bar built around a dual turntable DJ booth, with a 15-cocktail opening menu that includes drinks like the Yacht Club Martini. Two days later, on August 21, the Teal Duck held its grand opening on Exchange Street.
Both openings got same-day coverage from local food outlets. That's not an accident. Both sit in the two neighborhoods built for foot traffic and visibility, the Arts District and the Old Port, where a new bar or restaurant is part of the neighborhood's identity as a destination.
The Old Port's biggest story of the past year followed the same pattern. Dry Dock, the seafood tavern at 84 Commercial Street that ran for 35 years before closing in 2018, reopened in July 2025 after a renovation backed by the ownership team behind Luke's Lobster. The project more than doubled the outdoor deck capacity and added an entire new kitchen wing. Six months later, the Portland Press Herald gave it four stars, calling out the fish and chips and the fried cod cheeks by name.
That's the kind of reopening that comes with a narrative arc built in: a beloved name, a long closure, a careful restoration, a review that treats the return as a cultural event. It's a real story and a good one. It's just not the only turnover happening in this city right now, and it's not the one that tells you the most about where Portland's food scene actually has room to grow.
Why the Quiet Corridor Is the One to Watch
Forest Avenue doesn't get this treatment because it isn't built for it. It's a commuter corridor, not a tourist destination. The storefronts are smaller, the rents are lower, and the businesses that move into them tend to be owner-operators graduating from pop-ups and food trucks rather than groups with a marketing budget. Salvatore's spent three years building a following out of someone else's kitchen before it could afford its own address. That's a slower, less photogenic path than a bar backed by three established restaurateurs opening in the Arts District, but it's the more common one, and on Forest Avenue right now it's happening three times over in less than a year and a half.
That matters if you live along that corridor, because it means the pace of change on your own street has been faster than the pace of change downtown, even though downtown is the one that made the news. It also means the businesses filling those spaces are more likely to be first-time owners than proven restaurant groups, which is worth knowing if you're the kind of person who likes to walk in early, before a place has figured out its rhythm, rather than after a four-star review has already set expectations.
There's a version of this same story playing out at the edges of the city too. Belleville, the bakery run by Chris Deutsch and Amy Fuller, announced on August 28 that it's winding down retail operations through September, with final wholesale deliveries at month's end. Storefronts open. Storefronts close. The difference on Forest Avenue is that the closings have been getting refilled quickly, by real people building real menus, without anyone standing outside cutting a ribbon.
What This Means If You're Actually on That Block
If Pho Viet, Zaitun, and Salvatore's are all new to you, that's the point. None of the three has had the kind of write-up that turns a restaurant into a destination outside its own neighborhood yet. That's usually the window worth catching, before a place gets discovered by people driving in from other parts of the city and the Friday night wait gets long.
It's also a reminder that a lot of what makes a Portland neighborhood feel alive doesn't show up in the coverage built for tourists and first-time visitors. It shows up in which storefronts keep finding new tenants within a year of going dark, and what those tenants choose to serve. Forest Avenue's answer this year has been pho, Somali cuisine, and Philly hoagies, three cuisines that didn't have a foothold on that block before 2026. That's not decline. That's a corridor with enough foot traffic and enough demand that empty storefronts don't stay empty long, they just don't get a party when they fill back up.
Veronica Schneider tracks this kind of turnover block by block because it's the same texture that tells her which Portland streets are gaining momentum before the wider market notices. If you're weighing what a neighborhood's day-to-day changes actually mean for your own plans in Greater Portland, Veronica Schneider is glad to talk it through. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready.
