For the better part of two years, if you wanted to know what was coming to downtown Powell, you had to sit through a city council meeting or read a zoning packet. A groundbreaking here, a first reading there, a rendering of a rooftop bar that existed only as an architect's file. That phase is over. Between February and August of this year, most of what had been discussed finally opened its doors, and the four-block stretch of East and West Olentangy Street now functions the way those meetings said it would.
Start with the biggest piece. COhatch broke ground on its Powell campus at 50 and 60 East Olentangy Street in late 2024. Fifteen months of construction later, the coworking and event space opened to members on March 2, 2026, with the Lani Rooftop Lounge, a Hawaiian-inspired indoor and outdoor bar, following at the end of that same month. The restored historic home on the property, now called the Middlebury Member House, welcomed its first members in May and by June had been reworked into a bookable corporate retreat space with a patio, fire pits, and a kitchen built around a serious espresso setup. That is not a slow rollout. That is a single property adding a new public-facing amenity every few weeks across a single spring.
What Actually Opened, and When
It helps to see the sequence laid out, because no single headline captured all of it at once:
- February 26, 2026: Glazed Over, a hand-rolled, small-batch donut shop that started in Sandusky, opened inside Liberty Plaza at 240 North Liberty Street.
- March 2, 2026: COhatch's coworking campus opened to members at 50 and 60 East Olentangy Street.
- Late March 2026: The Lani Rooftop Lounge debuted on the third floor of the COhatch building, open to the public and not just members.
- May 2026: The Middlebury Member House opened for meetings and private events.
- This year: Khaab Indian Kitchen & Bar announced a Powell expansion, building on the success of its original Bexley location.
None of this happened because a developer picked Powell at random. Matt Davis, COhatch's CEO and co-founder, has lived in Powell with his wife for more than two decades, and he described the opening as launching the concept "in our hometown" rather than in a market they'd simply identified on a map. That detail matters more than it looks like it should, because it explains why the project leaned toward restoration over demolition. The Middlebury House is a converted historic home, not a new build, and it's COhatch's 38th building restoration nationally rather than its first attempt at one.
The Rooftop Changes the Math on a Weeknight
Before this year, an evening out in Powell meant driving to Sawmill Parkway or picking from the handful of restaurants that have anchored the downtown for years. Lani changes that math because it's the first rooftop bar the downtown has had, full stop. The space sits above the coworking floor, accessible by elevator, with south and west-facing windows, a firepit on the patio, and a west-facing section that can be enclosed once the weather turns. You do not need a COhatch membership to sit at that bar. Members get some priority booking and occasional perks like bartending classes, but the lounge itself is open to anyone who walks in.
A coworking company's rooftop sounds like a members-only amenity dressed up as a neighborhood bar, but Lani isn't that. It's a public restaurant and bar that happens to sit on top of a coworking building, which is why people who have never set foot in the coworking space downstairs are already showing up just for a drink after work.
The Food Scene Filled in Around It
Glazed Over beat COhatch to the punch by about a week, opening its Liberty Plaza location on February 26 with a lineup of hand-cut donuts, pastries, and coffee running from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. It's a small addition next to a much bigger one, but it's the kind of business that tells you something about foot traffic patterns: a donut shop that closes at 1 p.m. is betting on a morning crowd that's already walking the downtown, not driving in for a special occasion.
Khaab Indian Kitchen & Bar took the opposite bet. The restaurant's first Central Ohio location in Bexley did well enough that ownership announced a second location in Powell this year, describing the concept as elevated Indian cuisine paired with a full bar, aimed at everything from date nights to celebrations. Between Khaab's arrival and the existing restaurant base along Olentangy Street, downtown Powell now has a wider range of dinner options than it did even a year ago.
Separately, on Sawmill Parkway, Cava opened its Powell-area location at 9711 Sawmill Parkway in August 2026, its third confirmed spot in the Columbus market. That's a different corridor from the historic downtown, more fast-casual chain than neighborhood restaurant, and the two are growing at the same time for different reasons. Downtown is filling in with independent, sit-down concepts. Sawmill Parkway is filling in with the kind of national fast-casual brands that tend to follow rooftop counts and traffic studies rather than historic preservation grants.
A Sunday That Shows You the Whole Thing at Once
If you want to see the downtown's current state in a single afternoon, the Powell Street Market and Business Expo on September 13 was built for exactly that. The event runs from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and brings more than 60 local vendors along with food trucks and the chance to meet upward of 20 Powell Chamber member businesses in one pass. It's the kind of event that only works if there's enough foot traffic infrastructure to support it, and this year there clearly is.
The Powell Liberty Historical Society is running its own counter-programming this fall with open-house tours of the Martin-Perry House at 103 East Olentangy Street, a restored 1889 farmhouse open from 1 to 4 p.m. on the first and third Sundays starting in September. Admission is free, and it's a reminder that the same stretch of road hosting a rooftop cocktail bar also has a 137-year-old farmhouse a few blocks away, still standing, still telling the same local story it always has. IMBC, meanwhile, hosted its own low-key version of a Sunday plan on September 6, a flower-arranging session called Blooms n Brews led by Evelyn of Martha Jane's Flower Farm, where a beer in hand came with a take-home bouquet. Nothing about it made headlines, but it's the kind of small, recurring gathering that fills out an actual weekend once the bigger anchors are already in place.
What's Still Just a Proposal
Not everything from those city council packets has been built yet. Transform Construction has submitted plans for a two-story restaurant at 147 West Olentangy Street, on the site of the long-vacant Campbell House, along with a three-story building at 173 West Olentangy Street that would combine another restaurant, retail space, and a 16-room boutique hotel. The combined investment is estimated at $7.8 million, and the city has been weighing a 75 percent property tax abatement over 15 years to help make it happen. Powell's economic development administrator has been direct about why the city keeps pursuing more restaurant space: residents keep asking for more choices, not fewer.
The hotel piece is the one still generating real debate. City officials have questioned whether Powell's visitor demand justifies a boutique hotel at all, and the project's own parking plan, a shared arrangement between the two sites, has drawn concern from the neighboring Powell Crossing apartment ownership over site access. None of that has stopped the projects from moving through the approval process, but neither one is open yet, which means the corridor's next chapter is still being written in meeting minutes rather than storefronts.
What This Adds Up To
The pattern across all of it is compression. Projects that spent 2023 and 2024 as line items in planning commission agendas landed almost on top of each other in 2026, which means the downtown didn't creep toward its current state. It arrived there in the space of about six months. If you drove through Powell last fall, you saw scaffolding and sidewalk closures. Drive through this fall and you'll see a rooftop bar with people on it, a donut case that's usually down to the last few by midmorning, and a 137-year-old farmhouse with its doors open on alternating Sundays.
If you're curious about how downtown Powell's changes fit into the broader picture of the neighborhood, reach out to The Grandey Group. We're always glad to talk about what's happening in the communities we call home.
