Stand at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Camelback Road today and you're looking at a French bakery. A year ago you would have found Belly Kitchen & Bar, the Southeast Asian fusion spot that closed its original Phoenix location in October 2024. Before Belly, the building held something else. The paint changes, the menu changes, the crowd outside on a Saturday morning changes. The square footage does not.
That's the pattern worth noticing on Melrose's stretch of Seventh Avenue this year, and it cuts against the story the neighborhood usually tells about itself. The district has real momentum right now: a bakery drawing lines for pastries, a taco shop making a long-delayed comeback, a merchants association still filling half a mile of sidewalk every February. But look at where each new business actually landed, and you'll find that almost none of it is new space. It's the same storefronts changing hands faster than they used to, with one clear exception that did something different.
Two Reopenings, Zero New Buildings
Brasserie Melrose opened in December 2025 inside the two-story midcentury building at 4971 N. Seventh Ave., the same corner that housed Belly. Owners James Lenhart and Tory Johnson took over the property in September 2025 and built a French-inspired concept designed to run all day, from a morning bakery counter to a second-story cocktail lounge wrapped in black-and-white striped drapes. By August 2026, Phoenix New Times had added it to the paper's Top 50 restaurants list and nominated it for Best New Restaurant and Best Bakery in the paper's reader poll. That's a fast climb for a business not yet a year old, and it says something real about execution. It says nothing about the district gaining capacity, because the building didn't change size. It changed hands.
A half mile south, the same thing happened in reverse. America's Taco Shop opened this summer at 4306 N. Seventh Ave., the former home of Melrose Kitchen, a breakfast and brunch spot that has since closed. This is a homecoming with history behind it. Owners America Corrales and Terry Bortin opened their original shop on Seventh Street north of McDowell Road in 2008, then expanded into Melrose, Tempe, and Old Town Scottsdale. Rising rents closed all of those locations except Old Town over the years that followed. The Melrose comeback marks the first time the shop has operated in the district since 2014, twelve years of a gap that a lot of longtime residents will remember.
"Happy to be back in the Melrose neighborhood, which is probably my favorite neighborhood that we've ever been in," Bortin told Axios Phoenix when the reopening was announced.
Here's the table that makes the pattern visible instead of anecdotal:
| Address | Previous Tenant | Current Tenant | What Actually Changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4971 N. Seventh Ave. | Belly Kitchen & Bar (closed Oct. 2024) | Brasserie Melrose (opened Dec. 2025) | Concept and ownership. Same footprint. |
| 4306 N. Seventh Ave. | Melrose Kitchen (closed) | America's Taco Shop (opened 2026) | Concept and ownership. Same footprint. |
| 635 W. Glenrosa Ave. | Vacant auto body garages | The Royale (opened Jan. 2024) | New use entirely. Space that wasn't retail before. |
Two of those three rows are the same story with different names attached. The third is the one that broke the pattern, and it's worth understanding why.
The One Project That Added Real Space
The Royale sits a block off Seventh Avenue on Glenrosa, in a complex of old auto body garages that developers Mark Howard and Rocco Menaguale converted into a multi-tenant retail and food hub. Howard and Menaguale are not new to the neighborhood. They previously ran Bliss ReBAR and Fez, and Howard still owns FEZ Restaurant & Bar downtown. When The Royale opened in January 2024, it launched with eight tenants including Cult Hair Salon & Spa, Window Coffee Bar, Stem Swag florist, and YUMBAR, the complex's largest tenant.
What makes this project different from Brasserie Melrose or America's Taco Shop isn't the quality of the businesses. It's what the ground looked like before. Auto body shops aren't restaurants waiting to be renamed. Turning that footprint into retail and dining meant building sidewalks where none existed, creating a parking area from scratch, and working with the city to get a four-way stop installed at Sixth Drive and Glenrosa, an intersection neighborhood associations had been asking about for years. That's actual capacity added to the district. Nothing about a restaurant swap on Seventh Avenue does that.
What the Anchors Tell You
Not everything on Seventh Avenue is churning, and the businesses that have stayed put are part of why the district still feels coherent even as tenants change around them. A few worth knowing if you spend any time in the neighborhood:
- Fry Bread House, opened by Cecelia Miller in 1992, is one of only three Arizona restaurants and the first Native American restaurant to win a James Beard America's Classics award, a recognition it earned in 2012.
- Thunderbird Lounge, tucked into the historic Melrose Pharmacy building, runs an arcade-style front bar that opens onto a hidden back patio, a low-key spot that hasn't needed reinvention to stay relevant.
- Copper Star Coffee, housed in a converted gas station on Seventh Avenue, still runs as a drive-through with locally roasted coffee and weekend pastry specials that draw a loyal regular crowd.
- Sandfish Sushi and Whiskey, chef Engin Onural's Scandinavian-styled sushi bar, has held its footing as one of the district's more distinctive dining rooms while newer concepts cycled in and out around it.
These places didn't need a reopening announcement or a Top 50 nod to matter. They're the fixed points that make the turnover elsewhere legible. When a storefront changes hands on Seventh Avenue, you notice it against a backdrop that mostly hasn't moved.
Why This Matters If You Already Live Here
None of this makes Melrose a district in decline or a district in a boom, and it's worth resisting both stories. What's happening is narrower and more specific: the businesses occupying the strip are getting sharper, and the pace at which spaces trade hands has picked up, but the physical inventory of storefronts along Seventh Avenue has barely grown. The Royale is still the exception, not the pattern, nearly three years after it opened.
That distinction matters for anyone who treats Seventh Avenue as a weekly habit rather than a novelty. A faster reopening cycle means the specific restaurant you love today has a shorter shelf life than it might have a decade ago, when Fry Bread House and Copper Star Coffee could stay put for years without a serious challenger moving in next door. It also means the district's biggest annual gathering, the Seventh Avenue Merchants Association's Street Fair, still matters as much as any single opening. This year's edition ran on February 28 and drew a reported 25,000 people across a half mile of Seventh Avenue, with a beer garden from Huss Brewing and a classic car show that's been part of the event for years. That kind of turnout doesn't depend on which bakery or taco shop happens to be occupying a given address. It depends on the merchants association, the murals, and the rainbow crosswalk at Seventh and Glenrosa continuing to give the strip an identity that outlasts any one tenant.
If you've watched a favorite spot close and wondered whether the neighborhood was thinning out, the honest answer based on what's actually happened this year is no. The buildings are staying full. They're just changing names faster than they used to, and only one project in the past two years has actually made room for something that wasn't there before.
Melrose isn't the only Phoenix corridor worth watching this closely, and if you're curious how a neighborhood's daily rhythm connects to what's happening in the broader housing market around it, that's a conversation Lisa Gatchalian has regularly with clients across Phoenix and the East Valley. Reach out anytime. Let's connect.
