Walk down East Olentangy Street on a Thursday at 6:15 in the evening and you will see a small crowd gathering outside Nocterra Brewing, stretching, comparing notes on the week, waiting for the Nocterra Run Club to head out. That part hasn't changed. What has changed is what happens after the run. A year ago, the group filtered back into one taproom and called it a night. Now some of them keep walking two doors down, take an elevator to the third floor of a building that didn't exist yet in 2025, and end up on a rooftop with a view of the whole downtown grid.

That building is COhatch Powell, and the rooftop is Lani Lounge. Between the two of them, plus a run of new restaurants and a stalled-out construction saga a few blocks over, downtown Powell has quietly stopped being a place you visit for an occasion and started being a place with a weekly rhythm. If your mental map of Olentangy Street is more than a year old, it needs an update, and not the kind where a coffee shop changed its logo.

The Building That Reset The Math

COhatch opened its Powell campus at 50 and 60 East Olentangy Street on March 2, 2026, a 13,900-square-foot coworking and event space that also includes a restored historic home called the Middlebury Member House. That alone would have been a modest downtown addition. What actually shifted the block's character came five weeks later, when Lani Rooftop Lounge opened to the public on April 9.

Lani sits on the third floor of the same building and holds the distinction of being Powell's first rooftop bar, one of roughly ten in all of Central Ohio. The kitchen is led by Culinary Director Lingo Quichocho and local Columbus chef Michael Gadd, serving small plates that draw on Japanese, French and Italian technique alongside cocktails, with three distinct seating areas: a patio, a main dining room, and a sky room. It runs Wednesday through Saturday, with hours that stretch from an early-evening 4 to 9 p.m. midweek out to a full noon-to-11 p.m. Saturday. Reservations go through OpenTable, and parking is street-level or in Powell's public lots.

None of that reads as remarkable on its own. What makes it worth noticing is what it replaced: nothing. There was no rooftop anything in Powell before this year. A resident who wanted an elevated evening out drove to Dublin or Columbus. Now it's a five-minute walk from the same taproom where the run club just finished stretching.

What A Week On Olentangy Street Actually Looks Like Now

The easiest way to see the shift is to lay the calendar flat.

The bottom row is the old model. The Powell Street Market & Business Expo is a single Sunday, once a year, with more than 60 local vendors, food trucks, and proceeds benefiting the Powell-Liberty Historical Society, the Ohio Crime Victim Justice Center, and the Powell Sertoma Club. It's a good day, and worth planning around, but it's one day. So is the Powell Festival every June, and so is the historic walking tour that guide Sherry Carmichael leads periodically from the Martin Perry House at 103 East Olentangy Street, reservations required through the historical society. These are the events that have defined downtown Powell for years: excellent, but occasional.

The top three rows are new, and they're not occasional. They repeat every single week whether or not anyone is marketing them as an event. That's the actual change. Downtown Powell picked up a weekday personality it didn't have before, layered on top of the annual highlights it already had.

The Rest Of The Block Hasn't Caught Up

Here's the part that doesn't show up in the press releases about Lani and COhatch: a few blocks away, on the west side of downtown, nothing has moved yet.

Since 2025, a developer called Transform Construction has been trying to redevelop two properties on West Olentangy Street, the vacant Campbell House at 147 W. Olentangy and the old Milano Florist building at 173 W. Olentangy. The plans call for a two-story restaurant on the smaller lot and a three-story building on the larger one that would combine ground-floor retail or a restaurant with a 16-room boutique hotel above it. Transform's president, Joshua Weir, also owns Koble Grill directly across the street, which gives him a fairly direct stake in whether the block fills back in.

As of a November 2025 presentation to Powell's Development Committee, the combined investment is estimated at $7.8 million, and the city is 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. The city's own economic development administrator put the rationale plainly: residents keep asking for more restaurant choices downtown. But the project has also drawn formal objection from the owners of the neighboring Powell Crossing apartments over a shared parking and access easement, a dispute that was still unresolved when it went before the Planning and Zoning Commission.

So the honest picture, walking the full length of Olentangy Street today, is a two-speed downtown. The east end, anchored by COhatch and Lani, is finished and already generating foot traffic on a weekly cycle. The west end is still a long-vacant house and a shuttered flower shop tied up in a parking dispute, with a hotel that the mayor himself has publicly questioned the need for. If you've been wondering why one half of downtown feels transformed and the other half looks exactly like it did two years ago, that's why. The momentum is real, but it hasn't finished traveling the whole block yet.

New Names Worth Learning

The restaurant additions this year haven't been limited to the rooftop. Khaab Indian Kitchen & Bar announced a new Powell location in 2026, building on the success of its original Bexley spot, with a menu built around traditional recipes and a more contemporary bar program. On the more casual end, a doughnut shop called Glazed Over opened in Powell this past February, giving the morning coffee run one more option before the school drop-off rush.

None of this is dramatic on its own. A doughnut shop, an Indian restaurant expansion, a rooftop bar. But stack them against a downtown that a year ago had a fairly fixed and familiar lineup, and the rate of turnover itself is the story. Storefronts that would normally sit vacant for a season or two are filling faster than the usual pace, and the businesses filling them are placing real bets on foot traffic that mostly didn't exist before COhatch broke ground.

Why It's Worth Paying Attention If You Already Live Here

None of this requires you to do anything. You don't need to buy a rooftop membership or start running on Thursdays. But if your sense of downtown Powell is still built around the Festival in June and the market in September, you're missing the part that now happens every week without fanfare. The run club still meets. The rooftop is just there now too, four nights a week, five minutes from where the run ends.

That's the thing about a downtown finding a new gear. It doesn't announce itself with one big opening. It shows up as a Thursday that has more options than it used to, and a Tuesday that eventually will too, once the west end of the street catches up to the east.

If you're watching what's happening to property values and demand along a street like this, that kind of week-over-week texture matters more than any single headline. Keli Fisher has spent years tracking how these shifts play out in Powell and the surrounding towns, block by block rather than headline by headline. If you're curious what a changing downtown like this means for your own home's value, get your instant home valuation and start the conversation from there.