Drive Forest Avenue on any given month this year and you'll notice something that used to be rare on this stretch of road: a storefront sits empty for a matter of weeks, not seasons. Elsewhere in Portland, a closed restaurant can mean a dark window for a year while a landlord fields offers. On Forest Avenue right now, the turnover happens fast enough that if you blink between trips to the grocery store, you might miss an entire restaurant's run.
That's not the same story as "Portland has a lot of new restaurants," which is true of most of the city this year and not particularly useful to someone who already lives here. The specific thing happening on Forest Avenue is that the replacements keep arriving within weeks of the closures, and they keep being more specific, not less, about the culture and cuisine on the menu. This is a street that's filling itself back in with intention.
Two Openings on the Same Short Stretch
Start with the clearest evidence. At 865 Forest Ave, in the space that spent years as Mekong Asian Bistro, Pho Viet Restaurant opened its doors earlier this month under owner Chau Dang. The menu runs ten varieties of pho alongside Bun Bo Hue, noodle salads, and stir fries, served daily from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. in a dining room that looks out over the avenue, with a second seating area upstairs.
Just up the block at 849 Forest Avenue, in the space Loco Taco used to occupy, Zaitun opened at the start of August. Owner Abdulrahman Idow built the menu around Somali staples: Hummus Oodkac, hummus topped with Somali spiced beef jerky, injera-based dishes with chicken or lamb, sambusas, and shawarma wraps. Zaitun runs breakfast through dinner six days a week, closed Sundays, with slightly later hours on Friday and Saturday nights. Idow has said the goal is "bringing our community together" around food that's new to some and a taste of home for others.
These two openings landed close enough in time and close enough in distance that you could walk between them in a few minutes. That's not a coincidence worth dismissing. It means a stretch of Forest Avenue that used to read as a generic strip of chain-adjacent options now offers a genuine choice between two distinct culinary traditions within the same short block, something that didn't exist on this street two years ago.
The Storefront Graduation
Not every new arrival on Forest Avenue started from zero. Some of them started smaller, somewhere else, and Forest Avenue is where they graduated.
Salvatore's had been serving Philly-style hoagies and cheesesteaks out of the back of Howie's Pub in East Deering before opening its own storefront at 448 Forest Avenue, Suite 1. The move from borrowed kitchen space to a standalone address is the kind of signal that matters if you're trying to read where a commercial strip is headed: businesses don't relocate onto a street unless they believe the street can support them on their own.
At the same time, Forest Avenue is still hosting the earlier stage of that pipeline. A food truck called Royal Ice recently set up in the parking lot next to Mandy & Matt's Cafe, at the corner of Stevens Avenue, serving Gifford's ice cream, Cold Fusion gelato, and fresh squeezed lemonade on a weather-permitting basis. Mandy & Matt's itself, run by Amanda and Matt Lebel, took over the space at 1160 Forest Ave that used to be Samuel's Bar & Grill, serving daily from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. with a dedicated lunch window starting at 11. Samuel's owner Sam Minervino didn't leave the industry when that space changed hands. He moved on to launch the North Deering Tavern in Allen's Corner, in the building that used to house Parker's.
Put those pieces together and Forest Avenue is doing something a lot of commercial strips can't manage: supporting a business at every stage, from a food truck testing an idea in a parking lot to a storefront with its name on the lease, without losing the people who ran the previous tenant to some other neighborhood entirely.
The One That Didn't Come Back
None of this is a story about a street that fixes itself automatically. The former Vivian's Drive-in space, most recently home to Kung Fu Tea and TKK Fried Chicken, closed earlier this year and hasn't been claimed by a new concept yet. That gap is worth naming, because it's the exception that sharpens the pattern instead of undercutting it.
The businesses filling in fastest on Forest Avenue right now are not national chains or bubble tea concepts. They're independent, single-cuisine restaurants with an owner's name attached to the menu. Whatever comes next for the old Vivian's Drive-in space, the evidence so far suggests Forest Avenue rewards specificity over familiarity.
What's Actually Open Right Now
If you're deciding where to eat tonight rather than reading about the trend from a distance, here's the current lineup along the corridor:
- Pho Viet Restaurant, 865 Forest Ave, open daily 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
- Zaitun, 849 Forest Avenue, Monday through Thursday 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday 9 a.m. to 11 p.m., closed Sundays.
- Mandy & Matt's Cafe, 1160 Forest Ave, daily 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., lunch from 11 a.m.
- Salvatore's, 448 Forest Avenue, Suite 1, for hoagies and cheesesteaks.
- Woodford F&B, anchoring Woodfords Corner with seafood, steaks, cocktails, and brunch, an easy stop if you're already biking the Back Cove Trail or the Deering Avenue bike path.
- Belleville, which closed its original Munjoy Hill shop this June, now keeps its Forest Avenue location open weekends only, Saturday and Sunday.
A Street That Used to Be Just a Route Through
Forest Avenue has spent most of its history as infrastructure first and destination second. It's part of U.S. Route 302 for nearly its entire length, the main way traffic moves between downtown Portland and the neighborhoods to the west, and the city's own planning documents describe a mid-20th-century strip-mall character that grew up around that traffic function rather than around the people who lived nearby. The city's Forest Avenue Redesign Project, running from Woodfords Corner to the university exit off I-295, is explicitly aimed at rebalancing that: better crossings, better bike lanes, a street that works for people arriving on foot and not just people passing through in a car.
The building stock is shifting to match. At 509 Forest Ave, a 1927 building that once hosted Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington, and Glenn Miller as a dance hall, and more recently served as an auto dealership, is being converted into 38 apartments with street-level commercial space below. That's not a restaurant story, but it's the same underlying shift: a street built for cars becoming a street built for the people who live within walking distance of it.
That's the piece worth holding onto. The restaurant turnover on Forest Avenue isn't random churn. It's what a corridor looks like when a city redesign project, a wave of small-business graduations, and a run of specific, culturally distinct restaurant openings all land in the same stretch of road at the same time. Most residents notice one opening at a time. Taken together, they add up to a street quietly becoming somewhere you'd choose to walk, not just somewhere you used to drive through to get to the highway.
If you're the kind of person who tracks these shifts because you already live nearby, you already know the feeling of a neighborhood changing under your feet in a good way. And if a Forest Avenue kind of energy, or any other corner of Greater Portland, has you thinking about what your own next move might look like, Melissa McKersie would love to talk through it with you. Let's Connect.
