Walk North Davidson Street this month and you will pass three storefronts that look like fresh starts. They are not. Each one has been in motion for years, and the fact that they are all crossing the finish line within the same few blocks and the same few months is not a coincidence so much as a pileup. NoDa did not suddenly get busy. NoDa's slowest-moving projects finally caught up to each other.
That is the part worth understanding if you live here and have felt like the neighborhood was stuck in a holding pattern since 2024. It was. And now it isn't.
The brewery that took two years to reopen
Heist Brewery closed after a kitchen fire in July 2024. For most of the next two years, the only part of the building doing business was the adjoining Canteen space, which reopened about a month after the fire and got by on private events, run club nights and trivia while the main brewery sat gutted. Heist founder Kurt Hogan put it plainly during a walkthrough of the finished space this spring:
"It's been a marathon, and we are eager, to say the least, to get these doors back open."
The brewery reopened over Memorial Day weekend this year, nearly two years to the month after the fire. The rebuild changed more than the paint. The physical brew house was pulled out and kept only as a decorative nod to the building's history, since Heist now brews at its Barrel Arts location instead. That freed up room for about 40 additional seats and a U-shaped bar with roughly twice the seating of the old one. The side patio, previously overtaken by brewing equipment, is back. The mezzanine was reworked into a lounge space built for mingling instead of table service.
The menu blends old and new. Chicken and waffle tacos, the Diablo burger and whole wings are all back, alongside new additions like wood-fired oysters, a Reuben and fish tacos. The all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch buffet, which used to draw 450 to 500 people a week before the fire, is also returning, and Hogan expects the bigger space to handle it more comfortably than before.
The development that started before most of its future tenants existed
A few blocks away, on the former Johnson Memorial Presbyterian Church site at 36th and McDowell, the Centro NoDa project has followed a much longer arc. The rezoning petition that made the project possible was filed back in 2021, for up to 225 residential units and around 15,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, with construction expected to start in early 2022. That is a four-to-five year runway between paperwork and the storefronts actually filling in.
Those storefronts are filling in now. Ricci's Hoagies, a Philadelphia sandwich shop opening its third location after two in its home city, is moving into Centro NoDa's retail space at 715 E 36th St with authentic Italian hoagies, including veggie and chicken cutlet options. Bayt Almocha, a Yemeni coffee shop with existing locations in Kentucky and Michigan, is bringing handcrafted coffee, pastries and savory sandwiches to the same development. And the team behind Protagonist Beer is opening a coffee-by-day, cocktails-by-night spot inside The Campbell, the apartment tower that anchors the Centro NoDa site.
None of these three businesses existed in their current form when the rezoning was filed in 2021. The neighborhood watched an empty church lot for years without much to show for it. Now it is watching three separate operators move in within the same building at roughly the same time.
Here is what that gap actually looks like laid out side by side:
| Project | Started | Landed |
|---|---|---|
| Heist Brewery reopening | Kitchen fire, July 2024 | Reopened Memorial Day weekend 2026 |
| Centro NoDa retail (Ricci's Hoagies, Bayt Almocha) | Rezoning filed 2021, construction targeted for early 2022 | Tenants opening in 2026 |
Two very different kinds of delay, both resolving in the same season.
The faster-moving arrivals filling in the gaps
Not everything on North Davidson has been years in the making. Kulture NoDa opened this spring at 3228 N Davidson St, in the space Bulldog Taproom used to occupy, serving oxtail pizza and seafood pastas from the team behind the takeout favorite Renaldo's Culinary Experience. The concept, run by Cliche Hospitality Group under CEO Terrance Grant, turned a narrow storefront into a full sit-down spot with around 10 cocktails on the menu alongside beer and wine. It is open seven days a week, with hours running as late as 11 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays.
A few doors down, mixologist Larry Suggs filed plans in March for All Purpose Bar at 3123 N Davidson St, a 1,700-square-foot space drawing on East Coast bar concepts and offering both cocktails and non-alcoholic options. As of this writing, no opening date has been announced. It is the one project on this stretch that has not yet landed, which makes it worth watching if you are keeping track of what is actually open versus what is still filed with the city.
What this means for a Saturday in October
The geography matters here almost as much as the timing. Heist, Kulture, All Purpose Bar and the Centro NoDa tenants all sit within a few blocks of each other along North Davidson and 36th. That compresses years of separate, unrelated waiting into a single walkable stretch, right as NoDa's biggest annual tradition kicks off the fall calendar.
The NoDaWeen Freaky 5K, hosted by the NoDa Neighborhood and Business Association, runs on Saturday, October 24 this year. Runners are encouraged to wear costumes, with prizes for both fastest times and best outfits, and the post-race party lands at Great Wagon Road Distilling on Anderson Street. Pre-registration closes October 15 for anyone who wants the race shirt included.
Put those pieces together and the shape of an October Saturday here writes itself:
- Brunch at Heist, back in a space built for the crowd it used to draw
- A walk past Centro NoDa to see which of its three new tenants has opened its doors
- Dinner at Kulture, or a stop to see whether All Purpose Bar has finally posted an opening date
- A costume run down North Davidson that ends at Great Wagon Road
None of that Saturday existed a year ago. Most of it existed as a filed permit, a fire-damaged building or an empty church lot instead.
The read on this fall
The easy version of this story is "NoDa has a lot of new stuff." The more useful version is that NoDa's newest stuff isn't new at all. It is old plans and old damage finally clearing, landing in the same season by circumstance rather than design. If you have felt like this stretch of the neighborhood was quiet for longer than it should have been, that instinct was correct. The wait is what makes this fall's openings worth noticing, not just the openings themselves.
If you are the kind of NoDa resident who tracks this stuff block by block, that habit of noticing what changes and why is exactly the local read Charlotte Living Realty Group brings to every neighborhood it covers. When the time comes to talk about what a place like this is actually worth, that is the difference worth experiencing.
