Walk along Longshore Street this month and you'll see three storefronts either freshly opened or about to be. A diner with a coffee counter. A seafood-and-barbecue counter where an oyster bar used to sit. A Southern kitchen with a stage, moving in from across town. Every one of them will get called "new" in a headline somewhere. None of them are new in the way that word usually means.
That's worth sitting with if you live here, because it changes how you should treat opening week. A restaurant with no track record is a coin flip. A restaurant that's spent years proving itself somewhere else in Columbus, then moved to Bridge Park for more space, isn't a gamble at all. It's a known quantity that happens to be closer to your house now.
The Bristol move is an upgrade, not a debut
Bristol Republic opens its Bridge Park location on September 10, at the corner of Bridge Park Avenue and Mooney Street. If the name sounds familiar, it should. Bristol spent years on North High Street in the Short North before announcing its move, and the new 6,500-square-foot, multi-level space is built to hold everything that made the original work plus a second act it never had room for before: The Saddle Club, a separate cocktail lounge tucked inside the same building with live jazz and weekend DJs.
Chef Greg Roy runs the open kitchen, with smoked brisket, Texas-style ribs, and stone-fired pizzas built around the same Southern menu that built Bristol's following on High Street. Thursdays bring live band karaoke. Fridays and Saturdays bring a rotating lineup of local and national acts. Game days turn the whole place into a 20-screen sports bar.
The regulars are already tracking the move. One longtime Bristol customer put it simply:
"The bartenders, bands, beer, and bourbon all came together for a fun time. I'm excited to have Bristol back, now at Bridge Park."
Bristol's old Short North space didn't sit empty. Black Sheep Kitchen & Spirits, an LGBTQ-owned bar and restaurant, opened there in 2025. That's a separate story worth knowing if you split time between the Short North and Dublin, but it also underlines the point: Bristol isn't a startup betting on Dublin. It's an established concept redeploying to a bigger stage, and the old stage found its next act without missing a beat.
The seafood counter that filled a real gap
North Market Bridge Park lost COLO Market & Oyster Bar on January 11, when owner Ian Holmes closed the Dublin location after citing thin foot traffic and rising costs. COLO's downtown Columbus location kept running, but the Bridge Park spot, at 6750 Longshore Street, went quiet for a stretch. Holmes offered the Dublin staff a path to the downtown store, and some made the move.
"I'll miss the people the most. We had engagements there and graduation parties and just regulars that we have gotten to know over the years."
That closure is the reason BBQ & The Pier exists in Dublin at all. The new concept took over the same North Market Bridge Park space, run by Enis Ndreu, who already owns Holy Crepes at multiple North Market locations, and Elvis Lloshi, who spent a decade running front and back of house at Iron Grill. The menu keeps the oyster tradition alive alongside barbecue, fish and chips, and fried shrimp. It reads like a seafood shop, but it's really two North Market veterans filling a hole that a January closure left behind.
If you were disappointed when COLO left, this is the same corner, staffed by people who already know how to run a food stall in that market.
HangOverEasy isn't from out of town, it's from down the road
The other Longshore Street opening this year is HangOverEasy, which held its Bridge Park grand opening on May 2 at 6757 Longshore Street. It's easy to assume any brunch concept expanding into a mixed-use development is a chain moving in from somewhere else. This one isn't. HangOverEasy started on Neil Avenue near South Campus in 2007, added a second Columbus location on Parsons Avenue on the East Side, and the Bridge Park spot is its third Central Ohio address and seventh in the state.
The Dublin location got one feature none of the others have: a dedicated coffee bar built into the restaurant, serving drip and specialty coffee alongside house-made pastries, with table seating and Wi-Fi aimed at people who want to work from a booth rather than just eat and leave. The dining room seats 116, with a full bar and a patio. For a neighborhood that already treats North Market Bridge Park as a weekday lunch spot, a full-service coffee counter open for the whole morning fills a gap the market's food stalls don't cover.
The one that's actually new
Not everything on this list has a backstory elsewhere in Columbus. Rocket Fizz Soda Pop & Candy Shop opened August 21 at Bridge Park, and it's genuinely the brand's first Dublin location, a nostalgia shop selling specialty sodas and old-school candy with no prior Central Ohio footprint to point to. It's the one true debut in this wave of openings, which is exactly why it's worth naming separately from the rest.
What the rest of September looks like on the calendar
The restaurant openings are the headline, but they land in the middle of a month that already has its own rhythm. If you're planning weekends around Bridge Park and Historic Dublin, here's what's actually on the calendar:
| Date | Event | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Saturdays through Sept 26, 9am-noon | Dublin Market, 120+ vendors | Bridge Park |
| Sept 5 | Yoga in the Street with YogaSix | Bridge Park |
| Sept 6, 9am-noon registration | Dublin AM Rotary & Historic Dublin Business Association 8th Annual Classic Car Show, $15 entry for show cars, free for spectators | Historic Dublin, W North Street entrance |
| Sept 6, 1-4pm | Downtown Dublin Pup Crawl | Bridge Park and Historic Dublin |
| Sept 10 | Bristol Republic grand opening | 4495 Bridge Park Ave |
| Sept 12 | Ohio Pet Charities Barker's Market | Bridge Park |
| Sept 19 | PTULA Tailgate | Bridge Park |
| Sept 26 | OSU Hope in Motion Trailer, final Dublin Market of the season | Bridge Park |
The Pup Crawl is worth a closer look if you've got a dog and haven't done it before. It runs like this:
- Pick up a bandana and guide at one of four starting points: Market Bar, PINS, The Getaway Brewing Co, or Pet Wants.
- Walk the route through participating Bridge Park and Historic Dublin businesses, each offering a pet-friendly perk, water station, or treat.
- Tag Historic Dublin, Bridge Park, and Visit Dublin Ohio's accounts in a photo for a shot at the prize.
Dogs stay leashed, owners handle cleanup, and the whole thing threads through the same stretch of Bridge Park where Bristol and BBQ & The Pier are opening. If you're walking that route on a Saturday this month, you're walking past nearly every name on this list.
What this means if you already live here
The pattern under all of this is simple. Bridge Park in September isn't full of restaurants betting on an unproven neighborhood. It's full of restaurants that already proved themselves somewhere else in Columbus, moving here because they outgrew their old space or because a competitor's exit left a gap worth filling. Bristol built its following on High Street first. HangOverEasy built its following on Neil Avenue and Parsons Avenue first. Even BBQ & The Pier's operators built their reputations at other North Market stalls before taking on this one.
Rocket Fizz is the exception, and it's a low-stakes one. A candy shop doesn't need a track record to be worth a visit.
None of that guarantees any of these places will still be here in five years. COLO didn't make it, and it had five years and a loyal following behind it. But it does mean that if you're deciding whether to show up on opening week or wait for reviews, the wait isn't buying you much information you don't already have. These operators have already answered the question of whether they can run a restaurant. The only open question is whether Dublin likes what they're serving as much as their old neighborhoods did.
If you're the kind of person who tracks what opens and closes in this part of Dublin because you plan to be here for a while, that's exactly the read Hart Property Advisors keeps on hand. We watch this corridor because our clients live in it, not because we're trying to sell you on it.
