Walk North Davidson Street on any given Saturday this fall and it feels like the neighborhood added six restaurants overnight. Oxtail pizza at a spot that didn't exist in the spring. A Philadelphia hoagie shop. A Yemeni coffee counter. An Irish pub. A cocktail bar from a mixologist you might recognize from somewhere else in Charlotte. It reads like chaos, the kind of rapid-fire turnover that makes longtime residents wonder if anyone is still renting storefronts one at a time.
They aren't, mostly. Look closely at where these openings are actually landing and a pattern shows up fast: most of the new names aren't independent leases scattered across the neighborhood. They're tenants filling two specific development footprints, on two specific streets, built by two out-of-town developers with very different timelines. The rest of NoDa's restaurant activity, the part that still looks like the old NoDa, is thinner than the headlines suggest.
The Church That Became a Coffee Counter
Start on East 36th Street, on the site that used to hold Johnson Memorial Presbyterian Church. That parcel became Centro NoDa, a joint venture between Ascent Real Estate Capital and Centro Cityworks that turned 1.9 acres at 36th and McDowell into a mixed-use project with ground-floor retail bolted to new apartments. The rezoning that made it possible predates this year by a wide margin, but the tenants filling it are brand new to 2026.
Ricci's Hoagies, a Philadelphia sandwich shop opening its third location after two in its home city, is moving into Centro NoDa with the same authentic Italian hoagie lineup, including veggie and chicken cutlet versions, that built its reputation up north. Right alongside it, Bayt Almocha, a Yemeni cafe with existing locations in Kentucky and Michigan, is bringing handcrafted coffee, pastries and savory sandwiches to the same development.
That's two out-of-market operators choosing the same Charlotte address within months of each other. Neither picked NoDa's classic North Davidson storefronts. Both picked the development. That's worth sitting with if you've been assuming NoDa's growth is still driven by local entrepreneurs finding open doors on the strip. Increasingly, it's driven by whoever leases the retail pad at a project like this one.
Raleigh Street's Turn
A few blocks away, a bigger and slower-moving version of the same story is unfolding on Raleigh Street. Atlanta-based developer Third & Urban filed plans with the City of Charlotte this July to convert a former warehouse there into Pass 42, a 120,000-square-foot mixed-use expansion of The Pass, the adaptive reuse complex already anchoring that stretch of the neighborhood.
The filing describes indoor and outdoor pickleball, basketball and paddleball courts, a public plaza, flexible gathering space, and a restaurant sprawling past 6,000 square feet with its own outdoor patio. As of this writing the project is still waiting on city approval, and the developer hasn't announced a construction timeline or a cost. No restaurant tenant has been named. But the shape of the project tells you where the next wave of NoDa dining news is going to come from, and it isn't a storefront on North Davidson.
Put the two projects side by side and the pattern gets easier to see.
| Development | Location | Size | Status | Confirmed food & drink tenants |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Centro NoDa | East 36th Street at McDowell | 1.9-acre site, ~15,000 sq ft ground-floor retail | Built, leasing in progress | Ricci's Hoagies, Bayt Almocha |
| Pass 42 (The Pass expansion) | Raleigh Street warehouse | 120,000 sq ft | Filed with the city, awaiting approval | None announced |
Two developers, two very different clocks. One is already seating customers. The other hasn't broken ground.
What's Still Landing the Old Way
None of this means North Davidson Street itself has gone quiet. Kulture NoDa opened this April in the former Bulldog Taproom space at 3228 N Davidson St, the work of the team behind the takeout favorite Renaldo's Culinary Experience. The concept turns Renaldo's oxtail pizza and loaded seafood pastas into a full sit-down menu, with roughly ten cocktails on the drink list alongside beer and wine. It's open Tuesday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday until 11 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 10 p.m.
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 cocktail bar drawing inspiration from East Coast bar programs, according to reporting in the Charlotte Business Journal. No opening date has been set yet. An Irish pub also opened this year at 423 E 36th St, separate from the Centro development a few blocks over.
These are the closest thing left to the old NoDa model: independent operators finding open storefronts and building something from scratch. They're still happening. There just aren't as many of them relative to what's arriving inside the two bigger projects.
There's also a comeback worth noting on North Davidson. Heist Brewery, at 2909 N Davidson St, reopened this spring after nearly two years closed following a grease fire. For a neighborhood that measures itself partly by which taprooms are pouring, getting Heist back on the map matters as much as any new name.
The Screen That Finally Found a Home
Not every recent NoDa story is about food. The Charlotte Film Festival returns September 22 through 27 for its 18th year, screening more than 140 films, most of them shorts tackling subjects from job loss and grief to affordable housing. The venue is the Independent Picture House, located just north of NoDa in the Trailhead District, which has become the festival's permanent base since it opened in a converted warehouse at 4237 Raleigh Street in June 2022.
Festival organizer Ivana Woodcock has said that having one consistent venue, after years of bouncing between locations, has helped the event grow. The venue backs that up structurally: a November 2024 project added a flexible 145-seat fourth auditorium, bringing total capacity to 336 seats across four screens, with removable front seating and an expanded stage built for live performances and post-screening Q&As. A festival that used to scramble for space every year now has room to spare.
The Monthly Nights Worth Keeping on Your Calendar
Beyond the openings and the festival calendar, NoDa runs on a set of recurring rituals that don't make headlines but shape what a normal week actually looks like here.
- Gothic Punk Night Market at NoDa Brewing Company, third Friday of every month from 6 to 9 p.m., free to attend.
- BYO Craft Night, also at NoDa Brewing, first Tuesday of the month from 6 to 8 p.m., open to crocheters, painters, sketch artists and anyone building models, free.
- Third Thursday Gallery Crawl at Charlotte Studio Artists, 3045 North Davidson Street, where visitors can wander three galleries and seventeen studios and meet more than thirty resident artists.
- NoDa Bizarre, a biannual outdoor arts festival on the lawn of the Johnston YMCA, known locally as the front porch of NoDa, drawing more than 75 art vendors along with live music and food trucks. The most recent one ran August 1 at 3025 N Davidson St.
None of these require a reservation or a ticket most months. They're the connective tissue between the restaurant openings, the thing that makes a Tuesday or a third Friday feel like NoDa rather than any other stretch of Charlotte.
Reading the Pattern Correctly
If you live in NoDa, the honest takeaway isn't that the neighborhood is exploding at random. It's that growth here has started sorting itself into two speeds. Centro NoDa is already delivering, one storefront at a time, with Ricci's Hoagies and Bayt Almocha as the current proof. Pass 42 is a much larger bet still sitting in a city approval queue, with no tenant list and no completion date. And North Davidson Street itself, the strip that built NoDa's reputation, is still capable of producing something like Kulture, but it's no longer the only place new restaurants are choosing to open.
That distinction matters if you're trying to guess what the next twelve months look like. Expect the near-term restaurant news to keep coming out of Centro NoDa's remaining retail space. Expect Pass 42 news to move in fits and starts, tied to permitting rather than menus. And expect North Davidson to keep producing the occasional independent standout, just at a slower clip than the development pipeline around it.
Sylvia Gause and the team at Live Love Luxe spend enough time in NoDa to track these shifts as they happen, not after they've already changed the neighborhood's character. If you're curious how a specific block or building fits into where NoDa is heading, that's a conversation worth having before the next round of openings makes the decision for you.
