Why Forest Avenue's Empty Storefronts Never Stay Empty for Long

Walk the stretch of Forest Avenue between Woodfords Corner and Morrill's Corner on any given week this August and you'll notice something that doesn't show up in a drive-by: several storefronts have changed hands in the last year, and none of them sat dark for more than a few months. A hoagie shop moved out of a bar kitchen and into its own address. A Somali restaurant opened where a taco spot used to be. A Vietnamese pho counter took over a space that used to be Mekong Asian Bistro. This is not a corridor in decline looking for tenants. It's a corridor that refills itself faster than most people are tracking.

Portland Food Map described this same 1.4-mile stretch back in 2021 as a place "more often seen as a thruway than as a destination," the kind of road you drive through on the way to somewhere else, past nail salons and car washes and a McDonald's. Five years later, that description is getting harder to defend. The traffic is still there. So is the mix of hair salons and auto shops. But the restaurant turnover on Forest Ave has become fast enough, and specific enough, that it says something real about who's willing to bet on this street and why.

The turnover nobody's mapped

Here's what's changed hands recently, and how quickly the next tenant showed up:

None of these openings are franchise expansions. They're first-time storefronts, chef-owners stepping out from someone else's kitchen, or family businesses making a second attempt in a space that just failed for the last operator. That's the pattern worth paying attention to. A commercial strip that refills with first-time owner-operators, rather than sitting vacant or converting to national chains, is telling you something about the economics of the address.

Who's actually filling these spaces

Zaitun's opening was quiet by design. Owner Abdulrahman Idow described the goal as building "a place where people can experience authentic Somali cuisine," serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner six days a week with dishes like hummus topped with Somali spiced beef jerky, injera-based plates with chicken or lamb, and sambusas. The restaurant is closed Sundays.

A few blocks away, Pho Viet took over the space that had housed Mekong Asian Bistro at 865 Forest Ave. Owner Chau Dang's menu runs ten different styles of pho alongside Bun Bo Hue and a wide range of noodle salads and stir fries, open daily from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. The restaurant occupies both the ground floor dining room overlooking Forest Ave and a second upper level.

The former Vivian's Drive-In space had a rougher stretch. Kung Fu Tea and TKK Fried Chicken operated there before closing earlier this year, and the space didn't sit empty long before 243 Restaurant moved in, serving a menu built around Afro-American cooking with traditional recipes alongside contemporary twists.

Further out toward Woodfords Corner, Abbiocco has had roughly a year to settle in. Chef Anthony Curcio, who had been cooking at Twelve and working front-of-house at Benny's before opening his own place, took over the 634 Forest Ave space that Sissle & Daughters had vacated after just three months. Curcio built a 32-seat room, including a 10-seat bar, around pasta as what he called a medium to showcase Maine ingredients, with dishes like a braised beef-stuffed raviolo and a wine list that runs about 70 percent Italian, some of it on tap. He hired Zach Hoppie, someone he'd cooked alongside at Twelve, as his chef de cuisine.

And Salvatore's, which spent its early life operating out of the back of Howie's Pub in East Deering, finally opened its own storefront on Forest Ave earlier this year, serving Philly-style hoagies and cheesesteaks on house-baked rolls alongside New York-style pizza and panzarotti.

Why this corridor keeps refilling

The explanation that's held up over time comes down to what the street actually costs to operate on. Forest Avenue has long combined relatively cheap rents with a steady flow of commuter traffic, a combination that makes room for immigrant entrepreneurs to open halal markets, Asian groceries, and family restaurants without the capital a flashier Portland address would require. That mix has been part of what made this stretch a landing spot for newcomer-owned businesses for years, well before this latest round of openings.

Forest Ave's version of turnover looks more like succession than vacancy. When a lease ends here, the next tenant tends to already know the street, whether from working a counter a few doors down or watching a family member run a shop nearby. That's part of why closures on this stretch rarely feel like a loss for long. Longtime anchors like Maiz Colombian Street Food, open at 621 Forest Ave well before this current wave, show that staying power is possible here too. It's not only about who opens fastest. It's about who the street lets stick around.

The newer names worth knowing

Two of the freshest additions barely register as businesses yet in terms of foot traffic, but they're worth flagging before the fall rush. Royal Ice, a food truck serving Cold Fusion gelato, Gifford's ice cream, and fresh squeezed lemonade, recently set up in the parking lot next to Mandy & Matt's Cafe at the corner of Stevens Ave, with plans to run daily weather permitting. It's a small addition, but it fills a gap in a stretch that's had plenty of savory options and fewer places to grab something cold on a hot Forest Ave afternoon.

Salvatore's remains the bigger story of the two, mostly because its path from a borrowed kitchen to its own address on Forest Ave is the same trajectory that's defined most of this corridor's growth. Nobody arrives on Forest Ave with a fully built brand and a marketing budget. They arrive the way Curcio did at Abbiocco, or the way Idow did at Zaitun, testing whether the street will support what they're building, then building out from there.

The through-line

What ties all of this together isn't any single opening. It's the speed and the pattern. A space closes, and within weeks or months, someone with a specific idea and modest capital is running a new business out of the same four walls. That's not a sign of a struggling commercial strip. It's a sign of a strip where the barrier to entry is low enough that people keep trying, and where enough of those attempts work out that the next person keeps trying too.

If you've lived near Forest Avenue for a while, you've probably already noticed the churn without putting a number on it. This is that number, laid out storefront by storefront. Whether you're headed for a bowl of pho at Pho Viet, sambusas at Zaitun, or a raviolo at Abbiocco, you're eating in a corridor that's quietly become one of the more interesting economic stories in Portland, one lease at a time.

For anyone thinking about what this kind of neighborhood energy means for property values or timing a move near Forest Ave, Shawn Losier at Freeman Group has spent more than 27 years watching Portland's neighborhoods shift block by block. Let's Connect if you want a read on what a corridor like this means for buying or selling nearby.