A few months ago, a Better Burgers manager started fielding a strange kind of order. Customers would walk up to the counter at the corner of Woodward and Hamilton Row, and ask for Hunter House food. Manager Mikos Plumaj had to explain, more than once, that Hunter House was "down the road, located at the old KFC." The building hadn't changed. The sign over the door had, and people's memory hadn't caught up.
That mix-up is a small thing, but it points at something bigger happening in downtown Birmingham right now. If you've noticed a lot of restaurant news lately and assumed it means downtown is expanding, it isn't, not really. The footprint of Old Woodward and its side streets is roughly the same size it's been for years. What's changed is how differently that fixed space is being used.
A District That Isn't Getting Bigger, Just Denser
Walk the six or so blocks that make up downtown Birmingham's core and you'll pass three projects from the past two years with wildly different size profiles. RH Detroit, The Gallery, occupies 60,000 square feet across four stories, the only RH gallery in Michigan. A few blocks away, Big Rock Italian Chophouse is finishing out an 11,000-square-foot space with a $10 million buildout. And tucked into a storefront on Old Woodward, Bell Bistro operates in 3,000 square feet split across a main dining room, a lower level, and a private room.
That's a 20-to-1 range in square footage, all within a ten-minute walk. Downtown isn't adding new blocks to accommodate this. It's stacking very different scales of investment onto the same fixed real estate, which means the character of a given block can shift a lot depending on which of these projects lands there.
The Anchor: RH's Rooftop
RH's building is the biggest bet on that list. The rooftop level houses the RH Rooftop Restaurant, built with skylight ceilings, heritage olive trees, and chandeliers, serving a menu that runs from lobster towers to caviar carpaccio. It's the kind of anchor that pulls foot traffic simply by existing. For a downtown that's historically built its identity out of independent restaurants and boutiques rather than large-format destinations, a four-story, 60,000-square-foot building is a different category of gravity entirely.
The Landmark Building's Second Act
Big Rock Italian Chophouse is a different kind of bet. Cameron Mitchell Restaurants, the Ohio-based group behind Ocean Prime and Mitchell's Fish Market, is putting $10 million into transforming a landmark downtown building into an 11,000-square-foot chophouse and cigar lounge, with roughly 375 seats including more than 100 outdoors, plus three bars and multiple private dining rooms. The concept was originally announced with a target opening sometime in 2025. It's now posting operating hours for this fall, including a note that it will close for Labor Day on September 7 and reopen the next day, which tells you the timeline slipped by the better part of a year, not that the project stalled. A build of that size, in a building with that kind of history, doesn't move on a simple schedule.
The Small Rooms Are Turning Over Faster Than the Big Ones
While the large projects take their time, the small storefronts keep changing hands. Bell Bistro, from Bloomfield Hills-based Cicero Hospitality Group, opened in the space that used to be Mad Hatter Bistro at 185 N. Old Woodward Ave, directly across from the Emagine Palladium. The kitchen is led by Gabriel Botezan, a Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef who also cooks at Adelina in downtown Detroit, and the menu runs from a Wagyu meatball starter to a Bell Smash Burger. Same address, same 3,000 square feet, entirely different restaurant.
Then there's the Better Burgers situation. Hunter House sat on that corner of Woodward and Hamilton Row for 73 years before relocating to a new spot in town starting in the fall of 2025. By early 2026, Better Burgers had taken over the original building. The menu is smaller than what Hunter House ran, but Plumaj isn't trying to compete with the old tenant. He's just hoping people give the new one a try, in his words, hoping people "could come and try us out and maybe make this their new home."
A few doors down, Teuta opened in March 2025 as a family-owned breakfast and lunch spot, and Wilder's, the latest concept from restaurateur Samy Eid of Phoenicia, Forest, and Leila, has been running since early 2025 with an Art Deco supper club design. Neither one required downtown to grow. Both landed inside the same fixed grid of storefronts that's always been there.
The Calendar That Ties the Six Blocks Together
None of this turnover happens in isolation. Downtown Birmingham runs an events calendar that puts every one of these storefronts, old tenant or new, in front of the same crowd on the same nights. The next two months look like this:
| Date | Event | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Thu, Sept 17 | Birmingham Art Walk | A free strolling event, 5 to 8 p.m., through the Birmingham Shopping District and Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center, with local shops and artists along the route |
| Sun, Sept 20 | Farmers Market: Harvest Festival | Weekly farmers market, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., at the public parking lot on Lot 6 |
| Oct 1 to Oct 31 | BirminghamBURGER | Monthlong competition among downtown restaurants, each serving a signature burger, with public voting deciding Birmingham's Best Burger |
| Sun, Oct 25 | Farmers Market: End of Season Celebration | The market's final Sunday of the year |
BirminghamBURGER is worth paying closer attention to than a typical food promotion, because it's effectively an annual audit of who's actually operating downtown. Adachi, on South Old Woodward, won the inaugural event in 2024. By 2025, the competition had grown to as many as 18 participating restaurants, and public voting nearly doubled, climbing from about 2,900 ratings in 2024 to 5,570 in 2025. Erika Bassett, executive director of the Birmingham Shopping District, described what the event does for the district each year:
"The BirminghamBURGER is creating quite the buzz both within the local community and among our restaurants. With so many participating restaurants and unique ingredient combinations, there is something everyone will love during this event."
That nearly-doubled vote count matters here because it's a measure of how many residents are actively walking the district and comparing notes, not just defaulting to whichever restaurant they already know. In a downtown where storefronts keep changing hands, that kind of active comparison shopping is exactly what keeps a new tenant from getting lost behind the ghost of the old one, the way Better Burgers has had to work around the memory of Hunter House.
What This Means for the Next Two Months
If you live in Birmingham and haven't been paying close attention to the restaurant scene lately, you're behind on at least three storefronts you'd recognize by address but not by name. That's worth correcting before the calendar gets busy. The Art Walk on September 17 is a low-commitment way to see a chunk of downtown in one evening, on foot, with no reservation required. BirminghamBURGER starting October 1 is a lower-stakes way to try Bell Bistro, Better Burgers, or whichever new kitchen is behind a familiar storefront, one specialty burger at a time, without committing to a full dinner at a restaurant you've never been to.
The bigger pattern, though, is the range. Downtown Birmingham isn't spreading outward. It's absorbing a 60,000-square-foot anchor, an 11,000-square-foot chophouse, and a string of 3,000-square-foot storefronts changing hands, all inside the same six blocks it's always had. That's a different kind of growth than most suburban downtowns see, and it's worth understanding if you want to know what you're actually walking past on Old Woodward this season.
Donna and Bob McDonald live and work in this part of Oakland County, and keeping track of what's changing on the ground, restaurant by restaurant and block by block, is part of how they read a neighborhood day to day. If you're weighing a move in or around Birmingham and want a conversation grounded in that kind of local detail rather than a generic market summary, reach out to the McDonald Team. You can also see current listings and more on the Birmingham neighborhood page, or Get a Free Home Valuation if you're curious what your own place downtown is worth in today's market.
