MacArthur Avenue Is Quietly Becoming Northside's Main Street

If you have lived in Bellevue or Ginter Park for more than a year or two, you already know MacArthur Avenue as the two-block stretch with Once Upon a Vine, Enoteca Sogno, and a handful of storefronts that have been there roughly forever. That version of the street is gone, or at least outgrown.

In the last eighteen months, MacArthur has added a mixed-use redevelopment on one side, broken ground on a new retail row directly across from it, watched its longtime pizza slot flip to a Middle Eastern concept, and picked up a bakery run by a culinary school graduate who spent the pandemic dropping sourdough on neighbors' porches. The strip did not get trendy. It got denser.

The two buildings that changed the math

The turning point is a pair of new-construction and adaptive-reuse projects sitting almost across the street from each other in the 4000 block.

On the south side, the Bellevue Theater opened nearly 90 years ago to give North Side residents a small, local movie house, and after decades as a theater and then a Masonic lodge, its marquee now belongs to local retailers who set up shop in the first-floor retail area after construction wrapped in late 2024. That project, marketed as The Bellevue, is the mixed-use redevelopment of the former Samis Grotto Temple at 4028 MacArthur Ave., with apartments upstairs and three storefronts at grade.

On the north side, at 4029 MacArthur, developers Alex Griffith and Ben Adamson bought the old Lauterbach Electric Co. property in July 2025 and are putting up a new retail building. The $550,000 sale price was more than double the property's most recent assessed value of $248,000, and the one-story building planned to replace the old Lauterbach office will total 6,930 square feet and be all retail and restaurant space. Adamson said he and Griffith considered doing another mixed-use project on the site but opted against apartments above, saying one-story retail was more in keeping with the rest of the Bellevue-MacArthur frontage. The site was originally a Pure Oil station before being home to Lauterbach, and removing the old curb cuts is expected to net a handful of new on-street spaces.

Two buildings, one block, roughly 14,000 square feet of commercial space that did not exist for tenants two years ago. That is the story.

Who is actually in the buildings

Here is what has landed so far, and what is coming:

• Kickshaws Gluten-Free Bakery opened in July 2026 at 4028 MacArthur, inside The Bellevue. It is primarily a retail space, but also has counter service and bakes cookies, cinnamon rolls and other select items sold on site, plus breakfast and lunch sandwiches as well as espresso. Most baked goods are made at the company's Fredericksburg location and transported daily to Richmond, with roughly half a dozen items baked on site because they are better fresh out of the oven, owner Kathy Paz-Craddock said.
• Homme Essentials, a menswear and home goods store, is the anchor retail tenant in the old theater building. Its storefront opened in early May, five years after founding, and owners Christina Campitell and Alan Long launched the brand on Lafayette Street in the West End selling clothes, home goods and more items sourced from small brands.
• Sun Theory is a gift shop and workshop in the same building, previously known as Maven Theory.
• Jane Dough RVA signed on for the new Lauterbach-site building in February 2026. The real Jane behind Jane Dough is Jane Lukas, who has been running the bakery as a pop-up in recent years and traces the business's roots to the early days of the pandemic, when COVID-19 shut the world down a few days after she got her diploma from the Institute of Culinary Education in New York in 2020. The new bakery will also serve Blanchard's coffee and some iced drinks, the front-of-house area will be small and without seating, and Lukas is aiming to open this fall.
• Roughly 5,300 square feet remains available in the new building, with a letter of intent signed with an unidentified "restaurant-type" user to take about half the new building's square footage.

The Zorba's slot is now shawarma

The most emotional change on the block is not a new building. It is the corner where Zorba's Pizza Express used to be.

Zorba's Pizza Express, the longtime pizzeria next door at 4026 MacArthur Ave., sold a few months ago and is being rebranded into a Middle Eastern restaurant. That concept is Mila's Shawarma, and owner Ahmed Al Asani's restaurant roots trace back to local eatery Shawarma Bistro, which closed in 2020, so it is time to get reacquainted with the flavors.

If you moved to Bellevue in the last five years, Zorba's was probably in your weeknight rotation. If you moved in the last twenty, you have opinions. Either way, the takeaway for the block is that MacArthur is no longer holding onto every legacy tenant by default. Storefronts are turning over at market rate, and new operators are willing to pay it.

A Saturday you can now do on foot

The practical test of whether a commercial strip has crossed a threshold is whether a resident can string together a full morning without moving the car. Try this from anywhere in Bellevue or Laburnum Park:

1. Coffee and a bag of sourdough at Jane Dough once it opens this fall, or a gluten-free cinnamon roll and espresso at Kickshaws in the meantime.
2. Cross the street to Homme Essentials or Sun Theory to browse whatever seasonal market or pop-up is on the front patio, which is how those tenants have been programming the theater's exterior since they opened.
3. Walk two doors down to Once Upon a Vine, still run by owner Bob Kocher, affectionately known as the "Mayor of MacArthur", for a bottle for later.
4. Cut over to Bellevue Avenue for lunch at Northside Grille at 1217 Bellevue Ave., or hold out for dinner at Enoteca Sogno.
5. Drive or bike ten minutes to the RVA Big Market at Bryan Park on Saturday morning, where Bellevue Avenue dead ends into Bryan Park, with hiking trails, an acclaimed azalea garden, sports fields and two waterfalls.
6. Thursday nights instead of Saturday morning, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden runs Flowers After 5 with a different band every week, and second and fourth Thursdays are Fidos After 5 in partnership with the Richmond SPCA.

That itinerary was not possible in 2023. Two of those stops did not exist.

The edges of the strip matter too

MacArthur is the spine, but the interesting Northside food story is bleeding east and south.

Down Brookland Park Boulevard, the Scott's Addition Nate's is the third bagel shop to open in Richmond in the last year, and Julio's Bagels opened earlier this year on Brookland Park Boulevard. That corridor already had Brookland Park Market for prepared meals, meats, cheeses and wine, The Smoky Mug for upscale coffee and BBQ, Michaela's Quality Bake Shop with the Thalhimer's six layer cake, and Fuzzy Cactus, a rock and roll restaurant and bar focused on building Richmond's music community, plus Ruby Scoops for ice cream.

The Smoky Mug itself has expanded. The cafe and barbecue joint has been a Northside staple for a while, but it just opened a new, larger location down the block on North Avenue.

Housing on the north end is moving too. Officials in May 2026 marked the completion of a $27 million development adding dozens of new homes for lower-income renters in the Bellevue area of Richmond's Northside, a 78-unit complex at 3940 Rosedale Ave. targeted to households earning 30-70% of the area median income. Bellevue Gardens sits next to Legacy at Imperial Village on Rosedale. Construction also continues at The Crossings at Mulberry, StyleCraft Homes' development on Chamberlayne Avenue north of Azalea Avenue that is planned to total 160 townhomes.

Why any of this matters if you already live here

You did not need this post to know that Enoteca Sogno is worth the wait or that Bryan Park has waterfalls. You probably did need someone to lay out that in the last eighteen months, MacArthur Avenue went from three or four storefronts of interest to something closer to a dozen, plus a second retail building that will not finish leasing until sometime in 2027.

The practical read: the walkability premium that people pay for in the Fan is quietly showing up in Bellevue and Ginter Park. The block you walk your dog past is not the same block it was, and the alleys behind it, described by architect Charles McGuigan in North of the James as a maze of alleys that combine the convenience of the city with the natural beauty of the country, are now feeding into a commercial strip that can actually absorb a Saturday.

If you have owned in Northside for more than a decade and have been thinking about what your house is worth in this new version of the neighborhood, or if you are eyeing a move within Northside to be closer to MacArthur on foot, Kelly Blanchard Real Estate has been quietly watching the same block change. When you are ready to talk about what any of this means for your own address, get a free home valuation and we will start there.