The riverfront restaurant everyone downtown has been asking about finally has a name, a seating count, and a chef with three other addresses in this city already. Amara opened for dinner on July 10, 2026, inside Bicentennial Park at 229 Civic Center Drive, the exact spot where Milestone 229 served skyline views and comfort food for fourteen years before its last day of service on December 31, 2024, after the restaurant and the city could not agree on new lease terms.
That's a year and a half of dark windows on the single most visible restaurant lot in Columbus, a building that sits beside the Scioto Mile Fountain and gets passed by everyone walking, running, or biking the riverfront. Anyone who assumed prime public real estate like that fills fast has been watching the wrong kind of vacancy.
The City Wasn't Struggling. It Was Screening.
Six months after Milestone closed, the city still hadn't put the space back on the market in any normal sense. Columbus City Council member Nicholas Bankston sponsored legislation setting the terms for whoever came next, and he was specific about what he wanted. The city was looking for a local operator, someone who could tell "the Columbus story on the riverfront," and the lease would carry requirements around lunch-hour hours and price point.
"We have so many great local restaurateurs and entrepreneurs that can tell that Columbus story on the riverfront."
That's a different problem than an empty storefront nobody wants. It's a landlord, in this case the city itself, turning down faster options in favor of a specific kind of tenant. The building sat empty not because demand was thin but because the screening process was doing exactly what it was built to do.
By October 2025, the answer arrived. Downtown Columbus, Inc., the nonprofit that manages a lot of the daily texture of this part of the city, asked restaurateur Josh Dalton to come look at the space. Dalton already had Veritas and Speck Italian Eatery on his résumé, and he later said the location wasn't something he chose so much as something that chose him once he landed on Mediterranean food as the concept. The name Amara comes from Sanskrit and Greek roots both meaning something close to unfading.
The restaurant that opened this July seats sixty-five inside and another sixty-five on the patio, with valet parking available, a scale that matches the building's visibility rather than trying to feel intimate.
The Fountain Timed Its Return To The Same Week
Amara's spring 2026 target wasn't picked at random. It landed just ahead of the Scioto Mile Fountain's scheduled summer reopening, the same fountain the restaurant's patio looks directly onto. Dalton talked about wanting the space to pick up on the sound of the park itself, the water and the foot traffic, rather than operate as a room that happens to have a view.
That's the difference between a restaurant opening on its own timeline and one opening on the corridor's timeline. Bicentennial Park had been running at partial capacity since the end of 2024, a fountain with no restaurant beside it, or a restaurant with no fountain running. This is the first season since the closure where both pieces are back on at the same time.
A Few Blocks Away, The Same Kind Of Vacancy Moved At A Different Speed
Not every empty storefront downtown goes through an eighteen-month public screening process, and the contrast is worth sitting with. Huli Huli Tiki Lounge, already established in Powell, expanded into a new Downtown location on East Mound Street this year, the first tiki bar to open in this part of the city since 2019. There was no city legislation involved, no lunch-hour requirement, no council member setting price-point conditions. It's a private commercial lease, and it moved at private commercial speed.
Neither building sat empty because nobody wanted downtown real estate. One sat empty because its landlord had specific, publicly debated conditions attached to who could move in. The other filled quickly because it didn't. Anyone reading the pace of downtown's storefronts as a single signal, fast equals healthy, slow equals struggling, is missing that these are two different kinds of landlords making two different kinds of decisions.
North Market Timed Its Own Milestone To The Same Season
The Amara story isn't happening in isolation on the riverfront corridor. A few blocks north, North Market is marking its 150th year in 2026, and the anniversary lines up with an active expansion next door tied to construction on the Merchant Building, the 32-story tower rising on what used to be the market's parking lot. The market broke ground in 2025 on a 15,000-square-foot addition that includes new vendor stalls, a bar area, an outdoor plaza, and dedicated event space, work that's still underway rather than finished.
Exterior signage went up on the Merchant Building itself earlier this year, a visible marker on a tower that's been climbing the skyline since 2023 and is now slated for a full opening in 2027. None of that construction is done. But the fact that North Market chose its 150th year to expand, in the same season Amara reopened the riverfront's most visible restaurant, means downtown's two biggest food destinations are having their moment on overlapping timelines rather than years apart.
What's Actually Open Right Now
- Amara, 229 Civic Center Drive, dinner nightly with lunch service planned to follow by late summer, seating for sixty-five inside and sixty-five on the patio, valet available
- The Scioto Mile Fountain, running for the season directly outside Amara's windows
- North Market's 150th-anniversary expansion, still under construction next door, adding vendor stalls, a bar area, an event plaza, and meeting space
- Huli Huli Tiki Lounge's new Downtown location on East Mound Street, the first tiki bar in this part of the city since 2019
- The Merchant Building, exterior signage now visible on the 32-story tower beside North Market, construction ongoing toward a 2027 opening
Walk the Mile this month and you're looking at a corridor where a restaurant that took eighteen months of deliberate screening, a fountain that had been offline, a market marking a century and a half, and a tower that's been climbing since 2023 are all arriving in view of each other at once. That kind of alignment doesn't happen by accident, and it doesn't happen often.
If you're watching what fills in around your own block down here, or wondering how a season like this one tends to move property conversations along the riverfront, Jill Beckett-Hill keeps a closer eye on downtown's block-by-block changes than most. Reach out and book a consultation if you want that read applied to your own address.
