What's Actually Opening in Downtown Tempe This Fall, From a Relocated 1903 House to a Shark Tank

Last September, a house got picked up and driven across downtown Tempe. Not gutted, not demolished. The whole 1903 structure, the Harry Walker House, was lifted onto a truck at its old spot near 7th Street and Forest Avenue and set down again on 5th Street, right next to Tempe City Hall. It sat there through the winter while crews worked inside, and this spring it reopened as a Novel Ice Cream shop, the fourth location for a scoop shop that had just won national honors for its Dough Melt.

That single move tells you more about what's happening in Tempe right now than any list of new restaurant names could. This season, the neighborhood is placing two very different bets at the same time, a few blocks apart, and knowing which is which changes how you plan an evening out.

The blocks that didn't move

On Mill Avenue and the streets just off it, the strategy has been to reuse what's already standing. Novel isn't the only operator building inside a structure with a past. A few blocks away, Glai Baan, the well-regarded Phoenix restaurant known for its Thai cooking, is expanding into the 1892 Gov. Benjamin Moeur House on 7th Street, a 2,600-square-foot Western Colonial bungalow that's spent most of its life as something other than a dining room. It's expected to open before the year is out.

The rest of Mill's new wave is filling gaps in buildings that were already restaurants, just under different names. Julian Wright, the restaurateur behind Pedal Haus Brewery, Devil's Hideaway, and Idle Hands, is opening Carmen, a coastal Mexican concept, inside the Centerpoint on Mill space where he used to run Canteen Modern Tequila Bar for three years. Just south of 6th Street on Mill, the former Zuma Grill and Mill Cue Club space is becoming RePUBLic, a sports bar and live music venue from C.A.S.A. creator Scott Price, who's also expanding C.A.S.A. itself to add dine-in and walk-up service. Both were on track for an August opening. Around the corner, Culinary Gangster, a Chicago burger concept that started as a food truck, is aiming to open its brick-and-mortar below Varsity Tavern this summer, assuming renovations wrap on schedule. Across the river on University Drive, Wild Barbecue has already been doing this for almost a year, serving pitmaster Mo Abu Ghazal's Texas-style brisket and beef ribs out of a former Arizona Distilling Co. space, half a mile from Mill.

None of this is a from-scratch build. It's a reshuffling of storefronts and structures that were already part of Tempe's downtown, with operators betting that character and history are worth the extra work of retrofitting an old house or an old lease.

The corner that never existed until now

Then there's The Watermark, on Scottsdale Road just off the Loop 202, where Kaos Hospitality has been building something with no equivalent anywhere else in Tempe: a single address that now holds four restaurants stacked on top of each other in less than two years.

Three Thirty Three, an Asian-inspired steakhouse with curved LED screens and a live DJ, opened there in December 2024. Kaos then remodeled part of that same space into IX Sushi, an independent sushi bar that opened this past March. In May, 212° Shabu Shabu opened next door, an interactive hot pot concept where diners cook A5 wagyu and lobster tail tableside in simmering broth. And by late fall, the group plans to open Wood & Water, a 9,000-square-foot seafood restaurant with floor-to-ceiling windows over Tempe Town Lake and a 5,000-gallon shark tank as its centerpiece, alongside live crab and seafood tanks.

CEO John DeVries has described the shark tank concept as the group's attempt to make seafood the whole point of the room rather than a menu category. Whatever you make of a dining room built around live sharks, the pattern is clear. Nobody is renovating a bungalow at The Watermark. This is new construction, purpose-built, four concepts deep, all under one operator, all within walking distance of each other and the lake. It's the opposite bet from what's happening on Mill: instead of borrowing a building's history, Kaos is building the history from scratch, fast, on land that had none.

The smaller additions filling in the gaps

Not everything new downtown fits either of those categories. Some of it is just the everyday texture of a neighborhood adding options. Window Coffee Bar, ranked 15th in the country by Yelp for 2025, opened a Tempe location inside The Beam on Farmer Avenue this past December, serving pastries from Chacónne Patisserie and bagels from Bagelfeld's. Retail Therapy, a shop built around Arizona-made goods, opened at 6th and Mill in January, and Lizard Head Trading Co. set up nearby as a secondhand clothing shop that lets customers trade in old pieces for cash or store credit. Go Go Avocado, which started as a weekend pop-up at the Uptown Farmers Market roughly four years ago, finally opened its own flagship café downtown this month, and Ciao Pizza opened alongside it with a menu of specialty pies and sandwiches.

If you want to see the lake itself rather than just eat next to it, Tempe Boat Cruisin' launched this year with a pedal-powered party boat that seats up to 26 people, professionally captained, with music and the option to bring adult beverages purchased on site.

The hike that connects both sides of downtown

However you split your evening between Mill Avenue and The Watermark, there's one piece of Tempe that sits between both of them and hasn't changed at all. "A" Mountain, officially Hayden Butte, rises 1,496 feet just off Mill near 3rd Street, close enough to downtown that you can walk to the trailhead from dinner. The climb is short and steep, and from the top you get a full view of both the historic core around Mill and the newer construction ringing Tempe Town Lake, including The Watermark itself.

It's the kind of thing that doesn't show up in a restaurant roundup but explains why both bets, the relocated houses and the ground-up seafood complex, make sense in the same neighborhood. Tempe has enough density and enough of a walkable core that an operator can build a four-restaurant destination on one corner while, a mile away, someone else is trucking in a century-old house for character. Both work because the mountain, the lake, and the grid connecting them haven't gone anywhere.

What's open now versus what's still coming

If you're deciding where to spend an evening this month, here's the current state of things. Already open and operating: Novel Ice Cream in the Harry Walker House, Roman God of Fire at Hayden Ferry Lakeside, Wild Barbecue on University Drive, and Three Thirty Three, IX Sushi, and 212° Shabu Shabu at The Watermark, along with Window Coffee Bar, Retail Therapy, Go Go Avocado, and Ciao Pizza. Expected soon or before the year is out: Carmen, RePUBLic and the C.A.S.A. expansion, Culinary Gangster, and Glai Baan's move into the Moeur House. Wood & Water, shark tank included, is the last piece of the Watermark buildout, aimed at late fall.

Tempe's downtown has always had a reputation for cycling through bars and chains that never quite stuck. This season looks different, not because there are more openings than usual, but because the openings are coming from two directions at once, one preserving what was already here and one building something that never existed before. Worth knowing before you pick a spot for dinner tonight.

If you're a Tempe homeowner who's been watching this stretch of downtown change and you're curious what it means for your own property or your next move in the area, Camille Kennard is always happy to talk through it, no pressure, just a local conversation grounded in what's actually happening on the ground.