Stand at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Camelback Road on a Tuesday morning and you'll smell laminated dough before you see the building. That two-story midcentury corner spot has been a lot of things over the years. Most recently it was Belly Kitchen & Bar, a Southeast Asian fusion spot that closed its original Phoenix location in October 2024. Now it's Brasserie Melrose, a French-style bakery that opened in December 2025 and somehow runs a full cocktail lounge upstairs by the time the sun goes down.
If you've lived near the Melrose District for more than a few years, this rhythm is familiar. A restaurant closes. Something else moves into the same four walls within a year or two. You might read that as churn, the kind of turnover that makes a neighborhood feel unstable. I'd argue it's the opposite. The businesses on the Curve keep changing hands, but the corridor itself, the one-mile stretch of Seventh Avenue between Indian School and Camelback that everyone just calls "the Curve," keeps pulling people back to the exact same buildings. That's a different story than most restaurant roundups tell, and it says something real about why this district holds up.
The corner that keeps getting a second act
Brasserie Melrose's owners, James Lenhart and chef Tory Johnson, took over the property at 4971 N. Seventh Ave in September 2025 and spent a few months building out a space designed to work all day rather than betting on one meal period. The ground floor runs an open kitchen and espresso counter for the morning bakery crowd. Upstairs there's a 13-seat central bar and a second-story patio wrapped in black-and-white striped drapes for the evening cocktail crowd. It's the same building that once housed Belly, whose second East Valley location at Gilbert's Epicenter also didn't survive, before a different concept, The Mission, moved into that same spot the following year.
Notice the pattern. It isn't that Melrose is bad at keeping restaurants. It's that the physical building keeps getting reused rather than torn down or left dark. Whatever closes here tends to get replaced within the same footprint, often within the same year.
A taco shop that left in 2014 just came back
The clearer version of this pattern showed up in June, when America's Taco Shop reopened on Seventh Avenue for the first time since 2014. Founders America Corrales and Terry Bortin opened their original spot on Seventh Street north of McDowell Road back in 2008, then expanded into the Melrose District, Tempe, and Old Town Scottsdale. Rising rents pushed the closure of every location except Old Town over the years that followed. The Melrose spot, specifically, had been gone for over a decade.
So why come back to the same street, in the same commercial corridor, more than ten years after the rent pressure that pushed them out the first time? Bortin told Axios Phoenix the answer plainly: "Happy to be back in the Melrose neighborhood, which is probably my favorite neighborhood that we've ever been in." The new location sits at 4306 N. Seventh Ave, the former home of Melrose Kitchen, and is opening with limited hours while the team settles back in before expanding.
This is the detail that separates Melrose from a neighborhood simply catching a trend. Trend-driven openings are first dates. This is a decade-later reunion. An operator who was priced out came back to the same street on purpose, not because it's newly discovered but because it's the neighborhood he already knew.
The anchors that never had to come back because they never left
Part of why returning here makes sense is that the district's oldest fixtures never went anywhere to begin with. Charlie's Phoenix has run since 1984 and still serves as home base for the Arizona Gay Rodeo every February. Boycott Bar, one of the few remaining lesbian bars in the country, drew national attention through the Lesbian Bar Project documentary and is still open a few doors down. Stacy's @ Melrose, built to look like a small cathedral inside, still hosts drag shows and its signature painted wings mural on the exterior wall. Even Chars Has The Blues, the district's longtime live music venue, didn't close so much as get bought and renovated, reopening as Chars Live while keeping its role as a stop for touring music fans.
None of these businesses are new, and that's the point. A district doesn't get to run restaurant turnover the way Melrose does, cycling tenants through the same handful of prime corners, unless something underneath is stable enough to keep the foot traffic coming regardless of who's currently serving dinner. Here, that stability comes from a cluster of nightlife anchors that have outlasted several restaurant generations around them.
Five auto shops become eight small businesses
The clearest example of reuse over replacement isn't a restaurant at all. A cluster of buildings at the southwest corner of Glenrosa Avenue and 6th Drive had housed auto repair and body shops since the 1940s. Owners Mark Howard and Rocco Menaguale, who previously ran Bliss ReBAR and Fez, converted the site into The Royale, a fully leased complex of eight small businesses that opened in phases starting in January 2024. Cult Hair Salon & Spa, Window Coffee Bar, Stem Swag florist, and YUMBAR opened first, followed within a month by Rocco Designs, LIX Uptown Ice Cream, Scotty Kirby Photo + Design, and Your Health and Wellness.
Howard has talked about the project less as a real estate play and more as an obligation to the block it sits on. The team put in sidewalks where none existed, added a parking area, and pushed through a four-way stop at 6th Drive and Glenrosa that neighborhood associations had been trying to get installed for decades. That's not the profile of an owner planning to flip the property. It's the profile of someone who expects to still be standing on that corner in ten years, the same way the taco shop's owner expected the neighborhood to still be worth coming back to.
What this actually changes about a Melrose evening
None of this is abstract if you already live near Seventh Avenue. It means a weeknight now realistically looks like pastries or a cocktail at Brasserie Melrose, tacos a few blocks up at the returned America's Taco Shop, and a walk on the Grand Canalscape trailhead before heading home. That trail entrance sits just off Seventh Avenue near Fry Bread House and Joe's Diner, and the stretch running from 15th Avenue to 7th Street carries more than 60 murals painted during the 2021 Phoenix Mural Fest, including a Pablo Luna piece that depicts the Melrose curve itself and a collaboration with artist Thomas "Breeze" Marcus referencing the canal system's Hohokam origins on the back wall of Joe's Diner.
The one weekend a year when the whole corridor closes to cars for the Melrose on 7th Avenue Street Fair happened back in February, drawing more than 25,000 people for its 21st edition under the Seventh Avenue Merchants Association, an organization now in its 23rd year running events on this same stretch. That kind of longevity, on the same half-mile of street, is the same story told at a different scale.
The takeaway if you already call this neighborhood home
The easy read on any restaurant closing is that a neighborhood is losing something. The Melrose pattern suggests something closer to the opposite. When a taco shop's own founder calls this his favorite neighborhood after leaving it for over a decade, when an old auto body block becomes eight small businesses instead of a parking structure, and when the bars that have anchored this corridor since the 1980s are still the ones people plan a night around, that's not decline. That's a district that keeps proving to the people who already know it that it's worth staying close to, or coming back to.
I've spent years working in and around neighborhoods like this one across the Valley, and the ones that hold up over time are rarely the ones with the flashiest single opening. They're the ones where the same corners keep earning a second chance. If you're curious what that kind of staying power is doing to home values on streets like this one, or just want to talk through what you're seeing in the neighborhood, I'm always happy to grab coffee and compare notes. You can reach out through Kelleigh Evans any time to schedule a consultation.
