What Opened on 7th Avenue, 7th Street, and Central Since Last Winter

If you have lived north of Camelback for a while, you already know North Central is not a single main street. It is three parallel corridors sitting roughly a half mile apart: 7th Avenue on the west, Central down the middle, 7th Street on the east. What has been quietly interesting over the last twelve months is where the new places landed on that map, and where they did not.

Between March 2025 and December 2025, four of the corridor's most-discussed openings arrived on the flanking streets. Central Avenue, meanwhile, added exactly one, and it was a restaurant that had been in the same address since 1950. Read that pattern for a minute and the neighborhood's daily rhythm starts to make more sense.

The Two Flanks and the Spine

Central is still the corridor's shaded pedestrian backbone. The Murphy Bridle Path runs along the east side of Central from Bethany Home Road up to the Arizona Canal, roughly 2.6 miles of packed dirt under a canopy of olive and ash trees, including olive trees that date back to roughly 1905 to 1910. That canopy is the reason people walk Central. It is also the reason almost no one opens a restaurant on it.

Seventh Avenue and Seventh Street are the commercial flanks, and they are where the weeknight economy actually lives. Here is how the last year sorted itself out:

Four openings on the flanks, one careful restoration on the spine. That is not an accident. It is what happens when a boulevard is designed for shade and a bridle path and the commercial zoning sits one block over on either side.

What Landed on Seventh Avenue

The Melrose stretch of 7th Avenue between Indian School and Camelback did most of the talking in 2025.

In the spring, Kat Moore, previously a co-owner of Short Leash Hotdogs and Taproom, partnered with Boycott bar owner Audrey Corley to open Title 9, part of a growing list of women's sports bars in the U.S., which opened on Seventh Avenue in the Melrose District as Arizona's first dedicated women's sports bar. It took over the Short Leash address at 4221 N. 7th Ave., which means the block did not lose a bar; it just changed what was on the televisions.

The bigger December story was two blocks north, at the southeast corner of 7th Avenue and Camelback. James Lenhart and Tory Johnson bought the two-story mid-century building in September and, after a fast renovation, opened Brasserie Melrose on Dec. 3. It replaced Belly Kitchen and Bar, which had closed in late 2024. The concept runs the length of the day: espresso and pastries in the morning, then a lunch menu of soups, sandwiches and salads best paired with a glass of French rosé. Coffee comes from the local Roastery of Cave Creek, and the space stays open for cocktails Friday and Saturday until midnight.

One practical note the owners themselves keep repeating: parking is limited, and they encourage customers to use ride share, walk, bike or park in the nearby Park and Ride lot for the light rail. If you live in the neighborhood, that is a feature, not a bug. It is one of the few places on the corridor where walking in from the surrounding blocks is genuinely the fastest option.

What Landed on Seventh Street

Seventh Street's contribution came in April. The Taco Boys team opened Marisco Boys at 2026 N. 7th St., in the former Coco's Bakery. The elevated restaurant offers full-service dining at tables surrounded by navy blue velvet chairs or at its glowing, internally lit bar, with beer and craft cocktails alongside raw and cooked seafood, and many of the Sonoran and Sinaloan-style dishes designed for sharing. It reads less as a taco shop's older sibling and more as a full sit-down restaurant that happens to share a kitchen philosophy.

That block of 7th Street between Osborn and Indian School has been slowly filling in for a few years now. Marisco Boys is the anchor that changed the calculus for evening reservations there.

The One Move on Central

Central got Durant's back. That is the whole story, and it matters because of how narrowly it almost went the other way.

The dimly lit Central Avenue steakhouse has been serving politicians and businesspeople since 1950, until February, when its former owners, Jack and Carol McElroy, sold the restaurant and closed the doors. For most of 2025 the building sat empty. Then brothers Mike and Jeffrey Mastro, their dad Dennis Mastro and business partner Scott Troilo took over the restaurant with plans to modernize the menu, and Durant's reopened on Dec. 17. The kitchen door is still the front door. The neon still faces Central.

That is the shape of Central Avenue in a sentence. The corridor rewards preservation over invention. The Bridle Path is a century old. The olive trees are older than most of the houses. And the only restaurant that gets to sit directly on the boulevard is one that has been there since Truman was in office.

The Weekend the Neighborhood Shows Up on 7th

If you want the clearest picture of how 7th Avenue behaves as the corridor's social street, put one Saturday on the calendar.

The 21st M7 (Melrose on 7th Avenue) Street Fair is scheduled for February 28th, 2026 from 11 AM until 5 PM, spanning over a half mile in the heart of Phoenix's Melrose District on 7th Avenue from Indian School to Campbell Avenue. The organizers moved the date this year. It used to run the first Saturday in March; now it lands on the last Saturday in February.

A few resident-oriented details worth knowing before the day:

• Hosted by the Seventh Avenue Merchants Association, and free to attend.
• Around 200 craftsmen and artists, eclectic food trucks, a Huss Brewing beer garden, children's activities, a collectible car show featuring over 150 classic cars, trucks and motorcycles, and live local music.
• Attendance runs in the neighborhood of 25,000, which is meaningful for a half-mile stretch. Plan to walk in from an adjacent street rather than drive to the fair itself.
• Brasserie Melrose sits at the north end of the footprint at 7th and Camelback. Title 9 is inside it at 4221 N. 7th Ave. The Melrose location of El Chullo Peruvian, which closed its original 12-year Seventh Street location but still has a location in the Melrose District, is a short walk in as well.

The fair is a compressed version of what 7th Avenue already does the rest of the year. If a friend asks you what the neighborhood is like, this is the day to bring them.

What This Adds Up To

The Central Avenue corridor is doing two jobs at once. The spine is a walking boulevard with a shaded dirt path, a canal terminus, and one institutional restaurant that just came back from the dead. The flanks are where new operators actually place their bets, because the zoning, the storefronts, and the parking behave like commercial streets are supposed to.

If you already live here, the practical read is straightforward. Walk Central in the morning, especially during the cooler months from late fall through early spring, when the trail's mature-tree shade makes it more pleasant even on warmer days. Save Central for a Durant's night when you want the room to feel like it did the last time you went. Spend the rest of your weeknights on 7th Avenue between Indian School and Camelback, or on the 7th Street block that Marisco Boys just anchored. That is where the corridor's next year is going to be written.

If you are thinking about a move within North Central, or about how the shifting weight between Central and the two flanking streets should factor into a home search on this side of town, the team at Craig Bennett Group is happy to talk through the block-by-block picture. Contact us anytime.