"Happy to be back in the Melrose neighborhood, which is probably my favorite neighborhood that we've ever been in," Terry Bortin told a reporter back in June, standing outside the spot on 7th Avenue where he and business partner America Corrales had just reopened America's Taco Shop after twelve years away.
That sentence carries more weight than it sounds like it should. Bortin isn't a newcomer discovering Melrose. He helped build it, opened his original taco shop on 7th Street back in 2008, expanded into Melrose, Tempe, and Old Town Scottsdale, then watched rising rents force him out of everywhere except Old Town. Now he's betting on the same neighborhood again, and he's not the only one. Three businesses have opened or reopened along this stretch of 7th Avenue in the last nine months, and each one is solving the same problem in a different way: what do you do here before it gets dark?
A street built for after dark
Melrose has never lacked for nightlife. The stretch between Camelback and Indian School roads, known locally as "The Curve" for the way 7th Avenue winds through it, has long been anchored by gay bars and lounges like Stacy's @ Melrose, Boycott Bar, Pat O's Bunkhouse Saloon, and Charlie's Phoenix. Thunderbird Lounge, part arcade bar and part secret garden patio, draws a crowd after sunset. Chars Live, the renamed and renovated version of the longtime blues club Chars Has The Blues, still pulls in music fans from across the Valley. The city marked the neighborhood's identity officially in 2018, painting a rainbow crosswalk at 7th and Glenrosa.
What Melrose hasn't had, at least not consistently, is a reason to be there at ten in the morning on a Tuesday. That's the gap the newest wave of businesses is trying to close, and the way they're doing it tells you something about what actually works on this corridor now.
What opened, and what it replaced
Start with the building at 4971 N 7th Avenue. For four years it was Belly Kitchen & Bar, a Southeast Asian fusion restaurant that closed its original Phoenix location on October 30, 2024. Belly wasn't a one-off failure either. Its second location, at Gilbert's Epicenter development, shut down two months later on December 31, 2024, before a different restaurant, The Mission, moved into that Gilbert space the following year.
In its place, owners James Lenhart and Tory Johnson opened Brasserie Melrose in December 2025. Johnson also serves as executive chef. The building itself is a two-story midcentury structure, and the new concept was designed specifically to work across the whole day rather than around a single dinner service. Mornings bring hand-laminated pain au chocolat and Cave Creek-roasted espresso from the ground-floor bakery counter. By evening, the upstairs space, a 13-seat bar with a second-story patio wrapped in black-and-white striped drapes, turns into a cocktail lounge. One building, four dayparts, one lease.
A few blocks away at 4519 N 7th Avenue, a different kind of daytime bet opened in February 2026. Static Hall bills itself as Arizona's first commission-free collaborative shop, a permanent home for 33 local vendors selling everything from handmade pasta to vintage clothing, with none of the markup that comes from a typical consignment arrangement. Owner RaeAnn, who has run pop-up booths since she was 19, built Static Hall to fix a specific complaint she kept hearing from small business owners: one-day markets take enormous effort and don't guarantee you'll ever see the right customer twice. A permanent, browsable space on 7th Avenue solves that by turning market day into every day.
Then there's America's Taco Shop, which reopened in June at 4306 N 7th Avenue, the former home of Melrose Kitchen. This isn't a new concept finding its footing. It's a business with a documented history in this exact neighborhood, leaving once because the economics stopped working, and choosing to come back anyway.
Why the pattern matters more than any single opening
Three businesses, three different categories, one shared logic: none of them are built around a single evening meal period. Brasserie Melrose captures breakfast, lunch, happy hour, and late night in the same building. Static Hall doesn't serve food at all, but it exists because pop-up commerce alone couldn't sustain a vendor's income, so it built a daily storefront instead. America's Taco Shop is a lunch-and-dinner operation returning to a corridor where its old single-location model once buckled under rent increases.
Compare that to Belly Kitchen's trajectory. A strong concept, two locations, and two closures within months of each other, both built primarily around dinner traffic. The businesses replacing it and joining it on 7th Avenue aren't necessarily better restaurants or better shops. They're built to be useful to the same customer at more points in the day, which matters more on a street that already had nightlife figured out and needed the other sixteen hours filled in.
None of this erases Melrose's identity as a nightlife district. It adds a second one on top of it.
The night side hasn't gone anywhere
If you've lived here a while, the after-dark anchors are still exactly where you left them. Stacy's @ Melrose is still the closest thing the neighborhood has to a "Cheers." Thunderbird Lounge still pairs DJs and live music with a patio that feels more like a backyard than a bar. The Seventh Avenue Merchants Association still closes The Curve to traffic every first Saturday in March for its annual street fair, complete with Chester's Classic Car Show, food trucks, and beer gardens. That event isn't going anywhere either. What's changed is what's available to you between breakfast and happy hour.
Planning a week around it
If you're already in the neighborhood, here's what a full day on 7th Avenue looks like now in a way it didn't two years ago. Start with espresso and a pastry at Brasserie Melrose before the lunch crowd arrives. Spend an hour browsing Static Hall's 33 vendor booths, no obligation to buy, no pop-up calendar to track. Grab tacos at America's Taco Shop, back on 7th Avenue since June. Circle back to Brasserie Melrose after dark for the cocktail side of the same building, or walk a few doors down to Thunderbird Lounge or Stacy's for the version of Melrose nightlife that's been running for years.
That's not an itinerary that existed a year ago. It exists now because three separate business owners looked at the same street and decided the opportunity wasn't in competing for the dinner rush. It was in showing up for the hours nobody else was covering.
If you're watching this corridor because you're curious about where Phoenix's next interesting stretch of street might be, or you're already a regular trying to figure out what to try next, that's the read: 7th Avenue between Camelback and Indian School didn't get a new identity this year. It got a fuller one.
For more on what's shaping daily life across Phoenix, Arcadia, Biltmore, and the rest of the neighborhoods we cover, Phoenix Living keeps a close eye on the corridors worth knowing, whether or not you're in the market to move.
