Walk down Cricket Avenue this month and you will pass a construction crew finishing out the old John Henry's Pub, where Chinatown's EMei is building a second location after fifteen years of staying put at one address. Cross to Rittenhouse Place and you will smell whatever is on the flat top at Bikini Burger, open since January. Circle back toward the train station and Gouldsburger's, the South Jersey burger and cheesesteak chain, has been serving the platform crowd since February. None of this is close to Suburban Square's manicured courtyard. It is happening on the working streets around it, and it is happening fast.
That is the part of Ardmore's 2026 story that has not gotten much attention. The headlines this spring were about Suburban Square itself: a leasing surge that brought the shopping center to full occupancy, with national names like Barry's, On Running, and Boll & Branch signing their first Philadelphia-suburb leases. That surge is real, and it is tied to something concrete, the completion of Coulter Place, the 131-unit residential building that added 20,000 square feet of retail space to the property. More apartments on site meant more daytime foot traffic, and national retailers noticed.
But that is a story about one landlord's shopping center. It is not the story of what is actually opening around it, on Cricket Avenue, Rittenhouse Place, and Greenfield Avenue, where a dozen new businesses have opened in downtown Ardmore so far this year according to a July count from the Inquirer's Lower Merion newsletter. Almost all of them are food, drink, or wellness concepts, and almost none of them are national chains looking for a flagship. They are small operators betting on a few walkable blocks.
The dozen that already opened
Some of this year's arrivals:
| Business | Address | Opened | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bored Trading Café | 43 Cricket Ave. | January | All-day café with bagels, sandwiches, salads |
| Bikini Burger | 44 Rittenhouse Pl. | January | No-frills burgers from Penn Valley's Mia Robertson |
| Gouldsburger's | 4 Station Rd. | February | South Jersey burger and cheesesteak chain |
| PopUp Bagels | 10 Coulter Ave. | March 20 | First Philadelphia-area location of the TikTok bagel brand |
| Raffs Italian Cuisine | 65 Cricket Ave. | April | BYOB from chef Raffael Kupa, second location after Buona Vita in Somers Point |
| CorePower Yoga | 169 W. Lancaster Ave. | April | Third Philly-area studio after Center City and Northern Liberties |
| Revivéa Health | 20 Ardmore Ave. | April | IV therapy and wellness, second location after West Chester |
| OGYU | 60 Greenfield Ave. | 2026 | Japanese barbecue from Osushi owner Sam Li, in the former Iron Hill Brewery space |
| Mango Mango | 38 Greenfield Ave. | 2026 | Mango-focused dessert chain |
Two more are close behind. Vintner's Table, an Italian wine bar pouring glasses from its own Folino Estate winery in Kutztown, is taking 24 Cricket Ave. Calm and Strong Yoga & Pilates is set for 46 Rittenhouse Place this fall. And the space that held Kung Fu Tea for nine years is becoming Half a While Tea and Cake, which Downtown Ardmore's newsletter had targeted for a July opening.
Bikini Burger's opening tells you something about the pace of all this. Owner Mia Robertson did not rush the concept. As she told a reporter covering the opening, she and her team wanted to make sure the recipe was right before they signed anything. That patience is part of why the burger category in particular has become so crowded here. A March count from the Inquirer found at least 16 establishments in the 19003 zip code selling a burger of some kind, from Lola's Garden's lamb burger to DePaul's Table's steakhouse patty to Bikini Burger's never-smashed classic. Sixteen is not a typo. It is what happens when a downtown this walkable, sitting right on the Paoli/Thorndale regional rail line, becomes a place where a burger joint can open without needing to be a destination. You just need people already on the sidewalk.
The gap nobody has filled yet
Here is the part that complicates the growth story. While Cricket Avenue and Rittenhouse Place fill in, one of downtown's oldest anchors has an open wound. Di Bruno Bros., the Italian specialty counter that had operated inside the Ardmore Farmers Market for fifteen years, closed its stall on February 4. Local coverage from later that month described roughly half the market's floor space sitting empty afterward, with landlord Kimco Realty marketing the old space not as a single big lease but as four smaller stalls, an attempt to bring in several food vendors instead of one anchor tenant.
Five months later, the July roundup of downtown Ardmore's new businesses does not mention a replacement. That does not mean nothing is happening inside those four walls. It means that whatever comes next has not been announced publicly yet, even as the rest of downtown fills in around it. The market itself is still open seven days a week, Monday through Saturday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and the produce, seafood, and prepared food stalls that remain are still drawing a lunch crowd. But the biggest single storefront inside it has been a question mark since winter, even while the smaller storefronts a few blocks away keep signing leases.
That contrast is the real shape of Ardmore's year. It is not one uniform boom. It is a fast-moving wave of small, independent food and wellness concepts on the side streets, running alongside a slower, more uncertain process at the market that has anchored the same corner for over a decade.
What it means for how you spend a Saturday
If you live here, none of this requires a decision. It just changes where your feet go. A Saturday morning coffee run might now route past PopUp Bagels, whose grand opening in March drew a line stretching half a block before 7:30 a.m., something the Ardmore train station crowd had not seen for a bagel shop before. A weeknight dinner run has more options within four blocks than it did at the start of the year, from Raffs' BYOB Italian to OGYU's tabletop Japanese barbecue. And EMei's Ardmore location, targeted for a summer opening at 98 Cricket Ave., will bring the Chinatown restaurant's dan dan noodles and mapo tofu to the Main Line for the first time, a project owner Dan Tsao took on after noticing how many of his Chinatown regulars were already driving in from Lower Merion.
The Downtown Ardmore District, the business improvement district that funds street cleaning and capital projects along the commercial corridor, tracks all of this through its monthly newsletter, which is how most of these openings surface before the bigger papers pick them up. Keeping an eye on it is still the fastest way to know what is opening two blocks from your own front door before it shows up anywhere else.
None of this changes what Ardmore has been for a long time: a downtown built around a train stop, dense with small storefronts, and close enough to walk between a farmers market, a yoga studio, and a Sichuan restaurant in the same afternoon. What has changed is the density of what is filling those storefronts in a single calendar year, and the fact that the biggest empty space downtown right now is not on a side street. It is inside the market, where the counter that anchored one corner of it for fifteen years is still looking for its next tenant.
If you are watching this stretch of the Main Line for reasons beyond dinner plans, whether that is a move, a sale, or just curiosity about what a neighborhood this active does to property values over time, The MacDonald Team PA tracks Ardmore and the rest of the Main Line closely. Get Home Value to see what a downtown like this one is doing to your own address.
