Walk south from the gallery windows near Wadsworth on any evening this August and you'll pass at least half a dozen restaurants that didn't exist two years ago before you reach the two corners that made Allen Street famous in the first place. At 223 and 229 Allen, where The Old Pink and Mulligan's Brick Bar used to keep the lights on past 2 a.m., there's still gravel and a chain-link fence. Everything around those two addresses has moved on. Those two addresses haven't.
That gap tells you something the restaurant openings alone don't. Allentown isn't rebuilding by replacing what it lost. It's rebuilding around it, and the two things happening at the same time on the same block are worth separating out if you actually live here.
The Corner That's Still a Parking Lot
The timeline is short and brutal. An arsonist burned The Old Pink to the ground in June 2024. Seven months later, in January 2025, an accidental fire took down Mulligan's Brick Bar next door. Both buildings were demolished within days of their fires, leaving two adjoining lots, plus a small city-owned parking strip between them, sitting empty in the middle of the Allentown Historic Preservation District.
By August 2025, both lots had sold to Roche Development, run by Buffalo native Kyle Roche and his father William. The Old Pink parcel went for around $200,000, the Brick Bar site for about $180,000. Roche has said the plan is a multi-use building that respects the neighborhood's historic standards, and construction was expected to start sometime in 2026. As of this summer, the public record doesn't show a groundbreaking yet. A February 2026 update from Buffalo Rising described Roche as still "kicking some tires" on what actually gets built there.
Roche put it this way when the sale closed: success would be measured by "whether the community can continue to gather in that space." That's a real bar to clear on a block where two of the most-mourned buildings in the city just burned down within a year of each other.
The Old Pink and Brick Bar aren't the only stalled properties on the street. The Allen Street Hardware building at 245 Allen, an 8,375-square-foot mixed-use structure at the corner of Allen and College, was still listed for sale at a reduced $600,000 as of February 2026. The Red Jacket and Buckingham buildings, two more of the neighborhood's larger historic structures, remain in the same category: waiting on an owner with a plan. None of that is dramatic news on its own. What makes it worth noticing is what's happening a few doors down while it sits unresolved.
Where Allen Street Actually Came Back
The reopening didn't start at the anchor corners. It started in the smaller storefronts around them, and almost all of it has been food, not bars.
In 2025, Bamboo Ridge brought Thai and Vietnamese cooking to 244 Allen Street and quickly became a neighborhood favorite. Around the same time, Vasilis Express opened at the corner of Elmwood and Allen, giving the block its first dedicated gyro and souvlaki counter. Both filled gaps that had nothing to do with the fires, but both landed in a stretch of street that badly needed something to point to besides loss.
This year picked up the pace. JBC Rice Noodles & Ramen opened a sit-down location at 23 Allen Street earlier this year, a second Buffalo outpost for a restaurant that started as a mostly-takeout spot on Delaware Avenue. The broths spend up to 18 hours in a pressure cooker and the meats go through a 24-hour brine before anything hits a bowl. There's a full bar too, with a Beijing Mule cocktail running $12, and general manager Summer Adams has said the Allentown location is being given room to develop its own character apart from the original.
On April 23, Chef Dwayne "BigWayne" Jones opened Chef BigWayne Jamaican Cuisine at 242 Allen Street after building a following catering out of the West Side Bazaar. Everything on the menu is made from scratch, including a slow-cooked oxtail that takes four to five hours, jerk chicken, curry goat, rasta pasta, beef patties, and escovitch red snapper.
Down the block, owner Zach Russell opened F.A.T. in the space most recently known as Days Park Tavern, running the kitchen until 2 a.m. Wednesday through Saturday and midnight on Sunday. The menu centers on a Skirt Burger, a California-style build with house-made pickles, for $16.
And in November 2025, Bethany Halbreich and Cameron Sinclair opened Labyrinth Workshop at 15 Allen Street, a reservation-only tasting bar built around a rotating theme rather than a fixed menu. The first run was built around David Bowie, complete with film projectors and an apothecary wall of infusions, and was still running that spring at $71.60 before tax for three themed cocktails and three small plates. The concept has since rotated to a run built around Hayao Miyazaki's films, now priced at $76.62 before tax, which is the point: it's designed to keep changing.
Here's the shape of it laid out plainly:
| Business | Address | What it is | Opened |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bamboo Ridge | 244 Allen St | Thai & Vietnamese | 2025 |
| Vasilis Express | Elmwood & Allen | Greek quick-service | 2025 |
| Labyrinth Workshop | 15 Allen St | Reservation-only cocktail tasting | Nov. 2025 |
| JBC Rice Noodles & Ramen | 23 Allen St | Pan-Asian, sit-down | Early 2026 |
| Chef BigWayne Jamaican Cuisine | 242 Allen St | Jamaican | April 23, 2026 |
| F.A.T. | Former Days Park Tavern space | Late-night burgers | Early 2026 |
Six openings in a little under two years, five of them explicitly food-first, one a themed cocktail concept built around reservations rather than walk-in bar stools. That's not a coincidence of what happened to be available. It's a pattern.
Reading the Street by What Moves and What Doesn't
Here's the thing the timeline actually shows. The businesses that closed or burned on Allen Street in 2024 and 2025, The Old Pink, Mulligan's Brick Bar, and Allen Burger Venture (which shut its doors for good on January 31 of this year), were all built around the model of a walk-in neighborhood bar, open long hours, no reservation required. What's opened in their place, or near their place, skews toward something else entirely: full-service restaurants with defined menus, a reservation-only cocktail experience, a late-night burger spot with a curated single signature item instead of a sprawling bar menu. The street didn't rebuild its old identity. It built a different one next to the empty space where the old identity used to stand.
That's not a complaint. The 69th annual Allentown Art Festival still drew its usual crowd of juried artists and browsers to Allen and Delaware on June 13 and 14 this year, same corner, same weekend it's occupied for decades, proof that some of what makes this neighborhood work never depended on any single storefront. But if you've lived here through the last two years, you already knew that gathering places come and go faster than the neighborhood's actual bones do. What might surprise you is how cleanly the data breaks down: the buildings that burned are the ones still sitting empty. The buildings that just changed hands or changed concepts are already back in business. Whatever gets built at 223 and 229 Allen, it's going to open into a block that's already rebuilt its rhythm without it.
If you're the kind of person who tracks a neighborhood by watching what actually turns over on the ground, rather than what a headline says about it, this is the year Allentown gave you something real to watch. Susan Lenahan has spent decades reading these blocks the same way, storefront by storefront, sale by sale, and if you're curious what any of this means for a home nearby, a conversation costs nothing and starts with a free home valuation and neighborhood strategy.
