Three New Tenants Were Announced on Fairview Avenue. Only One Has Actually Opened Its Doors.
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
Walk East Fairview Avenue in Old Cloverdale this month and you will see one restaurant with a line out the door, one storefront with a finished sign and an unopened door, and one that looks ready but has said nothing official about a date. All three were announced together in March. Five months later, they are not on the same clock.
If you live in Old Cloverdale, you already know the building. It is the 11,000-square-foot redevelopment inside a 109-year-old structure that developers spent the winter restoring, keeping the original interior walls rather than gutting them. What you may not know is which of its three announced tenants you can actually walk into today.
The developer, Old Cloverdale Village Holding LLC, a partnership that includes The FiveStone Group, Bayer Ventures, D&A Companies, Fresh Hospitality, and restaurateur Charles Morgan, announced its core-and-shell completion in March and named three signed tenants in the same breath:
That is the version of the story every outlet ran in mid-March, and it is the version most guides to the neighborhood are still repeating. It treats "announced" and "open" as the same thing. They are not.
Big Bad Breakfast held its soft opening in the space in late March, and five months later it is the one tenant of the three that residents can currently walk into for a meal. That matters beyond the neighborhood, too. The Montgomery opening brought the chain's Alabama count to ten locations, filling what its owner called a missing market alongside existing stores in Birmingham, Mobile, Madison, and Florence. For a neighborhood that had been feeding itself on the same handful of breakfast spots for years, that is a genuinely new option, not a rebrand of something that was already there.
Cloverdale Creamery is the harder one to pin down, and that is itself the interesting part. Its own website is now live, listing a street address at 1044 East Fairview Avenue and describing itself as serving hand-scooped ice cream. Yet a Montgomery visitor guide updated within the past month was still calling it "coming soon" and telling readers to keep an eye out for a grand opening. Nothing on the developer's side has issued a formal opening announcement either, so the shop sits in the same gap the whole building does: further along than the March headlines suggested, but without anyone confirming the doors are open for good. Worth a walk-by rather than a guess.
House of Alchemy is the one still lagging. Its own site, as of this writing, reads simply "Opening Soon." That is not a knock on the concept. Designed by local architect Andy Graydon with interiors from Laura Dockery Design, it is planned as a genuinely distinctive addition to the block, wines by the glass, charcuterie, specialty coffee, and a retail section of bottles and books. But the gap between the March announcement and the current status is real, and if you have been waiting to bring a book down the street for a glass of wine, you are still waiting.
"Whether you're looking to unwind over a glass of wine with a friend, discover a new favorite book, or simply enjoy a cup of coffee in the morning, House of Alchemy will offer something for everyone."
That was Chappell's quote from March, describing a space that, months later, still has a sign on the door rather than a door that opens.
None of this is unusual for a phased retail buildout, and it is not a criticism of the developer. What it does mean is that anyone relying on the March news cycle to plan an evening out has an outdated map. FiveStone partner Michael Reilly has been candid about what the project is still chasing: one more true restaurant tenant, and fitness use, which he has called high on the list for the remaining space. The build is not finished filling in, and treating the March announcement as the neighborhood's current state means missing that the block is still, quite literally, under construction in places.
Reilly has also been clear about why FiveStone bet on this stretch of Fairview in the first place, pointing to the staying power of Moe's Original BBQ and the continued growth of Huntingdon College as reasons the area could support new retail. Those are not throwaway comparisons. They are the two anchors that made a century-old building worth saving instead of demolishing, and they are still doing the same work now that they were before the redevelopment broke ground.
It is worth remembering that Old Cloverdale's daily rhythm was never dependent on this one building. Filet & Vine Market, Deli, and Bottle Shoppe has been serving gourmet sandwiches and one of Montgomery's better meat-and-three lunches since partners Derk Lyerly and Jud Blount opened it in 1997. A few doors down, Vintage Year has been part of the neighborhood's social calendar since 1984, when it started as Montgomery's only specialty wine shop before adding a full dinner menu. Vintage Cafe, housed in a former bank building dating to 1955, still pours Stumptown Coffee to residents heading to work.
For evenings that do not involve food at all, the Cloverdale Playhouse keeps a season of theatrical performances running on Fairview, and the Capri Theatre, Alabama's oldest independently owned cinema, is still the closest thing the neighborhood has to a living room. Cloverdale Park and Cloverdale Bottom Park remain the two green spaces residents actually use for a walk between errands, not because a press release told them to, but because they have been there longer than any of this year's news.
If you already live in Old Cloverdale, the practical takeaway is simple: Big Bad Breakfast is real and open, so if you have been putting off trying it, this week works. Cloverdale Creamery is close enough to being open that a walk-by beats waiting for an official announcement. House of Alchemy is still a sign on a door, not a place to plan an evening around yet, no matter what the March coverage implied.
The larger point is about how to read neighborhood news in general. A single announcement covering three tenants at once creates the impression of simultaneous arrival. The reality on the ground is staggered, and the gap between what got announced and what actually opened is often the most useful thing a resident can know. Old Cloverdale is filling in a real, once-empty commercial corner of a neighborhood that has otherwise looked the same for decades. It is just filling in on its own schedule, not the press release's.
If you are watching this stretch of Fairview Avenue change and wondering what it means for property values or timing a move in or out of the neighborhood, that is a longer conversation, and one Elevar has with Central Alabama families every week. Let's Start a Conversation.
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