Old Town Erie Has Three New Restaurants Coming. One Won't Open Until 2027.

Ask around Old Town Erie this month about Johnny Bechamel's and you'll hear it's nearly ready. Ask again in a few weeks and you might hear the opposite. Both answers trace back to the same source: the Town of Erie's own downtown project tracker, which has described this one restaurant's timeline at least three different ways since permits were first pulled.

Meanwhile, a few blocks over, businesses nobody was watching that closely just quietly started serving people. That split, between what's genuinely open for business this week and what still lives on a permit application, is the actual shape of Old Town's fall season. Here's how it breaks down, block by block.

The Kitchen That Keeps Moving Its Own Deadline

Johnny Bechamel's isn't a local unknown trying its luck. It's the second location from Mamas & Papas Hospitality Group, the Denver team behind Dio Mio and Redeemer Pizza, who opened their first full-service concept at 81 South Pennsylvania Street in Denver's Wash Park in December 2025. An Erie location was announced the same year.

The build site is 656 Kattell Street, directly across from Coal Creek Park, with a three-season patio planned for the frontage. The Town's own downtown tracker has logged this project moving through several stages: an early-2026 construction target, then a later update describing construction as underway with an opening "anticipated later this fall." Most recently, Erie's economic development authority approved a financing amendment covering up to $725,000 in tax increment reimbursement to help cover higher construction costs, with a formal requirement that construction begin before June 30 and a completion target now set at December 2027.

That's a wide gap for one restaurant to sit in. The same public record has told residents this fall and more than a year from now, and both statements are still sitting on the page. Worth knowing before you plan a first dinner there: even a well-capitalized group with two proven Denver concepts needed the town's help closing a construction cost gap, which is a big part of why this particular build has taken longer to firm up than the early announcements suggested.

What's Actually Serving Food and Coffee Right Now

While Johnny Bechamel's works through financing and permitting, other Old Town spots skipped the drama entirely.

Cellar West's new sandwich window didn't come with a press release. It just started running on weekends, staffed by an outside pizza operator named Weedhart Pies. Birdhouse's patio expansion and new parklet seating finished on a similarly quiet timeline. Neither needed a town financing agreement or a multi-year build. They just opened.

The Playroom Still Filling Out Its Lease

Little Grove sits in the middle of the spectrum. The kids' play center and coffee bar has a signed lease at 512 Briggs Street and describes itself on its own site as a "nature-inspired indoor + outdoor play center and coffee bar" built for children from birth through age 7, with a mud kitchen, sensory space, and a climbing structure for older kids. The company's own target is a Summer/Fall 2026 opening, and it's already collecting founding memberships ahead of that date.

The Town's downtown tracker, in a slightly earlier update, still listed the project as in planning. Neither is wrong exactly. It just means the business is further along on its own books than the town's public log had caught up to reflect. If you're watching this corner for an opening date, the business's own site is currently the more current source.

The Fall Calendar Doesn't Care About Any of This

Old Town's event calendar keeps moving regardless of which storefronts are finished. Coal Creek Park just wrapped its free summer concert series, so what's ahead this season is festival heavy rather than concert heavy:

• Anderson Farms Fall Festival runs across four weekends this year, September 26 and 27, October 3 and 4, October 10 and 11, and October 17 and 18.
• The 13th Annual Erie Brewfest lands at Coal Creek Park on Saturday, October 3, with a lineup of Colorado breweries and food trucks and tickets sold through the Erie Chamber of Commerce.
• The annual Parade of Lights travels through downtown Erie on December 4, closing out the year the way it has for years.

Coal Creek Park at 575 Kattell Street keeps doing the work of holding all of this together. It's the address for the Brewfest, it's the frontage Johnny Bechamel's patio will eventually face, and it's the anchor point most people already use to pair a walk on the Coal Creek Trail with a coffee or a pizza stop downtown.

Reading the Block Like a Local

The lesson here isn't that Old Town is stalling. It's that announcements and openings move on different clocks, and the gap between them is exactly where a lot of people get their expectations wrong. A restaurant backed by an established Denver group can still take years longer than its first press release implied. A sandwich counter with no announcement at all can be open by the weekend.

Westerly's still-unnamed restaurant and market is the next version of this same pattern playing out on the other side of town, announced with no operator and no date attached yet. If you want to know what's actually running in Old Town Erie on any given week, the Town's own downtown project page and Little Grove's own countdown are both worth checking directly rather than going off what got announced first.

Whether you're timing a first visit to Johnny Bechamel's whenever it lands, or you're the kind of person who tracks a neighborhood this closely because you're thinking about what comes next for your own address here, that's exactly the kind of read on a block that Live.Laugh.Denver. Real Estate Group spends its time on. If Erie's the place you're watching, reach out and start your home journey with people who already know which storefronts are actually open.