Drive west on Elkhorn Drive past the old brick storefronts this month and you will hit a chain-link fence and a dirt pit before you hit a coffee shop. Cedar Creek Coffee & Art has been open in Olde Towne Elkhorn since January, tucked into the Elkhorn Landing building near 206th and Elkhorn Drive, and by all accounts it is good. But finding it since spring has meant working around a construction hole that swallowed the parking and patio out front. Owner Joey Kaplan has taken to describing his own shop the way you would describe a bar with no sign on the door. You kind of have to earn your way in to find it, he told a local TV crew in May, and if you have tried to grab a latte there since, you already know exactly what he means.
What makes this worth a closer look is not just that one coffee shop is hard to park at. It is that Olde Towne Elkhorn is running two completely different stories on the same short stretch of downtown at the same time, and knowing which is which is the difference between a wasted trip and a good Tuesday night.
The Construction Story Is Only Happening on One End of Downtown
The hole on Elkhorn Drive is a stormwater drainage project, not a sign that downtown itself is falling apart. City public works has attributed it to an issue with the drain in that specific area, and the timeline described in late May called for the dirt-moving phase to wrap by the start of June, with concrete pouring to follow. That puts the worst of it behind us by now, though nobody covering it has published a formal all-clear.
What the construction has done is squeeze the businesses that share that block. Foster's Mercantile, the home decor shop on the main floor of Elkhorn Landing's first building, has felt the pedestrian dip along with its neighbors. Owner Marshall Wallman put it plainly: the project affected the foot traffic that would otherwise walk from parking downtown over to the Main Street shops. Rather than wait it out separately, Foster's opened its own side courtyard, the one with exterior furniture already out for sale, so Cedar Creek Coffee would have somewhere to point customers while its own patio sat behind a fence. That is not the kind of arrangement two national chains work out with each other. It is a small business favor from a shop that has anchored that corner since the building went up, extended to the newer neighbor who moved in a few doors down.
Wallman's read on where things stand is more optimistic than resigned. He told reporters he sees the light at the end of the tunnel. If you have been steering clear of that end of Elkhorn Drive since spring assuming it is still a mess, it is worth an actual drive-by before you write it off for the rest of the year.
A Few Blocks East, an Entirely Different Kind of Opening
None of that construction touches the corner of Main Street and Elkhorn Drive, where a building that has sat empty since 2023 is finally getting its second act. Bella Vita Ristorante closed there that year, and the space, built in 1897, has been undergoing a renovation with no drainage project attached to it at all.
The person behind that renovation is Chuck Olson, who already runs Main Street Cellar, the wine bar a block away on North Main Street. He is preserving the original structure while splitting it into two restaurants with separate kitchens. The main floor becomes La Vida Nova, which translates to the new life, and it was slated to open in May. Upstairs, a still-unnamed fine dining concept built around a chef's tasting menu was planned to follow a couple of months behind it, which lines up with sometime around midsummer.
By the timeline Olson laid out to reporters last winter, both floors should be open or very close to it by now. What he said about why he took this on is worth sitting with for a second: he wanted something that would help the community grow while keeping the businesses local, the kind of continuity that keeps Elkhorn feeling like Elkhorn instead of turning into another strip of interchangeable storefronts. That is the same instinct that led him to open Main Street Cellar a block away in the first place, a wine bar with a rooftop patio that has quietly become one of downtown's regular gathering spots.
So the honest version of the map right now looks like this: the Main Street corner is in the middle of a genuinely exciting, unhindered opening. A few blocks west on Elkhorn Drive, the Elkhorn Landing end is still working through the tail of a construction project that has nothing to do with those restaurants at all.
What's Actually Open Tonight
If you are trying to plan an evening downtown without guessing, here is the honest state of things as of late summer:
- Coneflower Creamery is well past its opening buzz at this point and has become enough of a neighborhood fixture that Olde Towne Elkhorn's own business group has pushed for it to be recognized in USA Today's national rankings.
- Fluff, the interior design shop and store upstairs from Cedar Creek Coffee, has been open since last August and is unaffected by anything happening at street level.
- Foster's Mercantile is open, has adjusted its own layout to help a neighbor, and is easier to reach than the fence out front might suggest.
- Cedar Creek Coffee & Art is open, worth the extra ten seconds it takes to spot the entrance, and exactly the kind of place that benefits from you actually telling a friend how to find it.
- La Vida Nova and the tasting menu concept above it are either newly open or should be any week now, based on the timeline its owner gave, with no construction complicating access on that end at all.
Reading the Timeline Instead of the Rumor
The lesson in all of this is less about any single restaurant or coffee shop and more about how information travels in a small downtown. Word of mouth tends to flatten a neighborhood into one story: downtown is torn up, or downtown has a lot of new stuff, whichever version reaches you first. Neither is quite right on its own. The more useful habit is to separate what belongs to a specific construction timeline from what belongs to a specific building's renovation schedule, because in Olde Towne Elkhorn those two things happen to be running in parallel without actually overlapping.
That habit is worth keeping past this particular stormwater project, too. Downtown districts like this one tend to go through these stretches in waves, a cluster of openings here, an infrastructure fix there, and the residents who get the most out of it are the ones who check in on the actual timeline rather than the general impression left over from three months ago.
If you already call Elkhorn home, none of this changes anything about your address. It just means the next time someone tells you downtown is a mess right now, you will know enough to ask which end of it they mean.
And if you are the kind of person who pays attention to a neighborhood changing this much this fast, and you find yourself wondering what that means for home values or timing on the other side of a move, that is exactly the kind of conversation The Jackson Group has every week. Schedule Your Concierge Consultation whenever you are ready to talk specifics.
