Walk down Ocean Street in Knightville this week and the first thing you'll notice at 60 Ocean is a new sign. Himalayas on the Bay opened its doors on August 7, serving Nepali and Tibetan dishes like momo and thukpa in the space Taco Trio occupied for more than a decade, the last five of those years in a bigger room with a tequila bar the family had built out in 2021. If you've lived in South Portland for a while, this probably doesn't surprise you. It's just the latest version of something that keeps happening on this block, and once you start counting, the pattern is more dramatic than the neighborhood's food-scene reputation lets on.
The Address That Keeps Changing Hands
Knightville gets written up a lot. Down East once called this stretch of Ocean Street the single best food block in Maine. What those pieces tend to skip is how fast the roster underneath that reputation actually turns.
Uncle Andy's Diner served no-frills breakfast at its Ocean Street spot from 1954 until it closed in the early 2020s, ending a run of nearly seven decades. Judy Gibson opened in 2021 and won the Portland Press Herald's Best New Restaurant award that same year. Its chef, Chris Wilcox, has since moved on to a new project built around Maine-sourced meat and in-house charcuterie. Elsmere BBQ closed in 2024, and by spring 2026 the space had become Makoto, a sister restaurant to Portland's Yosaku serving wood-fired dishes and sushi. And now Taco Trio's old room belongs to Himalayas on the Bay.
| Address or business | What it was | What replaced it | Approximate change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60 Ocean Street | Taco Trio (est. ~2011) | Himalayas on the Bay | August 2026 |
| 448 Cottage Road | Elsmere BBQ | Makoto | 2024 to spring 2026 |
| Judy Gibson's kitchen | 2021 Best New Restaurant | Chef moved to a new venture | 2021 to 2026 |
| Ocean Street diner space | Uncle Andy's Diner (1954) | Closed | Early 2020s |
None of these were failing businesses when they turned over. Taco Trio was popular enough to expand into a bigger space in 2021. Judy Gibson won an award the year it opened. This is a food block that keeps producing acclaimed restaurants and still can't seem to keep most of them past a few years.
A longtime Knightville business advocate, Bob O'Brien, described the neighborhood's arc to Down East by saying it had "been on the cusp of something" for nearly two decades. That framing holds up. Knightville isn't a neighborhood that arrived and settled. It's one that keeps arriving.
Seventeen Years Is a Long Time on This Block
Against that backdrop, Verbena stands out. It opened at 103 Ocean Street in 2009, back when Uncle Andy's, the Bridgeway, and the Snow Squall were still the neighborhood's anchors, and it's still serving sandwiches and salads today. Edible Maine calls it the grande dame of the Knightville restaurant scene, which sounds like a nice compliment until you line it up against everything that's opened and closed around it since. Seventeen years in the same room makes Verbena an outlier, not a baseline.
If you're a regular on this block, that's worth sitting with. The businesses getting the most attention right now, the newest openings with the freshest reviews, are statistically the ones least likely to still be there in five years. The ones worth building a routine around are usually the ones that have already survived a few cycles.
The City Just Put Its Money Somewhere Slower
While Ocean Street's storefronts keep changing hands, the ground underneath the neighborhood is getting an investment built to outlast any single tenant. On August 5, the Portland Press Herald reported that South Portland is adding its first public art to the Greenbelt Walkway, the paved trail that's run through this part of the city since it was built in phases starting in the 1970s. The city put out an open call for artists to paint 4-by-8-foot murals, with applications open through the end of August. The first mural will go up at Mill Creek Park, right across from the Ocean Street food block, and the second at Bug Light Park.
James LaPlante, who chairs the city's public art committee, told the Press Herald he hopes the Greenbelt eventually becomes known as an art walk that draws people to it. It's a modest pilot for now, four artists and two locations, but it's the first time the city has treated this trail as something to design rather than just maintain.
The Greenbelt itself is the kind of infrastructure that doesn't move fast. It runs 5.6 miles from the Wainwright Athletic Fields near the Scarborough line to Bug Light Park, passing through Ferry Village, Knightville, Pleasantdale, and Broadview Park along the way, with three distinct waterfront views of Portland along the route. That kind of trail gets built over decades, not seasons.
You can see the same slow-money pattern a mile away at Willard Beach. The Press Herald reported in June that the city has finally secured funding to rebuild the eroded stairs and seawall at the Deake Street entrance, with construction expected to start as early as next summer, nearly a decade after the city first began pursuing the project. It took a $480,000 FEMA grant plus $160,000 from the city to get it funded, after an earlier grant application tied to a 2017 public forum didn't go through. Compare that timeline to how fast a restaurant space turns over on Ocean Street and the contrast is the point. Storefronts change in months. The paths and parks around them take a decade just to get the money, then get to actually last.
What's already anchoring that walk, regardless of who's cooking dinner nearby:
- Mill Creek Park, the trail's Knightville access point and site of the annual Art in the Park show
- Bug Light Park, the eastern terminus, with views across Portland Harbor and the WWII-era Liberty ship memorial
- The Wainwright Athletic Fields, the trail's western starting point near the Scarborough line
What's Actually on the Calendar This Month
If you're looking for a reason to get out this week, South Portland's summer calendar is still moving. Art in the Park, the city's juried outdoor art show in Mill Creek Park, just wrapped up on August 8 with work from close to 170 artists and a scholarship named for one of the show's founders. If you missed it this year, it happens every second Saturday in August, so it'll be back.
Tonight, there's a book launch at Lambs in South Portland for Virginia Shaffer's Oyster Society. And on September 9, Bug Light Park hosts its annual car show from 4 p.m. until sunset, with a rain date the following week if the weather doesn't cooperate.
None of this requires you to be shopping for anything. It's just what's happening on the ground right now, in a neighborhood where the restaurant lineup changes faster than most people realize and the walking path underneath it is finally getting some permanent attention of its own.
If you've ever wondered why Knightville feels different every time you come back to it after a few years, that's not your imagination. It's a neighborhood built on turnover at the storefront level, with real continuity showing up somewhere less obvious: the trail, the parks, and now the murals about to go up on both.
If you're curious what any of that means for property values on your particular stretch of Ocean Street or Cottage Road, Adam Parent and the LUX Group track this neighborhood block by block. Get your instant home valuation and see where your street stands today.
