Why Two New Slabtown Restaurants Are Both Named After Someone's Grandmother

Walk NW 21st Avenue between Pettygrove and Savier this month and you will pass two facades wrapped in paper, both mid-buildout, both about a block apart. One is going into the old Cosube space at 1580 NW 21st. The other is taking over a ground-floor spot in one of the new buildings that replaced the old concrete warehouses near Pettygrove and 21st. Ask around and you will hear the same detail twice: both restaurants are named after the owner's paternal grandmother.

That is not a coincidence worth a shrug. It is the clearest signal yet of what kind of moment Slabtown and the NW 23rd corridor are in right now. This is not a neighborhood full of first-time operators testing whether a concept works. It is a neighborhood where people who already built something else, a decade-old restaurant, a national brand rack, a career at Nike, are choosing these blocks for the project that matters most to them personally. That is the thread connecting a fern bar, a Spanish restaurant, a vintage shop, and a long-dead vacant lot that just started moving again.

Two Blocks, Two Grandmothers

The first name is Angelina's. It comes from the team behind Sesame Collective, and it is going into the former Cosube space at 1580 NW 21st Ave, a 2,800-square-foot spot with room for 76 people inside and another 30 on a heated patio. The concept is a fern bar, the loose, plant-heavy bar style that first caught on decades ago as a place for young singles to figure out how to drink together in public. Co-owner Laura named the space for her paternal grandmother, the same woman whose kitchen table anchored her childhood summers outside Boston. Early coverage in March pointed to a summer 2026 opening. By August, the timeline had slipped to fall, a small but real detail for anyone tracking construction on that block rather than reading a press release once and moving on.

A block away, Feli is going into a brand-new building, the first tenant in a space that also includes a pilates studio and a clothing store. It comes from Javier and Jael Canteras, the couple behind Urdaneta, which quietly hit its ten-year mark last month. Feli will be larger than its sibling restaurant and will serve food from Andalusia in southern Spain, with a full bar. The name is short for Feliciana, Javier's grandmother, a detail he only shared after being asked directly. Neither owner coordinated with the other. They just happened to land within a block of each other, in the same season, with the same instinct: when you finally open the place that is really yours, you name it for the person who fed you first.

That is the pattern worth noticing. Kasey, one half of the Sesame Collective team behind Angelina's, has been cooking in Portland since around 2000, and the group previously ran Dolly Olive before turning its attention to this new fern bar. Urdaneta, the restaurant behind Feli, has a full decade behind it. These are not operators rolling the dice on an unproven strip. They are established Portland restaurant people spending accumulated credibility on something more personal, in the same few blocks, at the same time.

The Retail Side Isn't Chasing Trends Either

The same pattern shows up a few blocks over on NW 23rd, just in retail instead of restaurants. At 724 NW 23rd Ave, visii opened from Veronika Ovchinnikova and Sage Brandt, two former employees of Northwest Union who left that job to open their own vintage shop directly underneath it. Ovchinnikova is just 24. She did not set out to own a shop. She saw a gap on a street she already knew from the inside and filled it.

A few doors down at 1536 NW 23rd, Superette has spent the past couple of years building something similar under owner Barajas, who quit a full-time job at Nike in June 2025 to run the store full time. Superette has become a stockist for brands most Portland shoppers cannot find anywhere else in the city, including Gigi Hadid's cashmere label Guest in Residence and the sock and silk brand Comme Si. It also landed the first Portland representation of the womenswear label Kallmeyer, which launched in the shop this past spring. As of this year, Superette's own plan was a second-floor expansion into home goods and a new menswear section, doubling down on the same block rather than opening a second location elsewhere in the city.

Add in the small stuff that changes a daily walk more than any single headline: Fireside's new location at 801 NW 23rd, Good Neighbor Cà Phê pouring espresso and bánh mì at 1650 NW 23rd, Il Corso serving salumi and handmade pasta at 1204 NW Glisan, and a Credo Beauty outpost arriving at 817 NW 23rd. None of these are chains expanding into a hot zip code. They are specific people making specific bets on specific storefronts they already knew.

The Lot That Finally Moved

For years, one stretch of NW 23rd near Marshall has been the neighborhood's most obvious gap, a fenced lot that outlasted at least one serious attempt to build on it. In 2021, a five-story, 74-unit project with ground-floor shops cleared design review and then quietly stalled as costs rose. In February 2026, new permits went in for a mixed-use building stacking housing over street-level retail, with a spring 2027 target and no confirmed unit count yet. It is not a done deal. Plenty of Northwest District proposals have died between permit and groundbreaking before. But it is the first real paperwork that lot has seen in years, and it fits the same story as the restaurants and shops around it: this is a stretch of the city where stalled things are finally starting to move.

A few blocks over, the same logic applies to Slabtown Square, the 200-unit apartment building with ground-floor retail that finished construction in 2024 on the double block bounded by NW 20th, 21st, Pettygrove, and Raleigh. The eastern half of that same block was donated to the city last August for a future one-acre park at NW 20th and Pettygrove. It is still in the early planning stage, with design and community engagement not scheduled until sometime between fall 2026 and summer 2027, so nobody should expect grass and benches this year. But it is one more piece of a neighborhood that spent a decade as mostly warehouses and is now filling in, block by block, with the kind of infrastructure that makes a place worth lingering in rather than just passing through.

The Neighborhood Already Knows How to Throw a Party

None of this needed restaurants to prove it works. On May 31, Slabtown closed off NW 21st Ave at Savier Street for a free market and block party that pulled in G-Love, The Love Shack, Tea Bar, and Core Collective, plus a morning workout class that filled a hundred mats across the street before the vendors even opened. Breakside Brewery's Slabtown location at 1570 NW 22nd Ave has also become an informal gathering point for the city's restaurant operators, hosting an industry meetup in April that pulled in owners from across Portland's food scene, a small sign that Slabtown is becoming a place people in the business choose to meet, not just a place they open shops.

Put it together and the story is not that NW Portland has new restaurants and new shops. Every neighborhood in this city can claim that in any given year. The story is that the specific people opening them right now have already proven themselves somewhere else and are spending that credibility here, on projects personal enough to name after family, on a strip where a decade-old dead lot just found its first real permit, next to a park that is still years from breaking ground but is finally, officially, coming. Walk NW 21st this fall and you will see the paper come off two windows named for two grandmothers. That is worth noticing on its own, no matter what else you plan to do with the block.

If you already call NW Portland home and want to talk about what any of this means for your building, your block, or your next move in the neighborhood, Erika Wrenn knows these streets block by block. Let's Connect.