The paint fumes on Ocean Street this week are competing with the smell of momo steam. Himalayas on the Bay opened its doors on August 7 with a limited menu, in the building at 60 Ocean Street that spent years as Taco Trio. One block over, the gazebo at Mill Creek Park still had ribbon staples in it from Saturday, when the 46th Annual Art in the Park wrapped up another free, juried, second-Saturday-in-August show that has run on that same schedule since 1980.
Here is the thing worth noticing if you actually live here: those two facts sit next to each other on purpose. In the four months between April and August of this year, three separate, long-standing restaurant addresses in South Portland changed hands. In that same stretch, the neighborhood's oldest public tradition didn't move an inch. If you want to understand how this city actually works right now, that contrast tells you more than any single opening does.
The Building at 60 Ocean Street Has a New Tenant
Himalayas on the Bay is a Nepali and Tibetan restaurant from owners Sachet Timilsina, Pushpa Regmi, and Dipesh Karki, with a kitchen led by chefs Raj Kumar Karki and Laxman Neupane. The menu leans on momo, thali, thukpa, and chow mein, and it draws some dishes from the team's sister restaurant, Hi Bombay in Portland. The space itself is sizeable for the block, at just over 6,000 square feet with room for roughly 80 guests between the dining room, bar, and outdoor seating.
The owners picked Knightville specifically because of its walkable footprint and the density of people who actually live within a few blocks of it, not because it was cheap or convenient. That reasoning matters more than the menu does if you're trying to understand what's happening to this stretch of the city. Restaurant operators are reading Knightville the same way a longtime resident does: a place where you can walk to dinner and back.
The building had been Taco Trio for years before this. That's not a footnote. It's the pattern.
Two Miles South, a Different Kitchen Reopened After Two Dark Years
Drive down to Cottage Road and you'll find the second data point in this story. Elsmere BBQ closed in 2024, and its space sat empty until this spring, when Rattanak "Ram" Tray and his wife, Hope MacVane-Tray, the team behind Portland's well-known Yosaku, opened Makoto at 448 Cottage Road. The restaurant runs on an open kitchen and a wood-fired grill, turning out duck, lamb, and seasonal vegetables alongside a sushi menu built on the same techniques that made Yosaku a fixture across the bridge.
Tray has said the name Makoto refers to honesty and sincerity, tying it to the restaurant's open format, in his words, "nothing to hide." That's a small detail, but it says something about what these new operators are betting on here: transparency and proximity, not spectacle.
Two years is a long time for a storefront to sit dark on a road with this much drive-by traffic. The fact that it took a Portland restaurant group crossing the bridge to fill it, rather than a South Portland operator expanding in place, is its own kind of signal about where new restaurant investment in this city is actually coming from.
The Coffee Shop That Used to Be the Restaurant
The third move happened even closer to home for one South Portland family. Taj Indian Cuisine's original location at 200 Gorham Road is now a coffee shop, bakery, and brunch spot, run by the same family that built Taj. The new concept serves masala chai brewed the Hyderabad way and single-origin Indian coffee roasted by Tandem, alongside laminated pastry and a brunch menu built around dishes the family says you won't find elsewhere in town.
This one is different from the other two. It's not a new operator taking over a legacy space. It's a family that already had roots in that exact building, choosing to keep the address and change what happens inside it. That's turnover of a gentler kind, but it's turnover all the same, and it happened in the same four-month window as the other two.
Three addresses. Three different corridors of the city. One spring and summer.
What Hasn't Moved
Set against all that motion, a short list of things in South Portland that have stayed exactly where they are:
- Mast Landing Brewing Company, still pouring in Knightville, still one of the two brewpubs locals point to first
- OTTO Pizza, still doing pie by the slice on the same corner
- Red's Dairy Freeze, still the answer to "where do we get ice cream tonight"
- Nonesuch Books, the independent bookstore that still hosts author talks and still gets its event copies from local shops rather than shipping them in
- The South Portland Farmers' Market, still running Sunday mornings from mid-May through October before moving indoors for the winter season
None of these needed a grand reopening or a press mention this year. They didn't need one. That's the point. The neighborhood's dining scene turns over fast enough to notice in a single season, but its actual social infrastructure, the places people build routines around, moves at a completely different speed.
Art in the Park is the clearest version of this. The show has run on the same second Saturday of August since 1980, with up to 170 artists exhibiting original paintings, drawings, photographs, and prints in Mill Creek Park, a food court running from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and prizes announced at noon at the park's gazebo, including a Best in Show award and a $1,000 scholarship named for one of the event's founders, given every year to a South Portland High School graduate headed off to study art. This year's show, the 46th, ran exactly as scheduled on August 8, one day after the newest restaurant on Ocean Street quietly opened its doors.
What's Coming Next
If you're tracking the calendar, the next fixed point is the Bug Light Car Show at Bug Light Park on September 9, an annual event with a built-in rain date the following week. It's a different corner of the city from Knightville, but it belongs on the same list: another tradition that shows up on schedule regardless of what's happening two blocks away on Ocean Street.
The Pattern Underneath the Openings
None of this is really a story about food. It's a story about how a small commercial city absorbs change. South Portland isn't building its way into a new identity with fresh construction and expanded footprints. It's recycling the same handful of storefronts, again and again, while its public rituals, the farmers market, the art show, the car show, hold the calendar steady underneath all that churn.
If you've lived here a while, you already sense this rhythm even if you've never put a number on it. Three storefronts changed hands in four months this year. The gazebo in Mill Creek Park did not move once. That's not a coincidence. That's just what a walkable, tightly built neighborhood looks like when it's healthy: restless on the ground floor, steady everywhere else.
We pay close attention to this kind of texture at Mary Libby Living because it's the same texture that shows up in how a house holds its value over time. A block that keeps reinventing its storefronts while its community anchors stay fixed tends to be a block people want to stay on. If you're curious what that means for a specific street or a specific house in South Portland, we're always glad to talk it through. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready.
