"Almost everybody says, 'Oh, I'm glad you opened here.'" That's Kamol Buaban, who runs Nisha Thai Kitchen with his 19-year-old daughter Nisha, describing what regulars tell him when they walk through the door at 216 N. Broadway. It's a nice thing to hear about a new restaurant. It's an odd thing to hear about a building that has served hot food to the same block for years, just under someone else's name.
That's the detail that gets lost in every "downtown is booming again" recap. Walk Montana Avenue and its side streets this September and you'll find a genuine run of new restaurants: Nisha Thai, La Morenita, Phónomenal, La Cocina Filipina. What you won't find, if you look closely at the addresses, is much new square footage. Almost every one of them opened inside a storefront that was already a restaurant, usually one that closed within the last two years. The avenue isn't expanding. It's rotating.
The Address Reopens Before the Concept Does
La Morenita, a Mexican restaurant that opened at 15 N. 26th St. this year, moved into the space that used to be Don Luis. Head server James Cortez told the Billings Gazette the food leans into authentic regional Mexican flavor rather than a Tex-Mex approach, and the molcajete, a shared platter of pork, chicken, beef, and chorizo, has become the dish regulars order. The building didn't change. The cuisine inside it barely changed category. What changed was who was cooking.
A few blocks over, the same pattern repeats with a twist. Nisha Thai Kitchen took over the old Imperial Thai space on North Broadway. Buaban and his family moved from Sidney after fifteen years in the restaurant business, and they inherited a location that had already trained downtown diners to expect Thai food there. Nisha didn't have to convince anyone that a restaurant belonged in that building. It just had to be a good one.
Phónomenal, the Vietnamese pho and bánh mì spot that opened June 5 at 2716 Third Ave. N., took over the former Soup and Such location. Owners Kaela Chanhthavee and Quito Keutla moved to Billings from Seattle during the pandemic, and Keutla grew up in the city. They told KTVQ they'd noticed a gap in Vietnamese food options going back roughly a decade. The address had already been proven as a soup destination. They just changed which country's broth was in the pot.
And the same team is behind the newest entry in the pattern. La Cocina Filipina, run by Lani Vicente and partner Doug Erickson, moved into 310 N. 29th St., the former home of Sarah's Mexican Food, and began serving lumpia by summer's end. Vicente had been cooking for Filipino gatherings around Billings for years and running a catering business under the same name before she found a commissary kitchen sitting empty and ready to use.
Four restaurants. Four different cuisines. Four buildings that were already restaurants, in some cases for decades, before this year's owners signed a lease. If you've mourned a closed spot on Montana Avenue in the last two years, there's a decent chance you've already met its replacement without realizing the address was the same.
What's Actually New, Not Recycled
Two changes this year broke the pattern, and both are worth knowing about precisely because they're the exception.
One More Throw Axe Throwing Lounge opened directly on Montana Avenue as downtown's first venue of its kind. It didn't take over a failed restaurant. It took a storefront that hadn't been serving food and turned it into something the avenue genuinely didn't have before.
The other is Popover Kitchen Supply, and it isn't a new tenant at all. The shop at 110 N. 29th St. opened in September 2020 as Zest Kitchen and Cookware. After a trademark dispute forced a rebrand, owner Marguerite Jodry relaunched under the new name in June with a launch party and the same staff behind the counter. General manager Klore Christensen told the Gazette the goal with the new name was capturing something the shop had been missing, a sense that there's another person in the room, someone cooking alongside you. Same building, same owner, same inventory. Only the sign changed.
Between the two, you get a clean split. When downtown gets a genuinely new concept, it tends to land in space that wasn't food before. When it's a restaurant, it tends to land in a building that already was.
The Block Comes Back Smaller
The clearest example of the recycling pattern isn't a new cuisine moving into an old dining room. It's the same building getting a second life at a fraction of its former scope. The longtime Buffalo Block closed, and new ownership reopened the space this year as The Block, serving drinks and flatbread pizzas Tuesday through Friday afternoons only. That's a narrower footprint than the restaurant that came before it, both in hours and in menu.
It's worth sitting with what that means. The building didn't sit empty. Someone was confident enough in that specific corner of Montana Avenue to take it back over almost immediately. But they didn't bet on rebuilding the previous concept at full scale. They bet on a smaller, more manageable version of the same address. That's a different kind of confidence than a grand reopening, and it's arguably a more honest read on what the corridor can currently support on a Tuesday afternoon.
Why September Is the Month to Actually Notice
Spring is when Billings hears about all of this. The Downtown Billings Association's development director, Mehmet Casey, has pointed out that the first quarter of the year has become unusually active for new openings two years running, which is when the local news coverage clusters. By the time Alive After 5 wraps its Thursday run in late July, Second Avenue and Montana Avenue quiet down, and the places that opened in the spring rush settle into a normal weeknight rhythm.
That's exactly where things sit right now. Nisha Thai and Phónomenal are past the opening crowds and running like they've always been there. The One More Throw axe lounge is easier to walk into on a Wednesday than it was in April. If you kept meaning to try La Morenita's molcajete or Nisha's curry and never found a night without a wait, September is the month that reward shows up. The newness has worn off. The food hasn't changed.
What the Pattern Actually Tells You
None of this is a story about restaurants failing. Some closed because owners retired, some because a lease ended, some for reasons that never made the news. What it tells you instead is something about the physical stock of Montana Avenue itself. The corridor sits inside the Montana Avenue Historic District, one of the oldest commercial strips in the city, built out with narrow storefronts along the old rail line long before anyone was thinking about restaurant square footage as a category. There are only so many buildings on that stretch already plumbed and vented for a commercial kitchen, and new operators keep circling back to that same short list rather than opening fresh space elsewhere downtown.
That's not a knock on the avenue. It's closer to a compliment. A building that's hosted three different restaurants across three different cuisines in a decade is a building that keeps convincing new owners it's worth the risk. The churn isn't decline. It's a specific, repeatable bet that a handful of addresses on Montana Avenue will keep drawing people through the door no matter what's on the menu that year.
If you live near the avenue, you already know which storefronts these are, even if you never thought about why they keep changing hands. The next time a familiar building gets a new sign, you'll have a better guess at what's actually happening inside than most of the people walking past it.
If you're weighing whether a home near this stretch of Billings fits the way you actually want to live, the team at Huskey Real Estate Group knows this corridor block by block. Schedule a consultation and we'll walk you through what's changing here and what it means for you.