Ask a longtime Pleasant Ridge resident about the old VFW hall on Montgomery Road and you'll probably get a shrug. It closed years ago. Nobody expected much to happen with it. The same went for the boarded-up storefront a few doors down that used to be Revolution Rotisserie, dark since it closed in December 2024. Vacant buildings on a business district like this tend to stay vacant. That's the pattern residents had come to expect.
Both buildings are reopening within the same year, and neither reopening happened by accident.
The former Revolution Rotisserie space at 6063 Montgomery Road became ZIQR Progressive Indian Restaurant, which held its grand opening in January. The old VFW hall at 6112 Montgomery Road is becoming a three-level restaurant from Agave & Rye, complete with a basement bourbon speakeasy, and the company announced the project this week with an early September opening target. Two buildings that Pleasant Ridge had mentally filed under "probably nothing" are both filling in the same calendar year, and the reason traces back to a nonprofit most residents have never heard of.
The Building Everyone Thought Was Just Gone
The Pleasant Ridge Development Corporation, a volunteer-run nonprofit focused on the business district, had already identified 6112 Montgomery Road for redevelopment before Agave & Rye ever announced a name. Its own project list describes the site simply as a redevelopment of the former VFW hall into a restaurant space. That listing predates this week's announcement. The building wasn't sitting there waiting for a developer to notice it. It was already in the pipeline.
Agave & Rye's version of the space, according to its own announcement, will include an open kitchen, a wraparound bar, a front patio, upstairs dining for larger groups, and a basement speakeasy with a curved bar, a private tasting lounge, and what the company calls a rack room stocked with bourbon and tequila. The chain started in Covington in 2018 and has grown to 18 locations across five states, which makes this the rare case of a hometown concept returning to open a flagship-scale build in a neighborhood a few miles from where it started.
The Corridor Already Has a Proof of Concept
None of this is Pleasant Ridge's first attempt at filling a dead storefront on this stretch of road. A few doors from the VFW hall, 6099 Montgomery Road sat as a long-vacant commercial property before the PRDC redeveloped it into what's now home to Goodfellas Pizza, Nine Giant, Hello Honey, and Fermentorium, four businesses sharing one building that used to hold nothing.
That project matters here because it's the evidence the newer redevelopments are built on. It's the version of this story that already happened, quietly, before ZIQR or Agave & Rye were on anyone's radar. The PRDC didn't stumble into a hot corridor. It built one, one vacant address at a time, and used the results from 6099 to justify going after 6112 next.
The nonprofit's own numbers back up the scale of that effort. It has secured more than $2.4 million in grants, including a $75,000 grant from the City of Cincinnati in 2025 specifically to update the Pleasant Ridge Business District Urban Design plan, guiding what the organization describes as tens of millions of dollars in redevelopment across the corridor.
Four Addresses, Two Timelines
| Address | What Was There | What's There Now (or Coming) | Status as of August 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6099 Montgomery Rd | Long-vacant commercial building | Goodfellas Pizza, Nine Giant, Hello Honey, Fermentorium | Open |
| 6063 Montgomery Rd | Revolution Rotisserie (closed Dec. 2024) | ZIQR Progressive Indian Restaurant | Open since January |
| 6112 Montgomery Rd | Former VFW Hall | Agave & Rye, 3-level restaurant with basement speakeasy | Targeting early September |
| 6100 Montgomery Rd | Corner property | Redevelopment plans | Early stages, per PRDC |
| 6114 Montgomery Rd | Vacant, blighted property | Planned mixed-use building | Active planning, per PRDC |
Two of these are done. One is weeks out. Two more are still just plans on paper, which is worth sitting with for a second. Montgomery Road isn't fully transformed. It's roughly half transformed, on a schedule the PRDC set years before most residents noticed anything changing.
What's Actually Feeding the Foot Traffic
A restaurant corridor needs people walking to it, and that part of the equation changed too. The Ridge, a mixed-use project at the Montgomery and Lester intersection, added 82 to 83 new residential units along with roughly 13,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space. Pre-leasing began in March 2025, with the first residents moving in as early as that summer, so the building has had a year or more to fill up. Reported costs vary depending on the source. Local news coverage of the apartment build put the figure around $20 million, the project architect's own account lists it closer to $18 million, and the PRDC's tally for the full mixed-use project puts it above $30 million, which suggests the higher number accounts for more than just construction costs. Whatever the true figure, the effect is the same: several dozen new households now live within a block of a restaurant row that didn't exist for them a few years ago.
That's the part of this story that's easy to miss if you're only counting new restaurant openings. The businesses didn't create the customer base first. The apartment building and the business district investment happened in parallel, on purpose, so that by the time ZIQR and Agave & Rye opened their doors, there were already more people living close enough to walk there.
What Ziqr Actually Feels Like Seven Months In
For residents who haven't made it to ZIQR yet, it's worth knowing what it replaced isn't really what it feels like now. Where Revolution Rotisserie left a dark storefront, ZIQR built out a 5,160-square-foot restaurant and bar. Regulars have pointed to the samosa sampler, served with four different chutneys, and the Kerala fried chicken as the dishes worth ordering, along with cocktails like the Manali Kream, a spiced rum drink built around coconut and lychee. It's a different kind of anchor than Pleasant Ridge has had before on this block, closer to a destination than a neighborhood spot, and it's been open long enough now that the early buzz has settled into something more like a regular rotation for people nearby.
What This Doesn't Change
None of this displaces what's already been working in Pleasant Ridge for decades. Gas Light Cafe, the burger-and-beer bar at 6104 Montgomery Road that took over the old Pleasant Luncheonette space back in 1989, is still packing in regulars for Golden Tee and cold drafts most nights of the week. The new additions are filling gaps, not replacing an old guard that residents already trust. That distinction matters for anyone wondering whether Montgomery Road is becoming a different neighborhood or just a fuller version of the one that was already there. It's the second one.
The honest read on Montgomery Road right now is that it's mid-project. Two long-dead buildings are open or about to be. Two more are still just acquisitions with plans attached. The apartments feeding the whole thing have had residents for a year or more. If you've walked past the old VFW hall assuming it would sit there forever, you had good reason to think that. You'd have been wrong by about a month.
If you're curious what a corridor like this means for property values nearby, or you're weighing a move to be closer to it, the team at Janell Stuckwisch Group pays attention to these shifts as part of how we read a neighborhood's trajectory, not just its listing prices. Reach out anytime you want to talk through what's actually changing on the ground in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky.