Walk Fifth Avenue on a Saturday morning this September and you'll pass at least three storefronts that didn't exist, in their current form, a year ago. The espresso smell drifting out of 153 Fifth wasn't there last summer. The Hollywood-themed window display near the Lincoln Avenue corner used to be a pub with a completely different name on the awning. Even the juice bar where Sue's Corner sat for years now belongs to someone else entirely.
If you've lived in Pelham long enough to notice this, you've probably had the same reaction most residents have: a flicker of concern that the block can't hold onto a business for more than a season. That reaction is understandable. It's also wrong.
Look closely at who's actually signing these leases, and a different pattern emerges. The turnover on Fifth Avenue isn't a sign of instability. It's what happens when a small, tight-knit downtown becomes attractive enough that the people who already work in the restaurant industry here decide to stop commuting to someone else's kitchen and open their own, five minutes from home.
Nine Storefronts, Twenty-Two Months
Here's what actually changed hands along Fifth Avenue between the fall of 2024 and this summer, based on reporting from the Pelham Examiner, the town's nonprofit community paper that covers the business beat block by block.
| Address | Was | Now | Changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 140 Fifth Ave | Macelleria Steak House | Basilico | Fall 2024 |
| 108 Fifth Ave | Cafe Latino | La La Taqueria | Spring 2025 |
| 148 Fifth Ave | (vacant space) | The Pelican Room | June 2025 |
| Fifth Ave, various | Cantina Lobos (prior owner) | Cantina Lobos, new owner Rob Gorsline | November 2025 |
| 139 Fifth Ave | (vacant storefront) | Gigi Mediterranean Counter | November 2025 |
| Fifth Ave & Lincoln | Pelville Coffee & Pastry (prior owners) | Pelville Coffee & Pastry, new owners | November 2025 |
| 321 Fifth Ave | (vacant storefront) | Dulce Treats bakery | December 2025 |
| 531 Fifth Ave | B&B's 5th Avenue Pub | Burger Bar 57 | March 2026 |
| 153 Fifth Ave | (vacant storefront) | Fifth Coffee | July 2026 |
Nine changes along one short commercial strip in under two years is a fast clip for any downtown this size. What the table doesn't show at first glance is how the timing clusters. Three of those nine changes landed in a single month, November 2025, when Cantina Lobos got a new owner, Gigi opened its counter, and Pelville Coffee & Pastry changed hands, all within weeks of each other. That's not a slow bleed of struggling tenants. That's a burst of activity that looks a lot more like confidence than distress.
New Name on the Lease, Same Zip Code
The detail that separates this from an ordinary story about restaurant churn is who's behind the new names.
Daniella Lulgjuray, who took over 531 Fifth Avenue and gutted it to build Burger Bar 57, has lived in Pelham since 2007 and spent 24 years in the food industry before opening a place under her own name. She didn't move to Pelham for the restaurant. She'd already been a neighbor for nearly two decades and finally built something close to home.
Kalkin Narvilas, who opened The Pelican Room at 148 Fifth Avenue, has lived in town for eight years and worked in restaurants for 22. The Pelican Room is his eighth restaurant overall, but the first one he's opened in the town he actually calls home.
Rob Gorsline, the new owner at Cantina Lobos, previously ran Tequila Sunrise in nearby Larchmont. He's also a graduate of Pelham Memorial High School, which made local coverage note that he was no outsider stepping into someone else's turf. A few doors down at 139 Fifth, Gigi Mediterranean Counter opened under a founder whose father already runs Sergio's Ristorante, which means one of the newest storefronts on the block and one of the oldest are run by the same family.
Even Fifth Coffee at 153 Fifth Avenue follows the pattern in a slightly different key. It's a collaboration between two brothers: Frank Krasniqi, who already runs VisionCraft Contracting in Pelham and built out the storefront himself, and Ilir Krasniqi, who spent years managing the morning menu at a full-service New York City restaurant before coming back to run the food and drink side in his own town.
Basilico's owners, Nick Demaliaj and Jetmir Arifaj, had worked together in the restaurant industry for 17 years before deciding to open a place of their own at 140 Fifth. At Pelville Coffee & Pastry, new owner Rene Tejeda spent around 15 years as an executive chef at an Italian restaurant in Greenwich before buying the shop with his partner Selly Alvarez, and the two chose to keep the previous owners' recipes rather than start from scratch.
None of these are outside investors or regional chains testing the market. They're people who already had decades in the industry, in most cases already lived in or near Pelham, and used this moment to finally put their own name above a Fifth Avenue door.
What's Been There Longer Than Most of Us
The churn is easier to read correctly once you notice what hasn't moved.
Pelham Pizzeria has occupied 113 Fifth Avenue since 1978, opened by brothers Luigi "Gino" and Ettore "John" Ruffolo. Today it's still family-run, with Gino's son John and son-in-law Pino Mancini, who joined the business in 1997, keeping it going. That's just shy of half a century on the same block.
Sergio's Ristorante has held down 503 Fifth Avenue since 2014, more than a decade of Northern Italian cooking on the same stretch of road where storefronts around it keep turning over. North Pelham Grill and Bar, under Chef Brian MacMenamin, went through a full renovation rather than a change of hands, choosing to reinvest in its existing spot instead of walking away from it.
A downtown that's actually declining doesn't usually have restaurants pushing 50 years and 10 years anchoring the same addresses while new operators fight for the storefronts around them. Turnover and staying power are showing up on the same block at the same time, and that combination tells you more about the health of Fifth Avenue than either fact alone.
What This Means If You Live Here
None of this requires you to do anything except pay attention to your own street. If you haven't tried Fifth Coffee yet, it's the newest addition, run by two brothers who are betting on a lower price point than the gourmet coffee shops elsewhere in Westchester. If you've been meaning to check out Burger Bar 57's Hollywood-themed dining room at the old B&B's spot, it's been open since late winter. And if you're already loyal to Pelham Pizzeria or Sergio's, nothing about the new arrivals threatens either one. They've both outlasted several waves of neighbors already.
The bigger takeaway, if you're the kind of person who likes understanding the place you live in rather than just moving through it, is that Fifth Avenue's constant reshuffling isn't a symptom of a downtown in trouble. It's what a downtown looks like when people who already know the neighborhood decide it's worth betting their own name on.
That's the kind of local knowledge that doesn't show up in a market report, and it's exactly the kind of thing we pay attention to at CENTURY 21 Elite Realty. We watch these blocks change the same way you do, one storefront at a time, because it tells us as much about a neighborhood's direction as any spreadsheet. If you're curious what that kind of steady local demand has done to home values on your own street, we're happy to walk you through it. Get a Free Home Valuation whenever you're ready to see where things stand.
