For the better part of two years, the old Bella Vida building on Main Street sat with its windows dark. It's a hard building to ignore. Built in 1897, it anchors one of the busiest corners in downtown Elkhorn, and every time you walked past it on your way to Main Street Cellar or Jukes Ale Works, you probably wondered the same thing everyone else did: what's going to happen with that place.
This year you got your answer, and it's a bigger answer than a single restaurant reopening. The corner building is now home to two restaurants stacked on top of each other, and that renovation turns out to be the smallest piece of a much larger shift in how downtown Elkhorn actually functions.
The building that sat empty for two years
Chuck Olson bought the vacant Bella Vida space with a plan that split it in half. The ground floor became La Vida Nova, a name that translates to "the new life," a fitting choice for a building that had been dark since before most of the other new storefronts around it existed. La Vida Nova opened in May. A few months later, the upstairs space opened as a still-unnamed fine dining concept with its own kitchen and a chef's tasting menu, distinct enough from downstairs that the two restaurants don't feel like a matched set so much as two separate decisions to bet on the same address.
Olson already owns Main Street Cellar a block away, so this isn't an outside developer testing the market. It's someone who has watched downtown Elkhorn's foot traffic for years deciding the corner building was worth the wait.
One roof, two very different nights out
The split makes more sense once you think about what each floor is actually offering. Downstairs at La Vida Nova, you're getting a casual, walk-in kind of night. Upstairs, the tasting menu format means a slower, reservation-driven evening in the same building, on the same corner, without one restaurant competing with the other for the same customer on the same night. It's an unusual structure for a small downtown, and it only works because there's enough demand in Olde Towne now to fill both floors on a Friday.
Olson framed the project as an extension of what already exists here, not a break from it.
"It's keeping the small town feel that Elkhorn's always had and the families who have been big supporters of Elkhorn. You know they're the ones that have built downtown."
That's a reasonable way to describe La Vida Nova and the upstairs concept. It's a less complete way to describe everything else that's happened around them.
Main Street ran out of room first
Here's the part that doesn't show up if you only track the restaurant news. Olde Towne Elkhorn's own growth updates make clear the district has stopped confining its expansion to Main Street's brick pavement. The new businesses filling in are spreading onto 205th Street and Elkhorn Drive instead, because Main Street itself is full.
A few of the specific additions worth knowing about if you haven't walked those blocks lately:
- Coneflower Creamery opened on 205th Street, with RAEVA Mane Street Oasis moving in as its upstairs neighbor.
- Cedar Creek Coffee & Art and Fluff Interior Design are filling out a lower and upper level in the same new building.
- The Nomad at the Olde Towne Grove, a three-story event and meeting space, went up on the southwest side of 205th Street.
- Elkhorn Landing One, already complete, put Foster's Mercantile on its main floor with residential condos above. Elkhorn Landing Two is filling in with commercial tenants next door.
None of this existed as part of "downtown Elkhorn" in most residents' mental map even a couple of years ago. The map itself changed. Main Street is still the historic spine, brick streets and all, but the actual footprint of Olde Towne now runs in an L shape across three streets, not one.
The balloon glow was already proof
If you wanted a single weekend that showed how much bigger this town's calendar has gotten, the 20th Annual Nebraska Balloon & Wine Festival at Ta-Ha-Zouka Park earlier this month was it. Two weeks ago, on August 14 and 15, the park north of 204th and Dodge filled with hot air balloons launching around 7 p.m., a balloon glow after dark, and a wine showcase pouring more than 60 selections from area wineries alongside live sets from acts like Love Town Band and High Heel. A festival hitting its 20th year in a town this size doesn't happen by accident. It happens because enough people showed up in year one, year five, and year fifteen to make year twenty worth planning.
That's the same pattern playing out on Main Street, 205th, and Elkhorn Drive right now. Elkhorn Days brings the area's largest parade through downtown every May. The balloon festival draws thousands to the north edge of town every August. And in between those two anchors, the storefronts filled in to match the crowd that was already showing up.
A short list for this weekend
If you're trying to decide where to actually go this week, here's a starting point drawn from what's real right now:
- La Vida Nova for a casual dinner on the ground floor of the old Bella Vida building.
- The still-unnamed tasting menu concept upstairs, if you're planning ahead for a reservation.
- Foster's Mercantile inside Elkhorn Landing One, worth a stop if you haven't been through since it opened.
- Cedar Creek Coffee & Art or Coneflower Creamery on 205th Street for a slower morning.
- The Nomad at the Olde Towne Grove, if you're curious what a three-story event space looks like from the inside.
What this actually means if you already live here
The easy story is that downtown Elkhorn added a few new restaurants this year. The more accurate story is that the district ran out of room on the street everyone associates with it and kept growing anyway, one block over. A building that sat empty for two years didn't reopen as one more coffee shop or boutique. It reopened as two full restaurants with two kitchens, because the person renovating it judged that Olde Towne could support that much new capacity in a single address.
If you've lived here a while, that's worth sitting with the next time you're deciding where to grab dinner. The corner you've been driving past for two years just placed a real bet on how much this town has grown, and so far it's paying off.
If you're weighing what a home in a growing pocket of the Omaha metro like Elkhorn is actually worth, or comparing it to nearby communities on the Nebraska and Iowa side of the river, Robin Philips has spent more than two decades helping buyers and sellers make sense of exactly these kinds of neighborhoods. Let's Connect when you're ready to talk specifics.
