Walk past 84 North High Street this month and you will see scaffolding coming down, new siding going up, and a construction fence that finally looks like it is closing in on a finish line. If you have lived near Historic Dublin for the past two and a half years, you have learned not to trust that feeling. A commercial listing for the property said the renovation would wrap by March of this year, and that deadline has already come and gone. The restaurant slated for the space will not open for at least another year past that, maybe longer.
That gap, between when a storefront on High Street looks finished and when it actually opens for business, is the real story of this stretch of road right now. Not the announcements. Not the renderings. The lag.
What Oscar's actually was
For three decades, 84 North High Street was Oscar's, a full-service restaurant and wine bar with a rustic feel, a wine room that sat up to 30 people, and a patio with live music on Wednesday and Saturday nights. It was the kind of place where you could show up without a reservation on a Tuesday and get a table. The restaurant group that owned it had also run several Brazenhead Irish pubs and Tucci's, the steakhouse a few blocks south.
Oscar's closed on January 27, 2024, and the closure was abrupt enough that a former employee said staff were not told until the next day, after the restaurant had already served its last table the night before. The eatery's furniture and equipment were sold off at auction two days later. A developer had floated a 127-room boutique hotel for the site back in 2022, but that plan never advanced, and the building sat vacant while the city's Architectural Review Board worked through a much larger proposal: a mixed-use redevelopment with 68 residential units, a 6,000-square-foot event center, restaurant space, and retail space, replacing the existing structures at 72 through 84 North High entirely.
The tenant that's replacing it isn't a replacement
Here is where the story gets interesting for anyone who assumed a new restaurant would simply take Oscar's old spot and pick up where it left off.
The tenant slated for 84 North High is NomaEN, a members-only omakase concept from entrepreneur Josh Weprin and Chef Taishi Noma, a third-generation Kyoto restaurateur whose earlier work at Haiku introduced many Columbus diners to sushi in the late 1990s. NomaEN will seat ten people at its omakase counter, with a private cocktail lounge called The Den attached for members only. The space is being designed by Kento Ohmori of FUKUI Architects, drawing on traditional Japanese homes and Kyoto hospitality spaces.
"I'm excited about introducing people to what is truly authentically Japanese," Weprin said of the concept.
That is a genuinely different business than the one it is replacing. Oscar's sat dozens of people without a reservation. NomaEN will require membership to get in the door at all. If you are picturing a straightforward swap, one full-service restaurant for another, the plans on file do not support that picture.
The timeline gap, in plain terms
A commercial leasing listing for the property said the building renovation was set to be completed in March 2026, a deadline that is now six months behind us. NomaEN's own site currently lists its opening as spring 2027, and Columbus Underground's reporting has also floated summer 2027 as a possibility. Even if the building itself finished on schedule, that leaves a gap of a year or more between construction wrapping and the doors actually opening to members.
For residents watching that corner, the practical takeaway is simple: do not treat visible construction progress as a signal that the restaurant is close. A finished building and an open restaurant are two different milestones on this project, and the second one is well behind the first. If you are the kind of person who checks a storefront window every few months hoping for a soft-open sign, save yourself the walk until at least next year.
Where the rest of the block actually stands
The Oscar's site is the anchor of this story, but it is not happening in isolation. The rest of High Street has been reshuffling at the same time, and the pattern across all of it points the same direction: smaller footprints, higher barriers to walking in unannounced.
Tucci's already finished its own transformation. The Italian steakhouse completed a $2.5 million expansion in February 2024 that converted its patio into a four-season dining room, extending a restaurant that was already established rather than introducing something new.
Matt the Miller's Tavern, a few blocks over on Avery-Muirfield Drive, rebranded itself as MTM Tavern | Steakhouse later that year under owner Craig Barnum, adding a wagyu sirloin and other steakhouse staples to the menu. The rebrand carries a direct thread back to Oscar's: Chef Patrick Klinker, who had cooked at Oscar's for more than 20 years, is on staff at MTM. If you are looking for where some of Oscar's culinary identity actually landed, it is there, inside an upscale rebrand, not inside a casual replacement.
Coast Wine House took the same small-footprint approach when it expanded. Owner Dustin Snow opened Gene's at 91 South High Street in July 2024, two doors down from the original wine shop, in a more than 100-year-old home that had previously served as an antique shop, a pizza parlor, and a nail salon. Snow described the goal as something that would feel "fresh yet familiar, sophisticated but unfussy," and the restaurant runs a small, seasonal menu built around a wine-forward beverage program rather than a large all-purpose dinner menu.
COhatch, the co-working company, is folding into this same corridor with plans to redevelop several historic homes and build a 15,000-square-foot headquarters along North Riverview Street, adding bars, restaurants, and event space to its own footprint rather than a traditional stand-alone restaurant.
Lay all of that next to each other and a pattern holds across every project on the street. Nothing coming into Historic Dublin right now is trying to be the next Oscar's: a big, unreserved, walk-in-friendly full-service room. Every project is smaller, more curated, and slower to open than the last generation of restaurants it is replacing.
What this means if you live here
If your routine used to include an easy Tuesday dinner at Oscar's, that specific option is gone and nothing scheduled to open on this block is designed to replace it directly. What is replacing it is a set of smaller, harder-to-access concepts: a ten-seat membership omakase counter, an intimate wine-and-small-plates restaurant, an upscale steakhouse rebrand. Investment on High Street is real and ongoing. Casual, no-reservation dining capacity on this particular stretch is shrinking even as that investment lands.
That is worth knowing before you plan a spontaneous dinner out expecting the same options that existed two and a half years ago, and it is worth knowing before you assume the scaffolding coming down at 84 North High means a table is close. The construction itself may already be finished, or close to it. The restaurant inside it is on a different clock entirely, one that runs into next year at the earliest, and residents who track the two separately will understand this corner of Historic Dublin far better than the people who only notice when a For Lease sign finally comes down.
Historic Dublin keeps changing shape one storefront at a time, and if you want a closer read on how these shifts touch home values and neighborhood character on the west side of the river, the Dedra Lucas Group has been tracking Dublin's market longer than most of these buildings have stood. Let's Connect if you want a conversation grounded in what is actually happening on the ground here, not just what the renderings promise.
