Franklinton Fridays Just Got A Dinner Reservation Worth Keeping

The second Friday of the month in Franklinton has always run on the honor system. Nobody sends a schedule. You just know that from 6 to 10 p.m., doors that are usually locked swing open, string lights go up outside garage bays that double as galleries, and a loose current of people moves block to block between 400 West Rich, Chromedge Studios, and whatever pop-up market has claimed a sidewalk that month. This is Franklinton Fridays, a standing fixture on the neighborhood's arts calendar, and the shape of the night has stayed remarkably consistent: wander, look, maybe buy a print, grab a beer, keep moving.

What changed this year is not the wandering. It's what happens when the wandering stops.

The night never used to have an ending

Ask a longtime Franklinton Fridays regular what they ate on a typical second Friday and the answer usually involves whatever food truck parked outside Land-Grant Brewing that week, or a plate of Ray Ray's Hog Pit, the James Beard-nominated barbecue operation that has run out of Land-Grant's beer garden for years. Maybe you swung by Strongwater Food & Spirits, one of the neighborhood's true originals, or ducked into Rehab Tavern if the music pulled you in. If you started your evening early, The Roosevelt Coffeehouse or One Line Coffee got you caffeinated before the galleries opened. Over at WAV, artists Charlotte McGraw and AJ Vanderelli have run a standing collage workshop on the last Friday of the month, a different but related fixture of the neighborhood's art calendar.

None of that added up to a reservation. It added up to grazing. You could eat well on a Franklinton Friday, but you couldn't really plan a dinner around it, because nothing in the food lineup asked you to commit to a table at 7:30. The night was built for people who wanted to keep their options open, which is a fine way to run an art walk and a strange way to end a Friday.

What actually opened at 440 West Broad

That gap is why the arrival of Losanti matters more than a typical restaurant opening. On February 28, 2026, Crown Restaurant Group opened its first location outside Cincinnati inside the Gravity development, taking over the space at 440 W. Broad St. that had been Taft's Brewpourium until that bar closed in 2024 after five years in business. At 6,000 square feet with seating for up to 250 guests, it's the largest Losanti the company has built, with a seasonal patio and three private dining rooms, including one that seats 40 and comes with its own dedicated bar.

The menu is built around hand-cut USDA Prime steaks and handmade pasta, and co-founder Anthony Sitek has been direct about where the cooking style comes from. "My cooking philosophy comes from learning in my grandmother's kitchen and carrying those lessons through," he told a Columbus TV station around the opening. The Columbus location runs a happy hour exclusive to this site from 4 to 6 p.m. daily, dinner service until 10 p.m., and expanded to seven-day service in April after opening on a Wednesday-through-Sunday schedule in March.

What matters for a Franklinton Fridays regular isn't the steak itself. It's that Crown Restaurant Group, a hospitality group that had never opened outside Cincinnati, chose this specific block of West Broad for its first expansion. Sitek put it plainly when the opening was announced through the Columbus Chamber of Commerce: Franklinton "felt like the right place to take that step," a neighborhood he said reminded him and his wife Haley of where they started. That's not filler quote. It's a hospitality company betting that this stretch of Franklinton can support a 250-seat dinner destination on a Friday night, not just a food truck line.

The block is getting shorter, not longer

There's a second piece of this that changes how the geography of a second Friday actually works, and it has nothing to do with food. Gravity has been built in phases along West Broad since 2019, when the original roughly $68 million, 240-unit building opened at 480 W. Broad. Phase two, known as Gravity 2.0, opened in 2023 with more than 380 units and over 200,000 square feet of commercial space along West Broad, West State, and McDowell streets. Those phase-two buildings changed hands in a $78 million sale in 2025 and were rebranded Horizon West under new ownership.

Phase three, called The Greenhouse, is the one still under construction, and it closed out its final piece of city financing this spring. Columbus City Council approved an additional $2 million on April 20, 2026, wrapping up the public funding for a roughly $119 million, 313-unit building at 501 W. Broad St. that will include 5,300 square feet of ground-floor retail and 32 units designated as affordable housing. According to the developer's earlier announcements, that phase is expected to open later this year.

What that means in practice is that the retail anchoring a Franklinton Fridays night is compressing onto a shorter run of West Broad rather than spreading further out. Losanti sits at 440 West Broad. The Greenhouse's storefronts will land at 501 West Broad, a few doors down. Add in the galleries at 400 West Rich and Chromedge just off the main corridor, and the second Friday loop that used to require a car or a long walk between scattered stops is turning into something you can genuinely do on foot, start to finish, within a few blocks.

Working the loop now

For anyone who's kept the second Friday habit for a while, the practical question is how to actually sequence an evening now that there's a real dinner option in the mix. A few ways it's playing out for people doing this on repeat:

• Start early at The Roosevelt Coffeehouse or One Line Coffee if you're coming straight from work, then hit the studios at 400 West Rich and Chromedge while the light is still good for looking at art.
• Time a Losanti reservation for the 6 or 6:30 slot if you want the dining room before it fills, since the restaurant's own happy hour runs 4 to 6 p.m. and dinner service continues to 10.
• Save Land-Grant Brewing's stage and beer garden for later in the night, when the live music FAD curates for Franklinton Fridays is in full swing and the crowd shifts from browsing to staying put.
• If you're driving, Gravity's parking garage and street parking near 440 West Broad put you within easy walking distance of most of the stops without needing to move your car twice.

None of this requires abandoning the wandering that makes Franklinton Fridays worth showing up for in the first place. It just means the wandering now has a natural place to land instead of trailing off into whichever food truck happened to be parked closest.

What to watch next

The interesting part isn't just that a nice restaurant opened. It's that a hospitality group with no prior reason to leave Cincinnati looked at this specific stretch of West Broad and decided it could support a 250-seat dinner house, at the same moment the city was finishing its last funding commitment to the retail space going in a few doors down. Those two things happening within a couple months of each other suggests the corridor between 400 and 500 West Broad is where Franklinton's Friday nights are going to keep concentrating, not where they've already finished changing.

If The Greenhouse's ground-floor retail opens on anything close to its expected timeline later this year, the next second Friday worth paying attention to might be the one where that block fills in too. Worth keeping an eye on if you're already in the habit of showing up.

If you're watching how a neighborhood like this evolves and want to talk through what it means for property here, Home Connections Group knows Franklinton block by block. Let's get you home.