Great Falls has not built ten new restaurants this year. It has repainted four or five of them, twice.
If you have lived here through 2025 and into this summer, you already have a sense that something is happening on the dining scene. New signs keep going up. Old ones keep coming down. The instinct is to call it a boom, a wave of construction crews and grand openings pouring into the Electric City all at once. Look closer at the addresses, though, and a different story shows up. Most of this year's arrivals did not clear ground. They moved into buildings that already had a kitchen hood, a walk-in cooler, and a parking lot full of regulars from somebody else's business. The real story is not growth. It is turnover, and it is moving faster than almost anyone tracking it casually would guess.
The corner that's on its third act
Two addresses in Great Falls have now cycled through three different restaurant identities in a span most locals would describe as "not that long ago."
At 300 First Avenue South, Bert & Ernie's gave way to KellerGeist, the German bar and dinner theater, but only as a stopgap. KellerGeist's real home was a few blocks over at 111 Central Avenue, where a renovation originally slated for 2020 had been derailed by COVID and was finally moving with $263,000 in city tax increment financing behind it. KellerGeist closed the First Avenue location for good on Sunday, February 18, 2024, to put its full attention on finishing that Central Avenue build-out, which reopened with nearly triple the old square footage on June 13, 2025. Closing the stopgap is what put the old Bert & Ernie's space back on the market, and Xóchitl Cocina & Tequila opened there in January 2026 after what its team described as a year of planning.
At 1216 10th Avenue South, on the northeast corner of the Holiday Village Mall parking lot, the lineage runs Applemill Grill to Fiesta En Jalisco to Texas Roadhouse, which officially opened in February 2026 as the chain's fourth Montana location. The new restaurant created more than 200 jobs in the city, and managing partner Steffany Stephenson, who grew up in a town of about 20,000 people in Rock Springs, Wyoming, said she wanted to be sure Great Falls felt similar before she committed to it, and it did not disappoint.
Two buildings, three tenants each, and neither one required anyone to pour a new foundation. That is the pattern worth paying attention to.
This year's arrivals, mapped to what used to be there
Once you start reading the dining scene by address instead of by headline, the recycling shows up everywhere:
- 1008 20th Street South: Mrs. Wright's Pasties became Pomodoro, serving pasta and piadinas including gluten-free options.
- 1220 Ninth Street South: Maria's Mexican Restaurant became Annapurna, serving traditional Himalayan and Indian dishes including butter chicken, tandoori, and momos.
- 1900 Fourth Street NE: Nitro Creamery became Haunted Scoops, which opened on Friday, March 13, 2026, serving handcrafted artisan ice cream.
- 1225 10th Avenue South, next to City Brew: became Dave's Hot Chicken, which officially opened Friday, May 22, 2026, with seven spice levels ranging from no spice to reaper.
- The former JB's Restaurant space: became Panera Bread, which had opened its doors by mid-February 2026, after the building was purchased by Pan Montana, the company that also runs Panera locations in Missoula, Kalispell, and Billings.
- The former Boston's Pizza location on Seventh Street South: is becoming Old Chicago, with Johnson Restaurant Group vice president Mike Malmberg promising 40 beers on tap, as many local as possible, alongside a horseshoe-style bar.
- 415 Third Street NW, in the West Bank Plaza: became Buffalo Noir, which its owners call Great Falls' first vinyl bar, mixing music, wine, and food in a lounge setting.
Then there is the one address that skipped restaurants entirely on its way to becoming one. The old JoAnn Fabrics building at 2515 10th Avenue South sat as a 15,000 square foot craft store until Pizza Ranch took it over, and when it opened its doors on Monday, September 22, 2025, it did so as the largest Pizza Ranch location in the country, complete with the FunZone arcade. That opening had been in the works since the company first announced Great Falls plans back in January 2024 at the Great Falls Development Alliance's annual Ignite event, where it said it hoped to open that summer. Instead, it took about a year and eight months between announcement and first customer.
Compare that timeline to Haunted Scoops, which moved into an existing ice cream shop's walk-in and freezer case and was serving scoops within what reads, in the local coverage, like a matter of weeks. Or to Annapurna, which told followers in March it was aiming for a late-March opening and had joined the list of the city's recent arrivals by the time local coverage rounded up May's new business news. The businesses moving fastest into Great Falls right now are the ones that did not have to touch a stud wall. The ones building from scratch, or converting a space that never held a commercial kitchen, are the ones still working through the calendar a year or more later.
Why nobody's breaking ground if they can help it
That gap in speed explains a lot about the one big chain still missing from the list: Chick-fil-A.
The City of Great Falls confirmed back in early 2025 that Chick-fil-A had submitted a preliminary traffic impact study for a proposed location at 711 10th Avenue South, the site of a former paint building. By February 2026, the city was still waiting on demolition or construction paperwork, and the company itself said only that it hopes to serve Great Falls in the future, with no location confirmed. On June 4, 2026, Chick-fil-A made it official at last, announcing four new Montana restaurants planned for Bozeman, Butte, Great Falls, and Helena by 2027, a plan expected to create more than 400 jobs statewide. Butte got the specific date first, opening June 11. Great Falls, the location that requires clearing an old paint building and constructing new, is still waiting on its own.
It is the clearest illustration in town of what the address-recycling pattern actually means. Moving into four walls that already have a hood system and a grease trap is fast. Starting from raw dirt, even for a company with the resources of Chick-fil-A, is not.
What closed, and where the regulars went
Turnover cuts both ways, and a few closures this year were the kind that come with real sentiment attached. Street Burgers, which opened in May 2021 at 2319 Tenth Avenue South, shut its doors on Tuesday, March 17, 2026, and the family wrote on Facebook to thank everyone who had shared a meal there over the years, adding that being part of the community had been an honor. They noted that Street Burgers gift cards would still be honored at three other local spots for family meals: Tracy's Diner, Homestead 1909, and Electric City Catering. The Pit Stop and Maria's closed around the same stretch, and Stadium Sports Bar & Casino on Fifth Street South announced it would stop serving food after March 29, though the casino side stayed open.
Homestead 1909, one of the gift card landing spots, is itself part of the same shuffling story. It opened inside Annie's Tap House at 112 Central Avenue, serving what its Facebook page calls elevated pub fare, including artisan flatbreads and handcrafted burgers. Meanwhile All The Things Charcuterie, which had operated out of that same Annie's Tap House space, moved out and rebranded as The Boardroom in its own storefront at 122 Central Avenue, in what had been a boutique. One building's internal footprint, two new identities, in the same few months.
Reading the corridor from here
None of this means Great Falls is short on options. It means the mental map a lot of longtime residents are still carrying around, the one where a given corner is permanently the Mexican place or the pizza spot from five years ago, needs an update more often than it used to. The fastest-moving turnover is happening in buildings that were already feeding people. The slowest is happening wherever someone has to start with an empty lot, a former craft store, or a stopgap lease waiting on a bigger renovation across town. Chick-fil-A has a plan and a place in line, but not yet a date. Everything else on this list already has a line out the door.
That is the version of the story that does not show up if you are only counting how many new signs went up this year. It shows up when you start asking what used to be there.
If you are watching this same stretch of town for reasons that have less to do with dinner and more to do with where to put down roots, The Front Agency spends its days tracking Great Falls block by block, the same way we just tracked its restaurants. Meet Our Team when you are ready to talk about what is actually for sale behind those storefronts.
