Okemos's New Restaurants All Have the Same Origin Story

Drive the four-mile stretch from Grand River Avenue to Jolly Road this month and you will pass four storefronts that did not exist a year ago. A bar and restaurant where a red-sauce institution served three decades of Sunday dinners. A shared kitchen tucked into a strip plaza that used to smell like Peruvian lomo saltado. A breakfast counter next to a coffee shop, in a space that sat dark for half a decade. And an old auto garage that now smells like espresso instead of motor oil.

None of these are chains. None are outside investors testing the market. Every one of them is owned by someone who already had a life in Okemos, or in Greater Lansing more broadly, before they signed a lease. That is the part the drive-by version of this story misses. Okemos is not getting new restaurants so much as it is getting the same people, further along.

What Used to Be Here

Start with the building at 662 W Grand River Avenue. In the 1980s it was the Polo Bar. For the next 34 years it was Spagnuolo's, the kind of place where regulars had been coming since they were kids and kept coming back as adults with kids of their own. Spagnuolo's closed in July 2025. By October 8, Gjoni's Bar and Restaurant had taken over the space, an Italian-focused concept with a full bar, gelato, and an espresso counter alongside pizza and pan-seared salmon.

The owner, Gjon Gjidoda, is not new to the neighborhood or the business. He has run Coney Island restaurants in the Lansing area for more than 30 years, including Dan's Coney Island on Pennsylvania Avenue, and he previously owned Hannah's Coney Island in Hannah Plaza. He lives in Okemos himself, which is part of why the building appealed to him when his real estate agent flagged it. His name, Gjoni's, is pronounced "Johnny's," a nod to his own name pronounced "John." He told Lansing City Pulse that customers who grew up eating at that address as kids are still walking through the door, just older now, and that keeping some of the old menu's comfort alongside new additions like cocktails and salads was a deliberate call. "I've been in the restaurant business for a very long time," he said. "I know what people like."

Two Food Trucks Become One Kitchen

A few minutes south on Jolly Road, at 2398, sits a different kind of homecoming. That address used to be Tantay, a Peruvian restaurant that closed in July 2025 after owner Jose Aste suffered a medical emergency. This summer it reopened as Get Loaded Kitchen, a brick-and-mortar built from two food trucks that had been circling Greater Lansing for years.

Get Loaded was started in 2024 by Ismael Jaber, who graduated from Okemos High School before finishing his degree at Michigan State. From Scratch, the Mediterranean-focused truck run by his parents Jamil Jaber and Bariaa Elbast, had been serving shawarma, gyros, and falafel for close to a decade before that. The family's home is minutes from the new restaurant, and Jaber has said that being close to his old high school and his parents' house was part of the draw. The plaza puts Get Loaded Kitchen alongside Cancun Mexican Grill and Valley Wings Okemos, in a commercial stretch that already includes Joe's on Jolly, Backyard Bar, and Ozzys Kabob, just off Interstate 96 on the south side of town. The menu mixes loaded mac and cheese, nachos, and fries with the Mediterranean dishes From Scratch has built its name on, a combination Jaber has described simply as two food trucks becoming one.

The Panera That Sat Empty for Five Years

Tantay closed in July 2025, and Get Loaded Kitchen did not open until this summer, which means that Jolly Road storefront sat dark for the better part of a year. That turns out to be closer to the norm in Okemos than the three months it took Gjoni's to fill Spagnuolo's old spot. At 4738 Central Park Drive, the wait was longer still. That space used to be a Panera Bread. It sat vacant for five years before anyone reopened it.

The tenant that finally did was Altu's Ethiopian Cuisine, expanding from its original East Lansing location on Michigan Avenue, where it has operated for more than 30 years under founder Altu Tadesse. The Okemos location had a soft opening on March 14 and a full public opening not long after, with a grand-opening celebration on April 18 that doubled as a 30-year anniversary event for the brand. The new location, next to Moka & Co, serves the same dishes the East Lansing restaurant is known for, but it also does something the original never has: breakfast. Altu's Okemos is open seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., which makes it one of the few sit-down breakfast options in that part of town, not just a dinner destination.

Five years is a long time for a well-located spot on Central Park Drive to sit empty. It is worth remembering that whenever a new business does open in that kind of space, it usually means someone waited for the right concept rather than the first available tenant.

An Auto Shop Becomes a Third Place

The fourth stop is the least likely to have been a restaurant story at all. At 1732 Hamilton Road, a small auto repair garage sat looking, in the words of the woman who eventually took it over, "very death-trappy." Angela Risk moved to Okemos with her husband and kids about four years ago and kept noticing something missing. She had lived near what people in Seattle call third places, spots that are neither home nor work, and she felt Okemos did not have enough of them.

Risk had finished a master's degree, then became a stay-at-home mother not long after, and found herself wanting something that was hers. The coffee shop had been in the works since 2023, and it finally opened on Friday, March 20, 2026, as Okemos Coffee Shop. Inside, the old garage is now bright and colorful, serving beans from local roaster 517 Coffee Co. alongside a disco ball she bought from the MSU Surplus Store and a corner that reads like a shrine to her own childhood, Barbie and She-Ra figures included. A bigger grand-opening celebration followed on May 16 and 17, timed to 517 Day weekend. The shop keeps generous hours for a small operation, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Sunday, hours that suggest Risk built the place to actually function as the gathering spot she said Okemos was missing, not just a coffee stop on the way to somewhere else.

What the Pattern Actually Says

Line these four up and a shape appears that a single write-up on any one of them would not show. Gjidoda already lived in Okemos and already ran restaurants nearby. Jaber grew up here and went to Okemos High School. Tadesse had already spent 30 years building trust in the same restaurant three miles away before extending it to a second address. Risk moved here first, felt the gap, and then spent three years building the fix.

None of them are outside capital parachuting into a growing suburb because the demographics looked good on paper. Every one of them is someone who was already invested in this specific stretch of Meridian Township, in one form or another, before they took over a lease. That is a different story than "restaurant boom," which is the headline every other outlet ran on each of these openings individually. The boom is real. The pattern underneath it, that the people filling these buildings tend to already belong here, is the part that only shows up when you look at all four side by side.

If you have lived here a while, you have probably already eaten at one of these four without connecting it to the others. If you are newer to the area, it is worth knowing that this is roughly how storefronts tend to turn over in Okemos. Not overnight, and rarely to a stranger.

If you are thinking about what comes next for your own address in Okemos, whether that means buying, selling, or just understanding what a neighborhood like this one is worth right now, The Whybrew Project has spent decades paying attention to exactly this kind of local detail. Schedule an appointment when you are ready to talk it through.