How Much Progress Has Been Made on Bellaire Blvd.’s Latest Garage and Pan-Asian Culinary Complex

Note: This story has been updated to include Beard Papa’s in the list of tenants planned for Bellaire Food Street.

The steel is up for Bellaire Food Street‘s 3-level garage, as shown in the twilit photo at top looking west down Bellaire Blvd. So far popsicle shop Popfancy, Japanese cream puff dealer Beard Papa’s, Japanese gather-’round-the-grill restaurant Pepper Lunch, Vietnamese restaurant Migo, Taiwanese shaved ice shop Meet Fresh, and — just today — Beijing-style skewered meat spot Fat Ni BBQ have punched their tickets for entry into ground floor of the 24,000-sq.-ft. strip next door, reports Eater, adding that more are on the way. The developer Kevin Kan has laid claim to the building’s second story office outpost.

Work on the 2-acre site between Beltway 8 and Gessner got off the ground earlier this year:

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It’s taking the place of the 2-story brick Diho Apartments — a 3-building complex with ground-floor retail like the tailor shop shown below in a shot from 2014:

By the time crews brought the 40-year-old complex down in 2017, both its retailers and residents were long gone. Other than the owners, the only people who’d been around were Houston Police and Harris County Sheriffs officers who used the place for counter-terror exercises in 2016 until abc13’s Miya Shay tattled on them for blowing up live explosives on the property without permits.