Walk into 1830 29th Avenue South this month and you'll order from the Cassimus family. Walk two blocks over to 1726 28th Avenue South and you'll order from Wil Drake. Neither of those sentences would have surprised anyone in downtown Homewood a decade ago. What's strange is that they're true again right now, in the same buildings, on the same corners, for the same reason: both men are back exactly where they started.
Zoe's Kitchen opened in that first storefront in 1995. It ran there for seventeen years before the brand outgrew Homewood, went national, and eventually sold to the Cava Group for $300 million. Hero Doughnuts opened on its corner in 2016, built a following on brioche doughnuts and cereal toppings, then handed the wheel to Pihakis Restaurant Group as it expanded into Trussville, downtown Birmingham, Hoover, and the Valley Post district in Chelsea. Both concepts left the founders' hands. Both are now back in them, in the exact addresses where the story began.
That's not a coincidence worth a shrug. It's the clearest evidence yet of how small downtown Homewood's commercial footprint actually is, and what that means for anyone who eats there regularly.
The Suite That Keeps Becoming Zoe's Kitchen
John Cassimus opened ZOZO'S Kitchen on May 1 in Suite 115 at SoHo Square, the same ground-floor space that housed the original Zoe's Kitchen for seventeen years before it briefly became a Cava location. His parents still live just over the hill. He grew up watching that storefront become a regional phenomenon, then watching it get sold out from under the family in a corporate deal.
ZOZO'S isn't a relaunch of Zoe's Kitchen. It's a new independent brand built from the same recipes and the same family, opened deliberately in the same room. Cassimus has also rebranded his existing restaurants in Cahaba Heights, formerly Marky's Kitchen, and Tuscaloosa, formerly Zoë's & Marky's Kitchen, under the ZOZO'S name, with a Hoover location planned for later this year. But the Homewood flagship is the one that matters for the story: it's the only location where the address and the family history line up.
The opening drew Ricky Bromberg, president of Bromberg's, who has apparently made a habit of being first in line for every incarnation of this family's cooking since the original Zoe's Kitchen opened downtown in the 1990s. That kind of loyalty doesn't happen by accident. It happens because downtown Homewood is small enough that the same regulars remember the same storefronts across three decades.
The Corner That Wouldn't Let Go
Days after ZOZO'S opened, a handwritten sign went up on the door of the shuttered Hero Doughnuts at 1726 28th Avenue South. It read, in part:
"Same corner. Same hands. Done the way it should have stayed."
That was Wil Drake, the original founder of Hero, announcing his return. Drake started Hero as a pop-up at Seasick Records and the Pepper Place Market in 2016 before Hero eventually settled into that Homewood storefront. When Pihakis Restaurant Group got involved, the brand expanded fast, adding locations across the state. This spring, PRG's finances collapsed under a stack of lawsuits and unpaid liens, and Hero's locations closed one by one, alongside other PRG restaurants including Rodney Scott's Whole Hog BBQ and Tasty Town.
Drake's answer was Full Circle Doughnuts, which opened May 14 in the same storefront, serving the same brioche doughnuts and the Domestique coffee regulars remembered, plus a new Homewood Special doughnut filled with cream and strawberries. The Homewood Chamber of Commerce held a ribbon cutting on June 29. Full Circle runs on what Drake calls a community first, scale never model, giving 5 percent of Sunday sales to rotating local nonprofits and offering free coffee to first responders. He's also opened a soft serve shop, New Shoes, on 18th Street, which suggests he's not finished building in this particular half-mile.
Two Reunions Don't Make A Trend. Here's What Does.
If ZOZO'S and Full Circle were the only two stories, you could call it sentiment. They're not. This spring and summer also brought Foo Hai, the second Alabama location from Atlanta's Urban Hai, into the ground floor of the Aloft Birmingham SoHo Square hotel, in the space that used to be Michael's Steakhouse. Foo Hai is a partnership between chefs Hai Wang and Peter Chang, whose Atlanta restaurant Eater has ranked among the city's best for spicy Sichuan dishes and dumplings. It was originally supposed to open in Birmingham's Parkside district back in 2024. Instead it landed in Homewood.
A few blocks south, NY Deli & Juice Bar is moving into the former SanPeggio's Pizza space on Green Springs Highway after that location closed following five years in business. It's a Georgia-based concept specializing in halal New York chopped cheese sandwiches, and this will be its first Alabama location.
None of these four openings, ZOZO'S, Full Circle, Foo Hai, or NY Deli, involved a developer building new retail space. Every one of them took over an existing storefront that already had a restaurant history attached to it. Downtown Homewood isn't growing outward. It's cycling through the same small set of addresses, and the names filling them keep turning out to be people who've already worked those rooms before.
Add one more data point that has nothing to do with restaurants: Arlington Properties recently won zoning approval for new signage at its headquarters in the office tower at 251 20th Place South, as it relocates roughly 100 employees from downtown Birmingham into Homewood. That's not a restaurant story, but it's the same underlying signal. People and businesses that already know this district are choosing to plant themselves more permanently in it, not testing it out for the first time.
Why This Particular Half-Mile Recycles Its Own
Downtown Homewood's commercial core, SoHo Square, Central Avenue, the stretch of 18th Street and Green Springs Highway around it, is genuinely small. There are only so many ground-floor suites, and most of them have been occupied continuously since the late 1990s or early 2000s. When a space like 1830 29th Avenue South or 1726 28th Avenue South comes open, a landlord isn't choosing between fifty untested concepts. They're often choosing between a handful of operators who already have a track record in that exact building, because those are the people who call first.
That's a different mechanism than gentrification or a hot commercial market pulling in outside investment. It's closer to a reunion circuit. The Cassimus family didn't need to introduce themselves to Homewood. Wil Drake didn't need to explain what Hero used to taste like. The landlords, the regulars, and the Chamber of Commerce all already had the relationship on file. That familiarity lowers the risk on both sides of the lease, and it's very likely part of why these particular reopenings moved as fast as they did, from a handwritten door sign in early May to a ribbon cutting by the end of June.
For anyone who already lives around here, that means the calculus for a night out downtown has changed less than the storefront signage suggests. The room ZOZO'S occupies has served roughly the same clientele since 1995. The room Full Circle occupies has served the same walk-up crowd for years under the Hero name. What's changed is which member of the founding family or team is behind the counter this year, and that's worth knowing before you decide where to grab dinner this week, not because the food is unfamiliar, but because it's more familiar than the new sign lets on.
If you're weighing whether to grab a Homewood Special doughnut on the way to work or split a plate at ZOZO'S after the kids' soccer practice, the honest answer is that either choice puts you in a room with more institutional memory than the exterior suggests. That's downtown Homewood's real advantage right now: it isn't importing its next chapter from somewhere else. It's just letting the people who already wrote the first one finish the story.
For more on what's happening in Homewood, or if you're ever curious what your own corner of this neighborhood is worth, the team at Sold By The Bell is always glad to talk through it.
