A 129-Year-Old Building A Few Minutes From Avante Is Becoming Two Restaurants

Drive east from Avante on Fort Street, cut down to 195th, and within a few minutes you're on Main Street in Olde Towne Elkhorn, standing in front of a building that has watched this town change shape for well over a century. It sat empty for a long stretch. Before that, for seventeen years, it was Bella Vita Ristorante, the Italian spot where half of Elkhorn had a favorite booth. This year, it's finally getting its second life, and if you live in the newest subdivision on this side of town, that building is worth knowing about.

Bella Vita closed in the spring of 2023 when its owner retired after nearly two decades of running the place. Gift certificates got redirected to a sister restaurant down the block, and the building sat quiet, its Main Street storefront dark, for the better part of three years while the rest of Olde Towne kept building around it. That kind of pause is common in small commercial districts. What isn't as common is what's happening to it now.

One Building, Two Kitchens

Chuck Olson, who already owns Main Street Cellar a block away, bought the building and is preserving its original 1897 structure while carving it into two separate restaurants, each with its own kitchen. The main floor is becoming La Vida Nova, a name that translates to "the new life," a fitting choice for a building coming back from a years-long vacancy. Upstairs, a still-unnamed fine-dining concept is planned to serve a chef's tasting menu, the kind of format Olde Towne hasn't really had before. Local reporting on the project put La Vida Nova on track to open this past May, with the upstairs room following a couple of months behind it. If that timeline held, the tasting-menu room would have opened sometime around midsummer.

Olson has been direct about why he's investing in a second project on the same block rather than just running Main Street Cellar. He told a local news crew:

"It's keeping the small town feel that Elkhorn's always had."

That's not a marketing line built for a press release. It's a fairly specific claim about who this project is for, and it lines up with how the rest of the block has been filling in.

The Block Isn't Just One Building

The old Bella Vita space isn't being renovated in isolation. Olde Towne Elkhorn has been adding tenants up and down Main Street and the intersecting blocks for a couple of years now, and most of what's landed there has been small and locally owned rather than a chain backfilling a vacant storefront. Within a short walk of the new restaurant building, you'll find:

• Elkhorn Landing, a two-building project on Elkhorn Drive with Foster's Mercantile occupying the main floor of the first building and residential condos above it
• Cedar Creek Coffee & Art, which moved into the ground floor of the second Elkhorn Landing building
• Fluff, an interior design studio and store that took the space just above Cedar Creek

None of these businesses depend on the restaurant project to succeed, but they're evidence of the same pattern. Old Town Elkhorn isn't filling empty buildings with whatever national brand wants cheap square footage near a growing suburb. It's filling them with people who already have a stake in the block, the same way Olson already had a wine bar there before he bought the building next door.

Why This Is Avante's Actual Main Street

Avante is one of the newer subdivisions in this part of Elkhorn, platted in 2021 at 195th and Fort Street and built out mostly between 2023 and 2025 by a handful of local builders including Hildy Homes, Trademark Homes, and Showcase Homes. It sits in the Elkhorn North school district, close to Stone Pointe Elementary, on land that was farm ground a few years ago. If you live there, your subdivision is younger than most of the cars parked on Main Street in Olde Towne.

That contrast is the point. New subdivisions on the edge of a growing suburb don't usually come with a built-in downtown. Avante does, and it's not a strip mall a mile down the road. It's a two-block historic district with buildings from the late 1800s and early 1900s still standing and still in use, close enough that a drive there and back takes less time than a round trip to most big box retail near West Dodge. Annexed into the city more than two decades ago, Elkhorn kept that older core mostly intact even as new subdivisions like Avante filled in around its edges. For a new subdivision, that's a genuinely useful thing to have nearby, not a nostalgic footnote.

What This Means For Your Next Few Months

If you moved into Avante in the last year or two, there's a decent chance you haven't spent much time in Olde Towne yet. New subdivisions tend to pull residents toward whatever's closest and newest, and until recently, the old Bella Vita building was a boarded-up reason to keep driving past. That's changing this year.

Worth knowing before you go:

The building itself is worth seeing regardless of what's on the menu. Preservation was part of the plan from the start, and a 129-year-old storefront on Main Street looks nothing like the new construction going up around Avante. If you've been meaning to walk Main Street on a weekend, this is as good a reason as any.

Two separate restaurants means two separate experiences in the same address. La Vida Nova on the main floor is built for a regular night out. The still-unnamed room upstairs, running a chef's tasting menu, is a different kind of evening entirely, the sort of place you'd book for an anniversary rather than a Tuesday.

The block keeps changing, so it's worth checking back. Between the restaurant project, Elkhorn Landing's coffee shop and design studio, and whatever fills the remaining space in that second building, Olde Towne has added more locally owned tenants in the last couple of years than it had in the storefronts that sat quiet before them. A trip there in the fall might look different from a trip there in the spring.

None of this requires you to be shopping for a house or thinking about your next move. It's just what's actually happening a few minutes from where you already live, in the oldest part of a town that keeps adding new subdivisions like Avante at its edges. The newest streets in Elkhorn and the oldest storefronts in Elkhorn are having their moment at the same time, and they happen to be about a five-minute drive apart.

If you're already in Avante, that's worth knowing. And if you're the kind of person who likes tracking what a neighborhood is actually doing, not just what the listing photos show, Ralph Marasco Real Estate Group keeps an eye on this corner of Elkhorn for exactly that reason.