Harrison Street's New Restaurants Are Opening Before the Sidewalk Is Finished

Walk east on Harrison Street past 20th Avenue right now and you will pass two different versions of Downtown Hollywood in the space of half a block. On one side, orange construction fencing, a stretch of exposed subgrade, and the low hum of equipment that has been parked there since early July. On the other, a storefront with butcher paper still taped inside the windows and a sign that says something worth waiting for is coming.

That second storefront is Common Room, and it sits at 2032 Harrison Street. The construction is Phase 6 of the city's Harrison Street Streetscape Project, and it covers the north side of the 2000 block, the exact stretch Common Room calls home. The city's own schedule has that phase running from July 6 through September 18, 2026. As of today, that leaves roughly three and a half weeks before the sidewalk out front is supposed to be done.

This is not a coincidence you'd catch from a portal listing or a chamber of commerce press release. It's the kind of thing you only notice if you've been watching this particular block for a while, which is exactly what makes it worth writing down for the people who actually live here.

The Street Is Being Rebuilt One Block at a Time

The Harrison Street Streetscape Project isn't a single closure. It's six sequential phases, alternating sides of the street, block by block, over the better part of a year.

The city has kept sidewalks and business access open throughout, closing only the westbound driving lane on the active block during daytime hours and reopening it each evening. That detail matters if you're trying to get to dinner on Harrison Street this month: the businesses on the 2000 block's north side are open, but the parking situation in front of them is not what it will be in October.

Common Room sits inside that Phase 6 footprint. So does Milieu Cafe, a new brunch spot expected at 2044 Harrison Street, just a few doors down. Both are opening their doors on the one block of Harrison Street that is, as of this week, still an active job site.

A Restaurant Group Betting on a Deadline It Doesn't Control

Common Room comes from BOL Hospitality Group, the team behind Social Room in Hollywood and several concepts inside the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, including Bae Korean Grill and Davidoff of Geneva Cigar Lounge. The group was founded in 2013 by Eric Douglas and Hai Nguyen, and Common Room is being pitched as their next chapter in South Florida, with a follow-up pan-Asian concept, Zhō, already slated for Dania Pointe later this year.

The menu leans into American comfort food built by executive chef Tanya Evans, whose background includes Barton G and Major Food Group: lobster rolls, slow-braised short rib, a French dip, and something called Yum Yum fried chicken. But the detail that will get people talking is tucked in the back. The Brooklyn Room is a speakeasy accessed through the alley behind the restaurant, invitation only, with a cocktail list named after New York City neighborhoods. Douglas has described the whole project as "an intimate neighborhood modern American restaurant with a vibe," which is either exactly what Downtown Hollywood needs right now or exactly what every new restaurant says about itself. Time on the ground will settle that argument better than a press release can.

What's harder to argue with is the timing. Restaurant openings tied to still-active street construction are usually a story about bad luck, a lease that started before anyone checked the city's capital projects calendar. Here it reads more like a bet. Common Room's own team has framed the restaurant as something meant to anchor Harrison Street's comeback, which only works if the comeback actually lands on schedule. Milieu Cafe, without a confirmed opening date as of this writing, is making the same bet a few storefronts away.

One Block Over, the Work Is Already Done

The contrast gets sharper if you keep walking toward Young Circle. The Hollywood Boulevard Streetscape Improvement Project, which covers the corridor from 21st Avenue to Young Circle along with sections of 19th and 20th Avenues, is listed by the city's Community Redevelopment Agency as substantially complete. That project converted diagonal parking along the boulevard to parallel spaces, a net loss of 57 spots, and used the reclaimed curb space to widen sidewalks for outdoor cafe seating, finished with gray shell-paver concrete laid in a geometric pattern. The tradeoff was intentional: fewer direct parking spots on the boulevard itself, in exchange for two public garages, the Van Buren Garage at 251 S. 20th Avenue and the Radius Garage at 251 N. 19th Avenue, absorbing the difference within walking distance.

So the two arteries that define Downtown Hollywood's dining scene are on opposite ends of the same construction cycle right now. Hollywood Boulevard has its finished sidewalks and its wider cafe zones. Harrison Street is still waiting on its last block. If you've eaten on the boulevard recently and wondered why Harrison feels a step behind, that's the reason, and it's a temporary one with an actual end date attached to it.

The Third Saturday Doesn't Wait for the Concrete

None of this has touched the one Downtown Hollywood tradition that runs on its own clock entirely: the ArtWalk. It happens the third Saturday of every month, six to ten in the evening, rain or road work, and it has kept going through every phase of the Harrison Street project without missing a date.

The August 15 lineup this year included a curated gallery tour led through Choose954, a magic show at Twisted Roots Kava Brewery on Hollywood Boulevard, a mural walking tour starting at the information tent at 20th Avenue and Harrison Street, and a main stage at 20th and Hollywood Boulevard that ran DJ sets into karaoke into a live set from Tomasito Cruz. The Hollywood Art and Culture Center on Harrison Street and Cinema Paradiso both stay part of the rotation most months, and the Artisan Market fills the block between Harrison and Hollywood Boulevard with pop-up vendors and local makers.

The point isn't that the ArtWalk is unusually resilient. It's that a monthly event with its own gravity, one that predates this construction cycle and will outlast it, tells you something about how this neighborhood actually operates. The street underneath it changes. The rhythm on top of it doesn't.

What This Means for the Next Few Weeks

If you live in Hollywood and you've been avoiding the 2000 block of Harrison Street because of the fencing, the current phase is scheduled to wrap by September 18. That's also roughly the window in which Common Room and Milieu Cafe are both expected to be open, which means the block you've been driving around might look completely different by the time the weather starts to turn.

In the meantime, sidewalks and business entrances on the active block stay open during construction hours, and the westbound lane reopens every evening, so getting to BEKA or any other spot already established on Harrison Street hasn't required a detour. The bigger change is parking. With Hollywood Boulevard's diagonal-to-parallel conversion already in effect and Harrison Street's own reconfiguration still finishing, the Van Buren and Radius garages are doing more of the work than the curb is right now.

None of this is a reason to wait on Downtown Hollywood. It's a reason to know which block you're walking into and why it looks the way it does this month instead of next.

If you're watching how a neighborhood like this changes block by block and wondering what it means for a home you already own here, or one you're thinking about, The Tello Team has spent decades reading Broward and Miami neighborhoods at exactly this level of detail. Get your free, instant home valuation and see what that local knowledge is worth for your property.