Drive past the Riverpoint Shopping Center on N. Port Washington Road this month and you'll notice something that wasn't true a year ago: every storefront has a name on it. That's not a small thing for a strip that saw three storefront changes during 2025. According to AOL, Jose's Blue Sombrero had held its space for more than a decade before closing in October 2025. The Cosi space sat vacant even longer before that. A screen-printing shop called Fully Promoted had previously occupied another storefront. Three gaps, one small shopping center, and no obvious reason they'd all get filled in the same twelve months.
But they did. And the same year they did is the same year Fox Point turned 100.
Three Storefront Changes, One Address
Start with the food, because that's what most people driving Port Washington Road actually notice first. Nino's Southern Sides, a Shorewood restaurant known for scratch-made Southern comfort food since 2015, opened its second location at 8775 N. Port Washington Road, in the space Cosi left behind. The menu runs from single-piece snack meals around $11.99 up through full dinners at $18.99, each served with two sides pulled from a list of roughly twenty options. It's the kind of expansion that only makes sense if the operator is confident the North Shore has room for a second location of something that already works in Shorewood.
A few doors down, Las Cazuelas Chilaquiles & Taco Bar, a West Allis-based family business, took over 8617 N. Port Washington Road, the address Jose's Blue Sombrero occupied for more than ten years. The menu carries over from the original West Allis location on Greenfield Avenue: tacos, chilaquiles, margaritas, homemade sauces, tres leches, and a Friday fish fry with a Mexican twist. What's new for Fox Point is the patio. Village documents describe live music on the outdoor space Friday and Saturday evenings from 5 to 7 p.m., something the original location doesn't have room for.
And where Fully Promoted used to print T-shirts, Donut Zone moved in. Owner Bao Nguyen leases the roughly 1,400-square-foot space from Midland Management, the company that owns the shopping center, and the shop cleared its conditional use approval from the village's plan commission in June. It's takeout-focused, with donuts, kolaches, breakfast sandwiches, and coffee, open 5 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Sunday, which puts it ahead of most of the neighborhood on weekday mornings.
None of these three businesses have anything to do with each other. Different owners, different cuisines, different lease terms. What connects them is the address and the timing. A shopping center that had seen tenant turnover over the better part of a decade welcomed three new businesses in a single calendar year.
New Barons Plans a Fox Point Taproom
The fourth piece of this doesn't have an address yet, but it might be the most telling. New Barons Brewing Cooperative, the Milwaukee-based brewery that already runs the beer garden at Longacre Pavilion each summer, is planning a standalone brewery and taproom in Fox Point by the end of 2026, according to village documents. That's a business the village already knows. It has already spent a season pouring beer at a village pavilion.
If the taproom lands on schedule, it means Fox Point closes its centennial year with a brewery that has already proven, one beer garden season at a time, that it draws a crowd here.
A Centennial Calendar That Actually Lines Up
None of this retail turnover happened in a vacuum. Fox Point spent 1926 to 2026 as a village, and it built a full year of programming around the anniversary. The Fox Point Farmers Market opened its 2026 season in the North Shore Congregational Church parking lot the same day the village held its centennial run-walk, a course that wound past historic landmarks with QR codes along the way so participants could learn the story behind each stop. Rock the Fox, the free summer concert series at Longacre Pavilion, marked its own 50th anniversary this year, with pre-concert yoga and Zumba classes from the Wisconsin Athletic Club running ahead of each show.
The centennial isn't finished. The village has described a fall event still coming, an open house-style weekend built around Fox Point's architecture, history, and neighborhoods, with details to be announced through the village's event notifications. Pair that with a brewery opening its doors for the first time by year's end, and the back half of 2026 is shaping up to be as active as the front half, just quieter about it.
What's Actually Open Right Now
For anyone trying to plan an evening or a Saturday morning around what's new, here's where things stand as of this fall:
- Nino's Southern Sides, 8775 N. Port Washington Road, open now, dinners $18.99 with two sides
- Las Cazuelas Chilaquiles & Taco Bar, 8617 N. Port Washington Road, open now, live patio music Friday and Saturday 5 to 7 p.m.
- Donut Zone, 8687 N. Port Washington Road, open now, 5 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday
- New Barons Brewing Cooperative taproom, address pending, targeted for late 2026
The pattern underneath all of this is simple even if the businesses aren't related. Three businesses arrived at the shopping center in a single year, and it happened to be the year the village itself hit a milestone worth throwing a hundred years of a party for. The Riverpoint storefront changes weren't part of the centennial calendar. They just happened to land the same year, and now the two stories read like one.
If you're already stopping in for tacos on a Friday night or grabbing a donut on your way to drop the kids off, you're living the part of this story that doesn't show up in village permitting documents. Blue Violet Homes works this stretch of the North Shore regularly, and we'll keep an eye on when New Barons finally opens its doors. If you spot the sign going up before we do, let us know. We'd rather hear it from a neighbor than a press release.
