Two New Restaurants and a Trail Detour: What's Actually New in O'Hara Township This Year

"We want to be a pillar of this community."

That's Brian Gorder, talking about the eatery he opened at 900 Gamma Drive in January. He's describing Gordo's Cafe & Cantina, but he could just as easily be describing what's happened to this stretch of O'Hara over the past two years. A corner of the township that trained everyone who drove past Route 28's Exit 10 to expect an empty parking lot has quietly turned into two full-service restaurants and a rerouted walking loop, all within the same year.

If you live here, you've probably caught pieces of this without connecting them. Maybe you tried the tacos. Maybe your evening walk got detoured and you didn't think twice about it. Put the two together and there's a pattern worth naming: O'Hara didn't get quieter this year. It got busier in two directions at once, the dining strip and the sidewalk, and neither happened by accident.

The Building That Sat Empty for Two Years

Before it was anything else, 900 Gamma Drive was a Max & Erma's. Then a family with roots in a Verona bakery gutted it and reopened it in 2021 as Periwinkle's Bakery & Cafe, in a building that housed a former Max & Erma's restaurant. The concept didn't last. Ownership struggled with staffing issues, and the bakery and cafe announced a temporary closing in late 2022. It never reopened. By 2023, the property was on the market as a turnkey restaurant, and the listing details tell you exactly what sat vacant along that highway frontage for two years: 8,000 square feet of space and 149 parking spaces on 2.8 acres.

That's the building Brian Gorder walked into in late 2025. By his own account, the restaurant had been empty for two years on those same 2.8 acres just off Exit 10 of Route 28. Gorder wasn't new to Pittsburgh restaurants. He also owns and operates Gordo's Tacos & Tequila in Mount Washington. What he built at Gamma Drive is a hybrid: part scratch bakery, part cantina, with a menu that leans harder into sourcing than the space's last two occupants ever did. He gets beans from Mexico for the coffee and hand-makes the syrups, and heirloom corn kernels come from Oaxaca for the fresh-pressed tortillas and chips, which he grinds into masa himself. Gordo's Cafe & Cantina is open daily at 900 Gamma Drive in RIDC Park.

Gorder frames the location as bigger than the office park across the street. He's said the restaurant isn't just there for the office park, but for the Fox Chapel area, with something for everybody, cronuts included. Two years of an empty building made that claim easy to test. So far the office park crowd showing up for lunch suggests it's working.

A Few Minutes Down Freeport Road, a Different Kind of New

Gordo's isn't the only recent arrival on this side of the township, and it isn't even the newer of the two. That distinction belongs to Viva La Vida Mexican Bar & Grill, which opened in Fox Chapel Plaza on Freeport Road in August 2024. This month puts it almost exactly two years into business, which is its own kind of milestone for a restaurant that started as a bet by a 22-year-old on his first business.

Luis Gil-Chacon was only 22 when he opened his first restaurant, an O'Hara resident on a mission to reinvent how Pittsburgh patrons enjoy authentic Mexican food, partnering with his mother, Belsy Chacon, also of O'Hara, to open Viva La Vida in Fox Chapel Plaza. They didn't staff the kitchen locally. Two chefs relocated from Mexico City to run it: head chef Gustavo Badillo, a noted chef in his native Mexico with hundreds of restaurant openings to his name, and Ricardo Hernandez, who trained alongside him. The result reads less like a strip-mall Mexican spot and more like something transplanted whole. OpenTable describes the space as an innovative take on authentic Mexican fare with a bold pink-paradise interior and resort-style hospitality. Two years in, the mother-and-son team still reports brisk business and a glowing local reception. You'll find them at 1141 Freeport Road in O'Hara.

What's worth noticing is the distance between these two openings, both in time and in geography. Viva La Vida spent two years proving out a concept built from scratch in a leased plaza space. Gordo's spent those same two years as a vacancy, then opened into a building with two failed concepts already behind it. Different paths, same short stretch of road, same result: two kitchens now competing for the same Tuesday-night dinner decision that, three years ago, would have sent you somewhere outside the township entirely.

Quick reference if you're planning a visit:

• Gordo's Cafe & Cantina, 900 Gamma Drive, RIDC Park
• Viva La Vida Mexican Bar & Grill, 1141 Freeport Road, Fox Chapel Plaza

The Trail Loop Got a Detour Too

While the restaurant corridor was filling back in, the township's most-used park amenity ran into its own disruption. O'Hara Township Community Park sits at 330 Fox Chapel Road, between the municipal building and Delafield Road, and it's the township's most popular park, with a gazebo, two picnic shelters with electric and water, restrooms, two ballfields, two tennis courts, two playgrounds, a sand volleyball court, hiking trails and a pond with its own fountain.

The loop trail itself is smaller than a lot of people assume. The loop around the park runs 7/10 of a mile, and if you want a full mile, you continue to the trail entrance at the Mews and back. It's a short, dependable circuit, the kind of thing regulars do without checking a map. That's exactly why the township's construction notice matters: officials posted word of a parking lot and trail closure at Community Park tied to ongoing work, the kind of announcement easy to miss if you're not checking the township's news page before you head out.

If your usual loop is affected, Meadow Park is the township's largest developed park at over 24 acres, with a picnic shelter, restrooms, two ballfields, two tennis courts and a newer playground, a reasonable alternative while Community Park sorts itself out. One more thing worth knowing before you go, dog owners in particular: O'Hara has a leash law that applies in every township park, dogs and cats included, and owners are required to clean up after their pets, with pick-up bag stations provided on-site.

What This Adds Up To

None of these three things, the two restaurants and the trail work, happened because of each other. But they landed in the same stretch of calendar, and together they say something about how O'Hara actually functions day to day. This isn't a township where change arrives all at once with a ribbon-cutting. It arrives in pieces, a building that finally gets a tenant, a two-year-old restaurant that quietly outlasts its opening buzz, a trail closure notice that only the people who walk that loop every week will notice at all.

I've spent enough years working construction and renovation projects around Fox Chapel and O'Hara to know that a two-year vacancy on a commercial corridor isn't nothing. It's a signal about what the market thought that building was worth, and Gordo's betting on scratch bakery credentials and Oaxacan corn is a different kind of bet than a casual American chain ever made there. Whether that bet keeps paying off the way Viva La Vida's has is the kind of thing worth watching if you live nearby, whether or not you ever think about real estate at all.

If you're weighing a move into O'Hara Township, or wondering what a home near this corridor is actually worth given how the neighborhood keeps filling in around it, I'd rather talk it through directly than guess from a spreadsheet. Let's Connect, and I'll walk you through what I'm seeing on the ground, restaurant corridor and all.