"Outdoor gathering spaces are expected to be a major draw for visitors."
That's how Olde Mecklenburg Brewery CEO Jim Birch described the riverfront taproom his company is building at 725 Elm Street, in reporting picked up by WhatNow Charlotte. It's a fine pitch for a brewery. But if you already live in Mount Holly, the more useful piece of information isn't the pitch. It's the address. OMB River View sits on Elm Street, at the point where the Catawba River meets Dutchman's Creek. The two restaurants that opened downtown earlier this year, The Holland and Bolton's Curbside Cookery, both sit on Main Street. Downtown Mount Holly isn't filling in one strip this year. It's building two, in two different places, for two different reasons, and as of right now there's no public walking route connecting them.
That split is the actual story, and it changes how you should think about planning an evening out here for the next few months.
Main Street Is Filling In What Was Already There
The Holland opened this spring inside a building most Mount Holly residents have driven past their whole lives without a second look. It's the old Holland Drug Store, a structure dating to the 1890s tucked off North Main Street, and it spent decades as exactly the kind of downtown fixture that quietly ages out of use. According to QC Life's coverage, the building has been restored and reopened as a wine bar and restaurant serving Southern American dishes with Asian-inspired touches, with an event space built in for private gatherings. It's the kind of project that only works because the bones were already there. Nobody built a new structure. Somebody finished a hundred-year-old one.
A block or two away, Bolton's Curbside Cookery tells a smaller and more local version of the same story. Lee and Jenny Bolton started as a food truck in 2021, specializing in smash burgers and homemade soups, and picked up a Best of Gaston award in 2022 before making the jump to a storefront at 108 South Main Street. Their menu still leans on the same things that built the following: smash burgers, a chili called Bad Nana's that carries its own following, and a soup rotation that includes chicken and dumplings. That's a food truck that grew into a lease, not a franchise that landed downtown from somewhere else.
Both of these openings share a pattern worth naming. They're small-footprint, locally rooted, and they filled space that already existed on Main Street. Nobody had to pour a new foundation.
The Riverfront Bet Is a Different Kind of Investment
OMB River View is not that. It's a ground-up construction project, more than $6 million by the brewery's own account, on a roughly 7,000-square-foot building at the confluence of the Catawba River and Dutchman's Creek. Per the Charlotte Business Journal reporting relayed by WhatNow, the project hit delays tied to fluctuating construction costs before foundations were poured and the steel frame moved toward erection this year, with a target opening in late September. Given where the calendar sits right now, that puts an actual opening date within the next several weeks rather than some distant future promise.
The scale tells you something the location alone doesn't. The plan calls for roughly 100 seats indoors, another 50 on the patio, and room for close to 400 more people across the biergarten. Compare that to a Main Street storefront that seats a few dozen people on a busy night, and you're looking at two entirely different bets on what Mount Holly's evening crowd looks like. One bet is that a restored drugstore and a graduated food truck can hold a loyal neighborhood crowd. The other is that a regional brewery with an existing following can pull a crowd that fills a biergarten built for hundreds.
It's also not a one-off wager. Birch told the Business Journal that OMB is advancing a warehouse project on adjacent property with a target 2027 debut, and the company has separate plans in motion for a Cornelius location tied to Northwood Ravin's Greenway Gartens development, which Birch said could land as late as 2029. Mount Holly's riverfront isn't a single building for this company. It's the first piece of something they intend to keep building on.
What Actually Connects the Two Sides of Town
Here's where the gap shows up in daily life rather than in a spreadsheet. Mount Holly's public trail system, which the city calls the Mount Holly RiverHawk Greenway, does real work connecting the historic core. The A&E Riverfront Trail runs 1.2 paved miles between Tuckaseege Park, known locally as Tuck Park, and the Municipal Complex on East Central Avenue. From there, it's a short 0.3-mile walk along Catawba Avenue sidewalks into downtown, past the shops and restaurants clustered around Main Street. Add it up and you get roughly a mile and a half of walkable route from the ballfields and dog park at Tuck Park straight to The Holland's front door.
That network does not currently reach Elm Street. Nothing in the city's published trail segments extends to the OMB site at the creek confluence, which means for now, getting from a smash burger at Bolton's to a pint at the new biergarten means getting in a car, not continuing a walk. That's a small logistical fact, but it's the kind of thing that actually changes how a Friday night here gets planned. If you're picking one stop for a walkable evening before the new taproom opens, downtown Main Street is still the only side of town set up for it.
Here's a quick way to keep the two nodes straight:
- The Holland — 100 N. Main St., wine bar and Southern American menu with Asian-inspired dishes, inside the restored 1890s Holland Drug Store building
- Bolton's Curbside Cookery — 108 S. Main St., smash burgers and homemade soups, grown from a 2021 food truck into a storefront
- OMB River View — 725 Elm St., Olde Mecklenburg Brewery's new taproom and biergarten at the Catawba River and Dutchman's Creek confluence, targeting a late September opening
What This Means for the Rest of the Year
Once OMB River View opens, expect Mount Holly's evening options to start pulling in two directions rather than one. Main Street will keep doing what it's doing: small, personal, built out of buildings and businesses that were already part of town. The riverfront will start doing something different, drawing people specifically for the water view and the scale of the space, in a way that has more in common with a destination brewery than a neighborhood restaurant.
If the trail system eventually extends toward Elm Street, that gap closes and Mount Holly ends up with one continuous evening loop instead of two separate trips. Nothing in current city planning documents points to that happening soon, so for now, the honest answer for anyone asking "what's new in Mount Holly" is that there are two answers, and they live in two different parts of town.
Mount Holly's downtown has spent the last few years quietly filling back in, and watching how a small river town balances a restored drugstore against a $6 million brewery investment says something real about where the town is headed next. John R. Bolin has spent decades tracking exactly this kind of shift across Gaston County, from downtown storefronts to riverfront development, and knows how these changes tend to ripple into what a street or a neighborhood is worth over time. If you're curious what that growth means for your own corner of Gaston County, Get Your Instant Home Valuation and see where your home stands today.
