Central Avenue's Comeback Isn't a Trend. It's One Guy's Four Storefronts.
August 27, 2026
August 27, 2026
Walk Central Avenue on a Friday night and you'll notice something that doesn't show up in any of the "downtown Barboursville is back" write-ups: the same last name keeps appearing on the storefronts that actually feel alive.
Start at the corner, where Orbit's Record Shop sells vinyl out of a converted retail space. Walk half a block and you're at 1861 Public House, where it's not unusual to see someone drop into a booth still holding the record they just bought across the street. Keep going and you'll pass Oscar's Breakfast, Burgers & Brews, rebuilt from its original space into a full kitchen with a longer bar and more taps. All three belong to Jason Beter, who also owns The Corner Hoagies & Hops a few miles away in downtown Huntington, and whose family runs Köerber Beer Company around the corner on Brady Street, where his son Noah does the brewing.
That's the part of the story most passersby miss. Central Avenue didn't get a downtown revival in the abstract sense, with a committee and a rebranding effort. It got one person who kept opening businesses that feed each other, literally and financially, until the corridor started functioning like a real night out instead of a strip of separately struggling storefronts.
The naming alone tells you how deliberate this is. 1861 Public House takes its name from the Civil War-era land battle fought in Barboursville that same year, and from the German-style brewing tradition the troops carried with them. Beter has said the connection between the history and the beer is what tied the whole concept together. That's not incidental branding. It's the same instinct that led him to put a record shop, a pub, and a breakfast spot within walking distance of each other: each one gives someone a reason to be on the block, and each one benefits when the others do too.
Köerber Beer Company extends that logic off Central Avenue and onto Brady Street, where the taproom serves as both a brewery and a kind of extended living room for the Beter businesses. Noah Beter, a recent Marshall University graduate, leads the brewing, and the beer shows up on tap at 1861 Public House and Oscar's as well as at the taproom itself. It's a small, closed loop: the family brews it, the family's other businesses pour it, and the customers move between all of them without ever leaving a three-block radius.
None of this happened by accident, and it didn't happen instantly either. Back in 2022, the Herald-Dispatch quoted Barboursville Mayor Chris Tatum noting that six new businesses had opened on Main Street and Central Avenue in the preceding two years, the first time in three decades those storefronts had been close to full. The Beter businesses were part of that wave, not the whole cause of it, but they've become the connective tissue that turns a handful of open storefronts into an actual evening.
Not everything happening on Central Avenue traces back to the Beter family, and the building at 646 Central Avenue makes that clear on its own.
That address has been through more identities than most Barboursville residents can probably list off the top of their head. It was once a pool hall known as Gatsby's. Later it became Blackhawk Grille. In 2018 it turned into Main Street on Central, a fine-dining restaurant that held the space for years. Today it's home to Bruno's Spotted Hare, chef Bruno Young's Appalachian-inspired restaurant that opened in the second half of 2024 and has already landed on the cover of Tri-State Living Magazine.
Young has talked about knowing immediately that this was the right building, calling it architecturally significant and central to the history of downtown Barboursville. The menu backs up the instinct: duck breast, fried catfish, leg of rabbit, dry-aged steaks, and a wine list that positions the restaurant closer to a special-occasion destination than a casual stop. Current hours run Wednesday through Saturday evenings, with the bar opening earlier in the afternoon.
Put those two threads next to each other and the actual shape of Central Avenue's comeback becomes clear. It isn't one story. It's two, running in parallel a few doors apart: a family-built casual circuit built for repeat weekly visits, and a single, ambitious restaurant occupying a building that has already worn three other names before this one. A downtown corridor that can support both a pint at Köerber and a dry-aged steak at Bruno's Spotted Hare in the same block is doing something most small-village Main Streets in this part of the state aren't managing to pull off.
If you ask around about "the Barboursville farmers market," you'll get two different answers, and they're both right.
Confuse the two and you'll show up to the wrong event with the wrong expectations. One is where you go for tomatoes and eggs before the heat sets in. The other is where you go with a drink in hand to hear a band and browse handmade goods from a folding table. Both are genuinely worth building a weekend around. Neither one is the other.
Barboursville's Fall Fest returns September 17 through 19, 2026, with the parade kicking things off on Thursday the 17th and the Arts & Crafts Show running the following two days. It's the kind of event that briefly turns Central Avenue's usual weeknight foot traffic into something closer to a small town fair, with a schedule the Village posts and updates on its own site each year. For residents who've watched the corridor fill back in one storefront at a time, Fall Fest is less a novelty and more a checkpoint, a chance to see how much of downtown is actually open compared to the year before.
The easy version of this story is "downtown Barboursville is coming back," and that's true enough as far as it goes. But it flattens something worth understanding if you actually live in this village: the comeback has a name attached to a good chunk of it, it runs on family labor as much as investment capital, and it's happening alongside a completely separate track where a single ambitious chef took over a building with real history and turned it into something that gets magazine covers.
That's a more interesting, more useful thing to know than "there are new restaurants downtown." It tells you where the corridor's momentum is actually coming from, and it tells you that a slow Tuesday on Central Avenue doesn't mean the street is struggling. It might just mean you're between Beter's rhythm and Bruno's rhythm, and Wednesday is when both of them pick back up.
If you're already planning your weekend around Central Avenue, you already know the corridor better than most listings ever will. And if watching this village fill back in has you thinking about what it would take to actually put down roots on one of these blocks, Home in WV is a good place to start that conversation. Schedule your free consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
Whether you’re ready to sell your home, curious about its value, or just exploring your options, Christina and David Di Filippo are here to guide you. Let’s connect and start turning your real estate goals into reality.