Walk north on Leroux Street from Route 66 on a weekday morning this August and you will pass paper still taped inside two storefront windows, a delivery truck idling outside a building with a hundred-plus-year-old brick facade, and the smell of garlic knots drifting out of a pizza parlor that did not exist eight months ago under that name. None of this looks unusual for downtown Flagstaff, where something is always mid-renovation. But look closer at what is actually happening on this one block and a different pattern shows up. The people opening these doors are not fanning out across the city. They are digging in, on top of and next to businesses they already own or businesses that just closed.
That is the part worth understanding if you live here and eat downtown more than a couple times a month. Leroux Street is not having a random growth spurt. Two separate operators, working from opposite ends of the ambition scale, have both decided that the smartest move right now is to go deeper into the same short stretch of pavement rather than open a second location somewhere else in town.
The chef who is stacking three restaurants on one address
Chef Rochelle Daniel opened Atria in 2021 and has spent the years since turning it into one of the reasons people drive up from Phoenix for dinner. She has two James Beard Foundation semifinalist nominations to show for it. Her next move was not a second restaurant across town. It was two more concepts on the same block as the first, one beside Atria and one directly underneath it.
Pompette is a French bistro and bakery going into 101 N. Leroux St., with pastry chef Alicia Motter running a grab-and-go counter each morning before the kitchen shifts into lunch and dinner service built around steak frites, mussels, and coq au vin cooked over an open-fire hearth. Little Rich Girl sits in the basement beneath Atria and Pompette, a speakeasy-style cocktail bar built around Flagstaff's own history of underground drinking and Prohibition-era tunnels, with beverage director Michael Hopper, who was named Top Mixologist and Bartender at the 2025 Foodist Awards, running the bar program.
Daniel has been public about why she is building this way instead of spreading out:
"Downtown Flagstaff is something special, and Leroux Street will soon be at the center of its food scene."
Here is the quick version of what that means for anyone deciding where to grab a coffee, a lunch, or a nightcap in the coming weeks:
- Atria (open now) — modern American, farm-fresh ingredients from wild mushrooms to locally harvested honey, the anchor restaurant since 2021
- Pompette (101 N. Leroux St., opening soon) — French bistro and bakery, pastries from 8 to 11 a.m., lunch 11 to 3, dinner 5 to 10
- Little Rich Girl (beneath Atria and Pompette, opening soon) — speakeasy cocktail bar, Tuesday through Sunday from 4 p.m., with a food menu built around caviar service and a tater-tot-and-vodka pairing called Tots and Shots
Three different reasons to be on that block, three different times of day, all within a short walk of each other.
The opening date moved, and it is worth knowing why
Coverage from earlier this summer, including reporting in the Arizona Daily Sun, described Pompette and Little Rich Girl opening "later this summer." That framing has held up less well as the season has gone on. A ticketed cocktail event at Little Rich Girl scheduled for September 13 points to an actual public opening landing in mid-September rather than before Labor Day.
That gap matters if you are the kind of person who plans a night out around a new opening. Show up over the next couple of weeks expecting both doors to be unlocked and you may find one or both still finishing out. The safer bet is to treat mid-September as the real target and check before you go, especially for Little Rich Girl, where the basement buildout and cocktail program appear to be the last pieces falling into place.
Alpine Pizza took the opposite route to the same idea
A few doors down, a much older business arrived at a similar conclusion from the other direction. Alpine Pizza first opened in 1973, run by the Rich brothers, and spent close to fifty years as the kind of place where NAU students, longtime locals, and Route 66 travelers all ended up on the same night. It closed a few years back. In December of 2025, Scottsdale-based Genuine Concepts, led by longtime Arizona bar and restaurant owner Tucker Woodbury, reopened Alpine Pizza in its original footprint on Leroux Street.
But Woodbury's team did not stop at restoring the old space. They expanded Alpine Pizza sideways into the space that had belonged to its neighbor, The McMillan Bar & Kitchen, which closed the same month. A new walkway now connects the two, and the McMillan Building itself, built in the 1880s and generally regarded as the oldest standing structure in downtown Flagstaff, once held a Wells Fargo station on the ground floor and a hotel for Route 66 travelers upstairs. Rather than opening a second Alpine Pizza somewhere else in the city, the operators chose to absorb the building next door and grow the original location instead. Original rock-climbing photos, wood paneling carvings, and the relit vintage neon sign stayed. The menu grew to include smashburgers and pizza fries alongside the classic pies.
Same block, same instinct
Set these two stories next to each other and the coincidence stops looking like a coincidence. A chef with two James Beard nods and a pizza parlor that has been a local fixture since the Nixon administration have landed on the same strategy within the same twelve months, on the same block of sidewalk. Neither one opened a second location in a different part of Flagstaff. Both chose to go deeper into the ground they already had a foothold on.
For anyone who lives here, the practical version of that is simple. This one stretch of Leroux Street is turning into a place where you can start the day with a pastry at Pompette, grab a slice at Alpine Pizza for lunch, sit down for dinner at Atria, and end the night in the basement at Little Rich Girl, all without moving your car. That kind of density does not happen by accident in a city this size, and it rarely happens on the same block twice in the same year unless something about that particular stretch of ground is working.
Next time you are walking past that taped-up window on your way to the post office or the visitor center, you will know what you are actually looking at. Not a random wave of new business. A short list of people who looked at Leroux Street and decided the smartest expansion was the one directly next door.
If you are curious about what a corridor like this can mean for property values and buyer interest nearby, or you are thinking about your own move in Flagstaff or the Verde Valley, Judy Ivicek has been watching these neighborhoods change since 1985. Let's Connect.
