Walk down Colley Avenue on a Tuesday morning and you will smell butter before you see the sign. That smell used to mean nothing was open yet, because the storefront at 1415 Colley Ave used to fill prescriptions, not pastry boxes. Now it is La Brioche, and the croissants in the window are the clearest evidence of something Ghent residents feel but rarely name: this street changes constantly at the storefront level while staying almost frozen at the level of its landmarks. Two clocks, running side by side, and knowing which one you are looking at tells you a lot about what to expect next on your own block.
The Pharmacy That Became a Bakery
For close to four decades, the address at 1415 Colley Ave belonged to Colley Discount Pharmacy, the kind of business people stop noticing precisely because it never changes. It closed in 2023. What moved in a year later was not another pharmacy or a chain drugstore. It was La Brioche, a French bakery that had spent five years building a following in Norfolk's Neon District under owners Jacqueline and Yvan Devulder, who baked their first baguettes there back in 2019.
The move itself was not simple. Their oven alone weighs roughly two and a half tons and took about a week to disassemble, transport, and reassemble in the new space. But the reasoning behind the move says something about how Ghent works now. Jacqueline has talked about how many of her regulars already do their other small errands within a few blocks, at places like Le Marche and the Pendulum Fine Meats butcher shop. Moving to Colley meant moving toward that existing foot traffic rather than waiting for it to find her.
The new location also let the bakery finally use a beer and wine license that had gone mostly unused at the old spot, since French wine service made little sense on a schedule that closed most days by early afternoon. On Colley, Friday hours now stretch to 5 p.m., a small but real shift toward evening customers rather than just the morning coffee-and-croissant crowd. Two years in, the bakery has settled into a rhythm: closed Monday and Tuesday, open Wednesday through Sunday, busiest on weekend mornings when the baguette supply runs out before noon.
That is the first clock. It moves fast. A retail category that held one identity for forty years flipped to a completely different one in about twelve months, and the flip stuck.
The Places That Never Left
Set that against the second clock, the one that barely ticks at all.
- Doumar's Cones & Barbecue has operated on the same corner since 1904, still family-run, still serving the original waffle cone recipe that Abe Doumar is credited with inventing at a World's Fair, alongside North Carolina-style barbecue and limeades.
- Rajput has served biryani, tandoori, and curry since 1999, expanding from its original Hampton location to Harbour View and Greenbrier before adding a Ghent address, and it still carries one of the more extensive vegan and vegetarian menus in the neighborhood.
- 80/20 Burger Bar has been a Ghent staple since 2011, built around grass-fed Virginia beef burgers and a rotating craft beer list.
None of these businesses relocated, rebranded, or changed hands in any way that shows up in local coverage. They simply kept operating while the storefronts around them turned over. A resident who has lived here fifteen years could tell you Doumar's has not moved an inch in that entire span, and they would be right. That stability is not an accident of luck. It is what happens when a business becomes load-bearing for a street's identity rather than just occupying a lease.
Friday Night on a Six-Season Clock
The Ghent Farmers Market sits closer to the fast clock than the slow one, even though it feels like it has always been part of the neighborhood. The market runs the first and third Friday of each month, April through September, from 4 to 7 p.m., set up on the corner of Colley and Spotswood in front of Blair Middle School. This year marks its sixth season, which means the market itself is younger than the bakery's original Neon District run and considerably younger than any of the three anchors above.
What changed this season is worth noticing if you have not been in a few months. Past years featured live music and food trucks occasionally. This season built both into every single market date. The opening night in April brought Luva Bowls as the featured food truck and live music from Matt Holloman, and organizers have kept that format going since. It is a low-commitment way to test whether a Friday night draw can grow, since a market stall costs a fraction of what a storefront lease does. That is likely why it keeps expanding while brick and mortar turnover stays slower and riskier. You can add a food truck to next month's market with a phone call. You cannot add a restaurant to a vacant storefront nearly as fast.
Two market dates remain before the season wraps for the year, September 4 and September 18, so this is the stretch to catch it before the market goes quiet until next spring.
The Turnover Reaches the Edges Too
The pharmacy-to-bakery swap is the most visible example, but it is not isolated. A few blocks out from the Colley corridor, the same pattern of old spaces finding new occupants keeps showing up.
- Gran Maya, a Mexican restaurant already established in Virginia Beach, expanded into the Ghent Market Shops at 2200 Colonial Ave, with a tease that a Hampton location on Big Bethel Road may follow.
- Donut Dugout finally opened in the former Naci's Corner Cafe space, after what locals had watched as a long, protracted effort to get the doors open.
- A new Virginia ABC store opened at 1225 W. 25th St., with a grand opening in mid-April, adding a much closer option for residents across Ghent, West Ghent, Chelsea, and the ODU area who previously had to drive farther for the same errand.
None of these are dramatic on their own. Taken together, they confirm that the churn on Colley Avenue is not a one-off story about a single bakery. It is a pattern playing out on the neighborhood's edges at roughly the same pace, just with less foot traffic to notice it happening.
What This Actually Tells a Ghent Resident
If you already live here, the practical takeaway is simple. The anchors, Doumar's, Rajput, 80/20, are not where the interesting news is going to come from. They have proven, over a decade or more each, that they are not going anywhere. The real signal sits in the smaller, service-oriented spaces, the pharmacy, the corner cafe, the empty storefront that used to be something else entirely. Those are the addresses that flip fastest, and lately they have been flipping toward food, drink, and small-format retail rather than sitting vacant.
Keep an eye on those transitions and you will see the next version of this story coming before it shows up in a roundup. Ghent's slow clock tells you what the neighborhood has always been. Its fast clock tells you what it is becoming.
If you are watching these shifts because you are thinking about what your own Ghent property might be worth in a neighborhood this active, Michael Morrill at M2 Properties can walk you through what local turnover like this tends to mean for property values on your specific block. Schedule a free consultation to talk through it.
