Who Took Over the Treat Street and Oakwood Bistro Spaces on Oakland Drive

On Oakland Drive, the shopping center where Whites Road comes in is called Oakwood Plaza. For 33 years its corner unit at 3023 sold ice cream and candy under the Treat Street name, and a mural on one wall kept growing as each new owner painted themselves into it. A few doors down at 3003, Oakwood Bistro served dinner from 1997 until its last night on Dec. 31, 2023.

You can now get a smashburger in the old Treat Street space, and the old Bistro is being built out as an Irish pub. The two new tenants have more in common than the timing. Neither one is a chain that picked a spot off a map. One owner grew up coming to this plaza. The other is a family that moved to Kalamazoo for work and decided to stay.

Why the two old tenants left

The closings had different causes, and both owners spoke openly about them.

Erin Schultz and her husband bought Treat Street from Mike Leeuw in August 2020 and added "Schultz's" to the name. By summer 2025, she said, running the store alongside her other business, Schultz Sweets, had become "very difficult." She told MLive she hoped to sell the location to someone who would keep Treat Street going. The shop closed at the end of July 2025. According to WWMT, the menu and recipes were moving to Schultz Sweets, and she was also thinking about a mobile Treat Street bus. So if you miss the Kalamazoo dog, it went with Schultz Sweets. It didn't vanish.

Oakwood Bistro had a harder ending. Ryan Soule started as its chef in 2003 and became the owner in 2009. When he announced the closing, he said the restaurant never fully came back from the pandemic, and he named food costs and staffing as well. He also said neighborhood pricing limited how far he could raise prices without cutting quality.

The two spaces sat empty for very different lengths of time:

The Treat Street corner was refilled about a year after it closed. If the pub opens on its listed date, the Bistro space will have been dark for close to three years.

The burger shop run by someone who grew up at this plaza

Fifth Street Burger opened July 27, 2026. Its website brands it as 5th Street Burger & Fries. It's an Arizona franchise, and Kalamazoo is its third location, after Tempe, where the first one opened on Fifth Street in 2020, and Mesa. The man behind it is Pasha Khosravani, a Kalamazoo native, and WhatNow names Sean Silverman as his business partner.

The location makes more sense once you know his history. Khosravani spent 20 years in Arizona, then came home. He told MLive he hadn't planned to open a third location this soon. Then this space came up.

"I always liked this place. I came here as a kid," Khosravani said. "I used to work at Oakland Pharmacy way back in the day. So I'm really familiar with this plaza, this whole area."

The menu is mostly smashburgers, and each signature burger comes with its own sauce on the side. The exception is the one people keep talking about, the "PB & PJ." It's a toasted brioche bun with a thin layer of peanut butter, a beef patty, pepper jack, bacon and spicy pepper jelly. The house "Fifth Street Burger" sticks with American cheese, pickles and house sauce. The "Steakhouse Burger" has blue cheese, grilled onions and steakhouse aioli, and the "Hawaiian" adds grilled pineapple and teriyaki.

Khosravani said traffic in the first two weeks ran close to double what they had projected. When MLive visited in August, the walls held work by local artist DiRTst. None of the coverage we found says what happened to the old Treat Street mural. Anyone who wants to know will have to stop in and look.

The website lists these Kalamazoo hours: Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Hours at new restaurants change often, so check before a late Sunday run.

The pub that pushed its opening to Nov. 20

The Emerald Oak is the work of Eammon and Gillian Nestor. Eammon spent five years on Stryker's executive leadership team. The family went back to Ireland after one assignment, then returned to Kalamazoo with the company in 2021. Their company, Auld Ned's Hospitality, LLC, is running the pub in the Bistro's former 4,400-square-foot space. The city approved its final permits in July.

The opening date has moved. When the pub was announced in July, MLive reported plans to open "this October." Around the same time, WhatNow said demolition had just finished and the build-out was expected to take about three months. As of Oct. 9, the "Upcoming Events" section of the pub's website says "Grand Opening - November 20th 2026." The online menu page still says items are unavailable and orders aren't being taken. If you were counting on an Irish pub for October, plan for the week before Thanksgiving. Until the doors actually open, treat Nov. 20 as the pub's target and not a promise.

The plans describe a building with a few different kinds of rooms:

• The main bar, with screens and sound meant for soccer, rugby, hurling and football, plus traditional and modern Irish music.
• The whiskey snug, with no televisions or screens. The pub's line for it is "No televisions, no screens — just stories." It will also take private dinners, team meetings and whiskey and gin tastings.
• Quieter dining spaces, with an opening menu built on Irish ingredients. MLive says it will start small. WhatNow reported that fish and chips and a traditional Irish breakfast were expected.

Nestor told MLive the pub will host soccer mornings and live music on some evenings. He also said he hopes to serve local soccer and rugby supporters, local clubs and community events. No regular schedule has been published yet, and the newsletter sign-up on the pub's site is where it says it will announce live music and match days. He was also clear about the kind of place they want:

"We want the feeling of a family-led pub," Nestor said. "We grew up in Ireland around these community-type pubs, so we want to be guardians of making sure that it doesn't begin feeling like a chain and that it stays authentic."

The neighbors that are still here

Two vacancies are a big change for one stretch of road, but the rest of the block has stayed put. Several of these businesses are older than both closed tenants:

1. Sawall Health Foods, 2965 Oakland Drive. Frank A. Sawall founded it in 1936, and Discover Kalamazoo calls it the oldest family-owned natural-foods store in the country.
2. Café '36, upstairs at Sawall's, same address.
3. Fletcher's Pub, 3013 Oakland Drive. WhatNow notes it shares a parking lot with the old Treat Street space.
4. Factory Coffee's Bookstore Cafe, inside This Is a Bookstore at 3019 Oakland Drive, open since 2023.
5. Water Street Coffee's Oakwood Plaza cafe, 3037 Oakland Drive, at Oakland and Whites Road.

Put the addresses in order and you get one short walk. Coffee at 3037 or 3019, burgers at 3023, a pint at 3013, the pub at 3003, groceries at 2965. Starting Nov. 20, the building that sat dark for almost three years is scheduled to be lit again. The Emerald Oak will be the second Irish pub on the block, next door to Fletcher's.

A short Oakwood Plaza calendar for the rest of fall

• Now through Nov. 19: Fifth Street Burger is the newest open business on the block. The Emerald Oak building is still under construction.
• Nov. 20: The Emerald Oak's listed grand opening.
• After opening: The pub's newsletter is where match-day viewing and live-music nights are supposed to be announced. Nothing has been posted yet.

Small business turnover on Oakland Drive tells you something about this side of Kalamazoo. A hometown owner and a family that chose to stay here both picked this plaza when spaces opened up. At Atwood Properties Group, we watch that kind of local detail because it's part of what makes a street worth living on. If you live near Oakwood Plaza and want to know what your home is worth with Fifth Street Burger open and The Emerald Oak on the way, get your instant home valuation. We're happy to walk you through the numbers.