Drive down Chocolate Avenue this month and the block between the Press Building and the old Hershey Towne Square looks almost exactly like it did two years ago. Same brick storefronts, same string of Hershey's Kiss streetlamps, same crowd spilling out of Fenicci's on a Friday night. Look closer and almost none of it is the same business it was in the fall of 2025.
That's the part locals tend to miss when they talk about "all the closures downtown." Houlihan's closed. Iron Hill Brewery closed. A homegrown grill announced it was leaving. Strung together like that, it sounds like Chocolate Avenue is thinning out. It isn't. Every one of those closures has already been matched by a reopening, a comeback, or an expansion, most of them inside the same footprint or the same 15-month window. If you've been watching one storefront at a time, you've missed the actual story: downtown Hershey just ran through a full changing of the guard, and it happened faster and cleaner than almost anywhere else in the region.
The corner everyone still calls Houlihan's
For 20 years, the ground floor of the Hershey Press Building at 27 West Chocolate Avenue was Houlihan's. It closed for good on December 31, 2025, after Hershey Entertainment & Resorts decided the space needed a different concept for the next chapter of downtown.
That concept, Hershey Social Restaurant + Bar, opened on March 11, 2026, in the same 8,000-square-foot space, reimagined with a wraparound bar, high-top and shared seating, 19 televisions, and 261 total seats, nearly double what the old layout could handle. The menu leans into the address rather than away from it: smash burgers, wings tossed in Hershey's own sauces, and a dessert called the Sundae Spectacular that stacks ice cream, popcorn, waffles, and brownies. Two premium dart bays with vision-tracking scoring and mobile trivia round out what HE&R calls Social Dart, the kind of thing that makes a Tuesday night out feel like an event rather than an errand.
The restaurant also runs a daily happy hour, Monday through Friday from 4 to 6 p.m. and weekends from 1 to 3 p.m., with $3 off drafts and $6 Bloody Marys on Saturdays and Sundays. If you haven't been in since the Houlihan's days, that alone is worth the visit. The corner is still the corner. The business inside it turned over completely in the space of ten weeks.
A brewery that went bankrupt and came back with almost the same people
The Iron Hill story is the one most residents half remember and few have the full timeline on. Iron Hill Brewery had operated at 101 West Chocolate Avenue since 2018, and it wasn't a small tenant. It was the anchor of the Hershey Towne Square development, the kind of place that filled up on a Friday without needing a special occasion.
On September 25, 2025, the entire company shut its doors overnight. An internal email to staff, later obtained by the industry site Breweries in PA, described the closure as immediate and permanent, tied to financial trouble the company had been trying to solve behind the scenes. All 20 Iron Hill locations across the East Coast closed at once, and the company filed for liquidation bankruptcy days later.
What happened next is the part that didn't make it into most of the initial headlines. A federal bankruptcy judge eventually awarded Iron Hill's name and intellectual property to a new group, backed by an entity called Rightlane LLC, that included the brewery's original founder and several longtime employees. That group also picked up the operating licenses for a handful of the old locations, Hershey among them.
The Hershey location reopened on West Chocolate Avenue in early June 2026, less than a year after the company filed for bankruptcy and shuttered its restaurants, bringing back nearly 100 local jobs in the process. Matt Gundrum, the brewery's director of operations, put it plainly to a reporter at the reopening:
"There were some problems that we couldn't overcome before, but now we know what they are and we know what to do in the future."
One practical note for anyone holding an old Iron Hill gift card from before the closure: the new ownership group doesn't have access to the previous company's records, so those balances aren't honored automatically. Pennsylvania's Attorney General has advised customers in that position to dispute the charge with their credit card company rather than assume the new Iron Hill will make it right at the register, though some staff have said they'll try to work something out case by case.
The local grill that's leaving town, sort of
Not every downtown business in motion is contracting. Chocolate Avenue Grill, at 114 West Chocolate Avenue, has been a fixture on the strip for years, and this fall it's opening a second location, not downtown but across the river in Camp Hill, in the former Grateful Goat Brewing space on the Camp Hill Bypass.
The Grateful Goat closed that location on October 12, 2025, and just days later Chocolate Avenue Grill announced it was under contract to buy the building. The purchase closed in January 2026, and the owners now expect the second location to open sometime this fall. It's worth sitting with what that actually signals. This isn't a downtown business folding under pressure. It's a downtown business doing well enough to bet on a second address forty minutes away, while keeping its original Chocolate Avenue location running its normal hours the entire time.
What never moved at all
Set against all that churn, it's worth naming what stayed exactly where it's always been. Fenicci's of Hershey, at 102 West Chocolate Avenue, has been serving Italian comfort food since 1947 and still holds the distinction of being the first restaurant in town to serve pizza. The Hershey Pantry has been voted the best breakfast in Central Pennsylvania for 20 years running, and its sister bakery, Desserts Etc., is still turning out the same cookies and quiches down the block. Rotunda Brew Pub, further east at 814 East Chocolate Avenue, never closed a day through any of this.
Those three businesses are the reason downtown Hershey doesn't feel like a construction zone right now, even though three separate storefronts effectively changed hands in under fifteen months. The turnover happened around a stable core, not instead of one.
There's a fourth data point worth mentioning, even though it sits a few blocks off Chocolate Avenue proper. Hershey Entertainment & Resorts opened 1933 Restaurant & Tavern at The Hotel Hershey in April 2026, an approachable steakhouse and pub concept named for the year the hotel first opened. It's a separate project from Hershey Social, but it tells you the same thing from a different angle: the company that owns much of downtown's dining real estate isn't retreating from food service anywhere in town. It's investing in more of it, in more than one place, at the same time.
What this actually means if you live here
None of this is a story about decline. It's a story about how fast a small downtown can reshuffle its anchors and still look, from the sidewalk, almost unchanged. If your read on Chocolate Avenue is still "Houlihan's and Iron Hill," you're carrying a picture that's over a year out of date. The current picture is Hershey Social's happy hour crowd on a Thursday, a rebuilt Iron Hill pulling in nearly the same regulars it had before, and a homegrown grill confident enough to open a second location across the river.
If you've lived here through all of it, you've probably eaten at every one of these places without ever stringing the timeline together. That's the nature of watching a neighborhood change one storefront at a time instead of all at once. The corner never looked different enough, week to week, to notice it had become a different corner entirely.
If you're weighing a move within Hershey or Central Pennsylvania and want a read on how a neighborhood is actually holding up, not just what the listings say, David K Hawkins has been tracking these blocks long enough to tell you what's changed and what hasn't. Let's Connect.
