Latham's New Restaurants Keep Turning Out To Be Second Locations

Five businesses opened along the same few blocks of Latham this year, and a sixth signed its lease last fall. Only one of the six is actually new to the region. The rest already had a location somewhere else in the Capital Region. Latham didn't attract a wave of first-time entrepreneurs betting on the neighborhood. It attracted a wave of already-proven concepts deciding they were ready for a second address, and nearly all of them picked the stretch of road that runs north from the Route 2 traffic circle past Latham Farms toward Route 9.

That distinction matters if you've driven past the construction fencing and new signage this year and wondered what's actually changed. It's not that Latham suddenly became a food destination. It's that Latham became the default next stop for businesses that had already tested themselves in Troy, Colonie, or Albany.

The timeline, plaza by plaza

Here's what actually landed, in the order it happened:

Five of the six are expansions. The pattern is consistent enough that it's worth asking why, instead of just cataloging the openings.

What "second location" actually means here

Kuma Ani didn't pick Latham because Latham needed ramen. The chain already runs locations on 6th Avenue in Troy and on Wolf Road in Colonie, and the Watervliet Shaker Road spot is its third in the Capital Region. The Latham store is also the only one serving bubble tea, something the owners specifically built out for this location rather than porting over from the others.

The Skinny Pancake followed a similar logic. Founder Benjy Adler had run the Albany location as a full-service restaurant for four years with the expectation that it would eventually support smaller satellite locations. Latham's Galleria 7 Market became that satellite, the chain's ninth location overall and its second in the immediate area.

Emack & Bolio's owner Orah LeHockey, who bought the Albany shop on Delaware Avenue in 2023, told a local news outlet she was approached about a second location and found the spot in Fresh Market Plaza. The Latham store won't be able to host live music the way the Albany original does. Same brand, same menu, but a different set of constraints once it's inside a strip plaza instead of a standalone building.

None of this is a story about Latham discovering something new. It's a story about three separate Albany-and-Troy-area businesses independently concluding, in the same six-month window, that Latham was where they wanted to grow next.

The one business that's actually new

Hangry Joe's Hot Chicken is the exception, and it's worth separating from the rest for exactly that reason. The chain, headquartered in Springfield, Virginia and running more than 100 locations nationwide, signed a lease last fall at 650 Troy-Schenectady Road for a plaza that used to hold a Dunkin', a Verizon store, and a dental office. At the time, two of the three storefronts had been claimed. Hangry Joe's took one end cap. The other went to Qahwah House, which was set to become the area's first Yemeni coffee shop.

That plaza is owned by RCM Properties LLC, based in Knoxville, Tennessee, which bought the property in 2024 for $1.2 million. Plans called for a refreshed facade, though as of last fall's reporting, construction hadn't started and neither tenant had an announced opening date. Whether either space has opened since then isn't something the record available here confirms, which is its own small lesson: a signed lease is a headline, an actual opening date is a different kind of fact.

Qahwah House is the closest thing this corridor has to a genuinely new addition this year rather than a familiar name adding a location. Whether it's actually serving coffee yet is worth checking before you drive over.

Why a strip plaza moves differently than a downtown

The ALDI project a few hundred yards up the road tells you something about how long these things actually take, even when the corridor looks busy from the outside. The 829 Loudon Road site was first proposed back in 2024. It sat as a fire-damaged former Travelodge for years before that, the hotel having been heavily damaged in a 2016 fire. The Town of Colonie Planning Board didn't approve the site plan until April 8, 2025, and the store itself won't open until October 8 of this year, a sneak-peek event scheduled for the day before. From proposal to grand opening, the project ran roughly two years.

Compare that to Kuma Ani or Emack & Bolio's, both of which moved from decision to open doors inside a single season, because they were leasing existing retail space in an already-built plaza rather than constructing anything new. The corridor's real estate isn't one continuous project. It's a series of separate landlords, separate timelines, and separate deals, some of which take months and some of which take years, all happening to land in public view around the same time.

That's the mechanism behind the "boom" feeling. It's not that Latham's commercial activity accelerated all at once. It's that several independent, slow-moving processes that started at different points, some in 2024, some earlier this year, happened to cross their finish lines within a few months of each other.

What's actually open right now

If you're trying to plan an actual outing rather than track the pattern, here's where things stand as of late September:

Open now: The Skinny Pancake at Galleria 7 Market, Chick-fil-A Latham Farms on Troy Schenectady Road, Emack & Bolio's in Fresh Market Plaza, and Kuma Ani on Watervliet Shaker Road.

Opening in the next two weeks: ALDI on Loudon Road, with a sneak-peek shopping event October 7 and a public opening October 8, including a Golden Ticket promotion for the first 200 customers.

Leased as of last fall, opening status unconfirmed since: Hangry Joe's Hot Chicken and Qahwah House, both at 650 Troy-Schenectady Road. Call ahead before making a special trip for either one.

The corridor will keep filling in through the fall. What's worth remembering is that almost everything filling it is a business proving out a model it already built somewhere else nearby, with one Yemeni coffee shop as the actual new idea in the mix.

If you're the kind of person who tracks which plaza is turning over and why, that's the same habit Jamie M Mazuryk brings to reading this corridor block by block. Reach out if you want the next update on what's leasing along Troy-Schenectady Road before it shows up anywhere else.