"It was the area, definitely," Veronica Hussey told Richmond BizSense in July, when asked why she and her husband Tommy bought Palani Drive. The Husseys had sold Lola's Farmhouse Bistro in Goochland in early 2025. They had planned to stay retired. Instead they spent six to nine months looking for the right spot and came back to work for a lease at 401 Libbie Avenue.
A block away, the reverse happened. Westhampton Pastry Shop is still run by the same people and still bakes the same cakes. It left the Avenues anyway, and the building it filled for decades is now for sale.
Both stories end in the same place. At Libbie and Patterson, the address has outlasted the businesses on it. One long-running tenant changed hands so the space could stay a restaurant. The other moved out so its land could become something bigger. If you live nearby, that explains both the new sign you've noticed on Libbie and the empty storefront on Patterson.
The lease that two retirees came back for
Jeff Weatherly opened Palani Drive in 1998 and built a following on smoothies, salads and wraps. In spring 2026 he put the restaurant up for sale so he could retire. By late June the Husseys had closed on its lease, equipment and business assets. They did not buy the building. They bought the right to keep cooking in roughly 1,800 square feet on Libbie.
The new restaurant is Lily's Italian Bistro, named for the couple's granddaughter. In July they were aiming to open in late August. When Axios Richmond covered it on Sept. 21, it had been open a few weeks, after a remodel of about 80% of the space.
If you haven't been in yet, here's the short version:
- Hours: lunch and dinner Tuesday through Saturday, brunch on Sunday, closed Monday.
- Dinner: Italian-American standards like Bolognese, lobster ravioli and chicken marsala, $24 to $29.
- Lunch: a fried green tomato sandwich, quiche Lorraine and an Italian meatball panini, $16 to $18.
- Happy hour: 2 to 5 p.m. at the bar, with half-price appetizers, $5 mixed drinks and $3 drafts.
- Dogs: welcome on the porch.
The schedule tells you who the restaurant is for. A place that does weekday lunch, a 2 p.m. happy hour and Sunday brunch is counting on people who are nearby on a Tuesday afternoon. Destination diners alone wouldn't fill those hours. The Husseys picked a spot where that kind of steady traffic already exists. Veronica Hussey said Tommy's cooking goes "more than just chicken parm and lasagna," and she described the menu as "innovative Italian."
Palani Drive was a smoothie-and-wrap counter, and Lily's is a full-service Italian bistro. The concept changed completely, but the address stayed busy. Under Weatherly, the move from one operator to the next took a matter of weeks.
The bakery that kept its owners and lost its address
Westhampton Pastry Shop has been baking since 1952. For decades it sat at 5728 Patterson Avenue. Its owners didn't sell. The building's owners had approved plans to replace it, so the bakery had to move.
Co-owner Mark Oley took the shop to 8903 Three Chopt Road in the Regency area. Richmond Magazine reported a planned reopening for June 26. The bakery's website now says "Now Open" at the new address. If your birthday-cake route still points you to Patterson, here's what changed:
- The new address is 8903 Three Chopt Rd., Suite E, in Henrico, near Westbury Apothecary.
- Hours are Tuesday through Friday 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The shop asks customers to check holiday hours ahead of time.
- There are still no online orders. Call 804-282-4413 or stop by.
That third point matters most as the holidays get closer. A bakery that takes orders only by phone or at the counter rewards people who plan ahead. The counter is now a short drive from the Avenues.
The bakery wasn't the first tenant to leave the building. Gild and Ash, the home decor and gift shop that had shared it for years, closed its Patterson storefront on Aug. 15, 2025, and reopened that September at 5021 Huguenot Road in River Road II. On Sept. 10, 2026, the shop marked one year at its new location. Both longtime tenants of 5728 Patterson found new homes, and both are about the same distance from Libbie in different directions.
What the empty building is actually worth
The week of Sept. 24, the former bakery building went up for sale through Thalhimer's Reilly Marchant, with no asking price listed. According to BizSense, the city's most recent assessment puts the property at $2.4 million, and $1.7 million of that is the land.
That ratio sums up the year on this corner. About 71 cents of every assessed dollar is for the 0.3-acre lot. The 1949 building, roughly 8,300 square feet, makes up the rest. Scott Frayser, whose family partnership owns the parcel along with relatives in the Frayser and Robins families, said the building needed so much work that it made more financial sense to start over.
Starting over has already been approved. In spring 2025, Richmond BizSense reported that the families got a special-use permit for a four-story office and retail building. The plan calls for about 29,000 square feet of office space over ground-floor commercial space, an outdoor dining area and 24 covered parking spaces. That permit is part of what a buyer gets. Under the city's Code Refresh zoning rewrite, the lot is marked MX-3, which would allow up to three stories. The approved permit allows four.
So nothing is under construction yet. The families went through the permit process meaning to build the project themselves, then decided they weren't the right group to lead it. Frayser explained it this way:
"We're very conscious of (the fact that) that corner is important, and that whole area is important. It needs to be done right for the neighbors around it."
He said the families hope to find a developer or a business that would build the new building and move in. They haven't ruled out building it themselves if the right deal doesn't come along. No construction start date has been reported. For now, the most accurate description of the old bakery is a vacant 1949 building with a four-story approval and an open question about who will use it.
The rest of the Avenues kept filling in
The same thing happened elsewhere on the Avenues this year. In May, jewelry maker Elsie Frieda opened its first storefront with regular hours at 5804 Grove Avenue. Founder Chrissy Harrison moved into the former Paper Plus space. When a longtime tenant left, a local business took the space. That's the same pattern as Palani Drive and Lily's, just with jewelry instead of pasta.
The district's calendar has stayed put through all of it. Party on the Avenues, the Westhampton Business Association's free festival on Libbie between Patterson and Guthrie, is happening today, Oct. 4, from noon to 6 p.m. Lily's is in its first fall in the middle of it. Next on the association's schedule is the holiday kickoff on Saturday, Dec. 12:
- Santa Breakfast: 8 to 10 a.m. at Westwood Fountain Diner, 5823 Patterson Ave. The special is pancakes, bacon and two eggs for $7.99, and Santa will be there for photos.
- Holiday trolley: free, looping through the Avenues all day after breakfast, with stops for shopping.
The association's event pages don't show when they were last updated, so check westhamptonrva.com closer to the date. Westwood Fountain Diner is on Patterson, a short walk from both the old bakery site and Lily's. The holiday route passes the corner that changed the most this year. Some storefronts there have new names, and one is empty, but the trolley route hasn't changed.
If you own a home near the Avenues and want to know how this year's activity at Libbie and Patterson affects your street, Simpson Realty Group can help. We'll go over the recent sales near you and what they mean for your house. Request your free home valuation, and we'll walk you through it over coffee, maybe somewhere on Libbie.
