What's New In Old Mandeville: A Resident's Guide To The Lakefront's Second Wind

Five years ago, a Wednesday evening on Lakeshore Drive meant Rips, Donz, or a quiet drive home. The stretch between Foy Street and Carroll Street held a handful of longtime rooms and not much reason to linger between them. That has changed, quietly and quickly, and if you have been ordering takeout out of habit you have missed most of it.

Old Mandeville is not adding restaurants. It is becoming walkable.

The thesis, stated plainly

The recent openings are not scattered across the parish. They have clustered inside a roughly ten-block radius bordered by the lakefront to the south, the Tammany Trace Trailhead to the north, and Girod Street through the middle. If you live inside that box, you now have more food, coffee, and evening programming within a fifteen-minute walk than most Northshore downtowns offer on their entire main street. That density is the story. Everything below is evidence.

The lakefront block

Start with Lakeshore Drive itself. Cayman Sinclair, who owned an empty building along the lakefront, opened Aperitif Spritz + Bites there earlier this year alongside his catering operation. Aperitif sits next door to Donz on the Lake and a couple doors down from Rips on the Lake, with the Barley Oak and Pat's Rest Awhile a block or so over and Nuvolari's up the block. Read that list of neighbors and the point becomes obvious. What used to be a cluster of three or four rooms is now a small restaurant row, and Aperitif's spritz-and-tapas format was chosen precisely because the block was missing it.

Sinclair's own read of the moment is worth quoting.

"Mandeville needs this," Sinclair said, noting that other areas of the parish, notably downtown Covington, have added new, higher-end restaurants that draw customers from St. Tammany and beyond.

That is a Mandeville restaurateur admitting Covington got there first, and treating his opening as a correction. Residents who used to cross the causeway or drive to Columbia Street for a small-plates evening no longer need to.

The Trailhead block

Walk four blocks north and you are at the Mandeville Trailhead, the old rail depot at 675 Lafitte Street that anchors this side of the neighborhood. Two new rooms opened there in the last several months. Iceburg Charlie's Grill & Chill, a burger-beer-ice cream restaurant, and Noir Bistrot, a tapas restaurant, recently opened several blocks from the lake at the Mandeville Trailhead on the Tammany Trace. Cafetomas, on nearby Girod Street, is coming up on a year in business.

Two tapas rooms inside four blocks of each other is not redundancy. It is the market telling you that Old Mandeville residents will now sit down for a two-hour dinner on a weeknight, which was not a safe bet a decade ago.

The Trailhead itself is doing more work than it used to. Operated by the City of Mandeville, it hosts over 80 local artisans, producers, and growers offering seasonal produce, eggs, honey, fresh cut flowers, plants, prepared foods, and arts and crafts, and functions as a weekly gathering place for the community year-round. Free Friday evening concerts run throughout the year, and the Trailhead Community Market runs Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. If you have not been on a Friday night this year, the amphitheater programming has grown into the closest thing Mandeville has to a standing weekly ritual.

The edges: Girod, Highway 22, and the sweet stuff

A few of the notable additions sit just outside the walking core, but they belong on the same map.

• Jack's Bistro. A cozy cafe inspired by European travels, worth the visit for sandwiches, soups, and salads, and one of the reasons the Mandeville lunch conversation has changed this year.
• Banh Mi Boys. The Vietnamese po'boy shop opened its Mandeville location on April 12, 2026, at 4350 Highway 22, Unit H, joining existing locations in New Orleans and Metairie. The fact that a South Shore concept chose Mandeville for its third location is itself a data point about where the food scene is heading.
• Mandeville Creamery. A homemade ice cream shop housed in a bright purple building, family-owned, with creative flavors made fresh in-house.
• Cafetomas on Girod, mentioned above, has become the daytime anchor between the lakefront and the Trailhead.

Stitch those together with the older rooms already on the map and the ten-block radius holds tapas at two different price points, Italian, Cajun-Creole at Nuvolari's, Vietnamese, cafe fare, ice cream, and multiple bars with lake views. That is not a neighborhood you drive out of for dinner.

A Saturday, in order

The clearest way to see how the neighborhood has changed is to walk through a Saturday.

9:00 a.m. Trailhead Community Market. Coffee, produce, flowers, and whatever the honey vendor is pouring that week. The Trailhead sits adjacent to the Tammany Trace, 4.38 miles south of the Trace Headquarters.

10:30 a.m. On the Trace itself. The 31-mile Tammany Trace was originally a corridor for the Illinois Central Railroad, purchased by the St. Tammany Parish Government in 1992 and remodeled into a walking, running, biking, skating, and equestrian trail. From the Trailhead you can push north toward Abita or hold to the Mandeville loop.

12:30 p.m. Lunch at Jack's, a banh mi from the Highway 22 location, or a burger and a beer at Iceburg Charlie's without leaving the Trailhead block.

Late afternoon. Aperitif or Noir if the plan is small plates and a drink. Nuvolari's, Rips, or Donz if the plan is longer.

Evening. Amphitheater concert if it is a Friday, or the lakefront itself. The stretch from Foy to Carroll is where the city keeps staging its bigger nights, which brings us to the calendar.

What's on the lakefront calendar

A few dated events worth knowing about, from the city and from the Old Mandeville Business Association.

The Light Up the Lake evening begins at 4 p.m. with the Mande Milkshakers Parade on Lakeshore Drive from Foy Street to Carroll Street, followed at 6 p.m. by Liberty on the Lake, a Louisiana 250 commemoration, with live music by Groovy 7, food trucks, and the Kids Tent. The fall lakefront music festival, in its second year, stretches along the Mandeville Lakefront west from Lakeshore Drive and Lafitte Street, offering original local music in the setting of Lake Pontchartrain. The Old Mandeville Poker Run sends participants through seven local Northshore businesses to draw a card at each stop for a chance at a $2,000 prize, with $40 registration including a t-shirt, food, drinks, and good company across a day in Old Mandeville.

Put the calendar next to the restaurant map and the density argument gets stronger. The city has been programming the lakefront harder every year, and the private business association has started adding its own events on top. The infrastructure that supports a walkable neighborhood, meaning reasons to be outside your house on a Tuesday or a Sunday, is being built in front of us.

What this means if you already live here

Two practical takeaways.

First, the ten-block core between the lakefront and the Trailhead has become the most active piece of St. Tammany real estate in terms of walkable amenities per acre. Homes inside that core now come with something they did not have five years ago, which is a genuine daily-life reason to leave the car in the driveway.

Second, the neighborhood's identity is finally catching up to its geography. Old Mandeville has always had the lake, the oaks, and the Trace. What it lacked was a critical mass of small rooms open past 9 p.m. That gap has closed, and it closed fast enough that if you have not walked the block in six months you have a genuinely new neighborhood to explore.

If you are curious how this shift is showing up in what your home is worth, or if you are thinking through a move within the Mandeville area, the team at Jennifer Rice would be glad to walk the block with you. Request a complimentary home valuation and we will follow up with a considered read on your street, not a generic one.