For as long as most Westridge residents can remember, Century Drive was the road you drove through, not the road you stopped on. You'd fill up at the pumps, grab a coffee if you were running early, and point the car toward Mt. Bachelor. Coming back down in the evening, the corridor mostly went dark. If you wanted a real dinner out, you crossed town to downtown or the Old Mill.
That pattern broke this year. Since May, two new destinations have opened along the same short stretch of SW Century Drive, with a third confirmed to follow before summer's out, and the change isn't cosmetic. For the first time, this corridor supports the kind of evening you used to have to drive somewhere else for.
The lot behind the ski shop finally has a reason to stay open past dinner
Todd and Shanda McGee have run Powder House Ski & Patio at 311 SW Century Drive for almost 25 years, and until this summer, the back lot behind their shop was exactly what you'd expect behind a ski shop: storage, overflow parking, unused space. In mid-July, that lot reopened as Base Camp, a roughly 7,000-square-foot taphouse and food truck pavilion with 40-foot ceilings, a rooftop garden built on repurposed shipping containers, and a 50-foot bar pouring 36 taps of beer, cider, wine and spirits.
The opening weekend drew more than 500 customers, according to reporting from the Bulletin, which is a meaningful number for a lot that used to see nobody after the ski shop closed for the night. The food cart lineup includes Thaipas, Luckey's Woodsman, El Taquero, and P53 Fresh, a plant-based cart run by Bend residents Lisa and Dan Brown. Dan Brown put it simply during the soft opening: "This is probably the biggest, coolest food cart pod around."
Base Camp is open 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Friday, with happy hour from 2 to 5 p.m. That's a stretch of hours a ski shop parking lot never had reason to keep before, and it means the corridor now has somewhere to land after 5 o'clock traffic clears, not just somewhere to pass through on the way up.
A building that couldn't hold a restaurant now can't keep customers away
A few doors down at 335 SW Century Drive, a different kind of turnaround happened. That address had developed a reputation as a revolving door, cycling through restaurants including Crave Bend before it closed. In early May, father-and-son team Reyes and Alex Nava opened Casa Sur in the same space, and by June the Bulletin was describing a restaurant "bustling on a weekday afternoon" with a wraparound patio full of regulars.
Reyes Nava spent more than two decades in restaurant kitchens, including 15 years as an executive chef, before building a menu rooted in the food of his home state of Guerrero. Alex, who spent 11 years working in hospital labs in Bend and Portland before joining his father, described the decision this way: "For years we talked about creating something that truly reflects our family, our roots, and our style of cooking."
The menu backs that up with specifics rather than a generic taco-and-margarita lineup. The Molcajete del Sur, served for two in a traditional volcanic stone bowl, arrives piled with steak, chicken, chorizo and bacon-wrapped shrimp simmered in a tomato broth. The Ceviche Tropical pairs mahi or shrimp with mango and jicama, and the enchiladas de mole use a from-scratch mole that takes real kitchen time to build correctly. None of that reads like a placeholder tenant waiting for the next lease to expire.
Casa Sur is open Tuesday through Sunday, with hours extending to 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. That's meaningfully later than a stop built around daytime mountain traffic would ever need to be.
The quieter signal: a bagel shop is betting on your Tuesday morning
Base Camp and Casa Sur both target evenings, which is the more visible half of this shift. The detail that says more about daily life on this corridor is Haven Bagels, which confirmed a second location at 515 Century Drive set to open in late summer 2026. Haven's first storefront opened in Bend's Reed South development in August 2024, and it built a following on bagels made with clean, organic ingredients alongside espresso drinks.
A bagel shop doesn't succeed on weekend destination traffic. It succeeds when people already move through a place on ordinary weekday mornings, on their way to work or after a dog walk, and are willing to make a stop part of the routine rather than a special trip. Choosing Century Drive for a second location is a bet that the corridor now has that kind of steady daily traffic, not just an evening crowd drawn in by a new opening.
Put the three together and the pattern is clearer than any one opening on its own:
| Address | What used to be there | What's there now |
|---|---|---|
| 311 SW Century Dr | Powder House back lot, unused after hours | Base Camp taphouse and food cart pavilion |
| 335 SW Century Dr | A cycle of short-lived restaurants, including Crave Bend | Casa Sur |
| 515 Century Dr | No dedicated storefront | Haven Bagels, second location, opening late summer 2026 |
What this actually changes if you live off Century Drive
If you're in Westridge, none of this requires a special trip. Base Camp and Casa Sur sit within a few blocks of each other on the same road you already use to get to Mt. Bachelor, and Haven Bagels will be a short stop on the way into town rather than a detour. The practical change is that the evening you used to plan around driving across town for dinner can now start and end on your own street.
A few things worth knowing before you go:
- Base Camp (311 SW Century Dr) is open 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Friday, happy hour 2 to 5 p.m.
- Casa Sur (335 SW Century Dr) is open Tuesday through Sunday, with weekend hours running to 10 p.m., and reservations are limited to parties of 10 or more.
- Haven Bagels' second Century Drive location is expected late summer 2026, between the OSU-Cascades campus and Terava Apartments.
None of this changes what makes Westridge itself work, the quiet streets, the mature trees, the easy trail access. What's changed is the road that connects it to everything else. Century Drive used to be infrastructure. Now it's a destination in its own right, and that's a genuinely different way to live a few blocks off it.
If you're curious what else has shifted in the neighborhoods around Bend this year, or you're weighing a move within Central Oregon and want a read on how a specific street or corridor actually functions day to day, that's the kind of on-the-ground detail David Holland tracks closely. Schedule a Consultation anytime to talk through what a neighborhood is really like to live in, not just what the listing photos show.
