For years the Mt. Lebanon summer map had a single center: Washington Road, from the July 4 fireworks at Mt. Lebanon Park down through First Fridays at Clearview Common. That map is quietly redrawing itself. The programming Uptown is still there, but the reason to leave your block in August 2026 has migrated a few streets over, to Beverly Road and Broadmoor Avenue, where two new openings are pulling weekend routines away from the main drag. If you already live here, the interesting question is no longer what to do on Washington Road. It's how often you now find yourself walking the other direction.
Beverly Road is the story
The former Bado's Pizza Grille space at 307 Beverly Road reopened this year as F&F Pizzeria, the Brooklyn concept from Frank Falcinelli and Frank Castronovo — "The Franks" — chosen as the first location outside their original New York hotspot, with additional sites planned for the Strip District and Shadyside. That last detail is the one worth sitting with. A Brooklyn restaurant with two decades of Carroll Gardens history picked a South Hills business district over the Strip and Shadyside for its debut. The Strip came second.
The kitchen is doing what it does in Brooklyn. F&F's naturally fermented sourdough crust takes 72 hours to prepare, and the same process is used in Mt. Lebanon — flour, water, salt, no artificial ingredients — with the popular clam pizza and dishes tailored to local tastes on the menu. Expect pasta, arancini and rotating seasonal specialties, ingredients like organic tomatoes, Sicilian olive oil from the "Frankie's 457 Specialty Foods" line and Grande Mozzarella from Wisconsin, all in an open-concept downstairs with a 40-seat dining area, full bar, slice shop and exposed pizza kitchen. For residents used to driving downtown for a serious pizza night, that's a fundamental change in what a walkable Tuesday looks like.
Owner Anthony Simasek has been clear about the intent. "We want to be that neighborhood spot where people gather for all occasions, whether it's a date night, family dinner, catching a Pens game at the bar or a special celebration," he told Mt Lebanon Magazine. That's the same social role Bado's occupied for decades, translated forward. The building didn't lose a neighborhood restaurant. It gained one with a longer waitlist.
Broadmoor's small anchor
The other opening is easy to miss because it sits outside the Uptown foot traffic entirely. The Baked Bean debuted on Valentine's Day at 380 Broadmoor Avenue, bringing hand-crafted coffee beverages and artisan baked goods to the South Hills. A neighborhood coffee-and-pastry spot on Broadmoor is not the kind of announcement that makes a Pittsburgh Magazine cover, but it changes the geography of a Saturday morning in ways the fireworks calendar doesn't. Residents who used to drive to Dormont or the city for a pastry now have a reason to stay on their side of Cochran.
Read together, these two openings are doing something the municipal event calendar can't: they're extending the neighborhood's active hours into ordinary weekdays. The Uptown Partnership can program a Friday. A bakery and a pizzeria program a Tuesday morning and a Wednesday night.
What's still on Washington Road
None of this means Uptown has gone quiet. It means the programming there now competes for the same August evenings that Beverly Road is starting to claim.
The remaining anchor is at Mt. Lebanon Park, 900 Cedar Boulevard. The free Music in the Park summer concert series runs with a blanket-or-chair setup beneath the trees, closing out on August 2 with The Timothy Earl Band playing modern country hits and country rock from 7 to 8:30 p.m. That's the last outdoor concert in the park this summer. If you were planning to catch one, this is the one.
The steadier weekly draw runs on Saturdays. The Uptown Farmers Market, a project of the Mt. Lebanon Partnership, occupies the South Lot across from Washington Elementary on Saturday mornings through the fall. It's the same market that has run for years, and the reason to mention it in an August post is calendar arithmetic: there are only about ten Saturdays left in the outdoor season, and the peak-produce ones are happening right now.
Thursdays belong to the library. The Concerts in the Courtyard series returns to Mt. Lebanon Public Library at 7 p.m. on Thursdays in August, no reservations or tickets required. If you've never been in the library's rear garden, the courtyard is the point of the series as much as the music is. It's a piece of Uptown most residents drive past without knowing it exists.
The date to hold
The Partnership's calendar has one late-summer anchor that deserves a save-the-date treatment rather than a same-week decision. The Mt. Lebanon Artists' Market returns for its annual two-day juried fine arts festival on September 26–27, 2026, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., transforming Uptown into a regional arts destination. The juried festival showcases original artwork in a professional outdoor setting. It's the event most likely to bring out-of-town family into your kitchen for the weekend, which is worth planning around now rather than in the second week of September.
A resident's August template
If you live here and want the shortest possible answer to what to do, the honest version looks something like this:
- Saturday morning: Uptown Farmers Market in the South Lot, then coffee and a pastry at The Baked Bean on Broadmoor on the walk back.
- Sunday, August 2: The Timothy Earl Band at Mt. Lebanon Park, 7 p.m.
- Thursday evenings in August: Library courtyard concerts, 7 p.m., no ticket needed.
- Any weekday you'd normally drive somewhere for dinner: F&F Pizzeria on Beverly Road.
- Late September: Block off September 26–27 for the Artists' Market before out-of-town relatives ask.
That's a full month of things to walk to, none of which existed in this exact configuration a year ago.
Why the small openings matter more than they look
There's a temptation, in a neighborhood with a calendar as strong as Mt. Lebanon's, to treat the big scheduled events as the story and the new businesses as background. In August 2026 the ratio has flipped. The Music in the Park concerts are almost identical to last year's. The Farmers Market is running the same route it always has. What's different is that a Brooklyn pizzeria chose 307 Beverly Road for its first location outside New York, with the Strip and Shadyside second, and that a coffee-and-bakery concept picked 380 Broadmoor Avenue as its introduction to the South Hills. Those two decisions are third-party votes on where Mt. Lebanon's foot traffic is going next. The residents living within a five-minute walk of either address already know. Everyone else finds out when they finally try to get a table on a Friday and realize they should have called on Wednesday.
For anyone in Mt. Lebanon thinking about a move within the neighborhood, this is the sort of shift that shows up in a listing description a year late. The Beverly Road corridor and the Broadmoor block are quietly repricing themselves in the minds of buyers who care about walkability. It's not visible in a median sale price yet. It's visible in where the lights are on at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday.
If you're weighing a move within the South Hills, or wondering whether the block you've had your eye on is actually as walkable as it looks on a map, Jen Schalk knows this ground street by street and is happy to walk it with you. Let's connect.
