If you drive past 701 N. McCroskey St. often enough, you start keeping score. For most of the winter and spring, the building sat there with brick walls and an arched roofline that already looked like a restaurant, because it had been one twice before. First it was Bud & Walt's, a pizza and pasta spot that closed back in October 2018. Then it became Bair's Sports Bar & Grill. By late 2025, banners announced the next tenant: PaPPo's Pizzeria & Pub, the Springfield-born chain finally bringing its 12th location, and its first in Christian County, to Nixa.
The sign said "opening soon" for a long time. What finally got that door open, and why it took roughly five months longer than anyone announced, says something real about how two very different restaurant models work in this town.
What Was Actually Under the Floor
PaPPo's owner Chris Galloway told Springfield Business Journal in September 2025 that he hoped to have the Nixa store open by Thanksgiving, with a public target of December 2025 or January 2026. By April 2026, that had slipped again, this time to early May. The restaurant finally opened its doors on May 14, 2026.
The delay wasn't about permits or staffing. According to reporting from the Springfield Daily Citizen, once crews got into the McCroskey Street building, they found plumbing problems beneath the substrate that hadn't shown up in any walkthrough. That's the part worth sitting with. A building that had already hosted two restaurants, with brick walls and an arched facade that manager Josh Carlew said looked like it was built for PaPPo's logo, still had infrastructure nobody could see until they started tearing into it. The shell said ready. The plumbing said otherwise.
PaPPo's is open now, staffed with 40 to 50 employees and led by Carlew, who came over from the chain's Battlefield Road location in Springfield. If you've been waiting on that corner, the wait is over. But the reason it took so long isn't a Nixa story so much as a single-tenant story: one kitchen, one build-out, one set of pipes that had to be right before anyone could eat there.
Eleven Kitchens Under One Roof
Across town, 14 Mill Market runs on a completely different clock.
The food hall at 203 E. Mt. Vernon St. opened in 2023, built inside a restored feed mill that traces back to the Wisner family operation on that same ground. Owners Rich and Leah Callahan salvaged old feed mixers, scales, and oak from the original mill and worked them into the building's tables and decor. It was never meant to be one restaurant. It was meant to be ten, sharing a roof, a bar, and a backyard.
Here's the detail that matters if you've eaten there more than once. The vendor lineup isn't the same as it was on opening day. Three of the original ten stalls, Lindsay's Kitchen and Bistro, Fresh Poke, and Abby's Acai Company, are gone from the current roster. In their place, The Gochu, Liege Love Waffle Co., Not'cho Ordinary Taco, Mo Slider Company, London Calling, Sno Biz, Classics Pizza Co., and two newer additions, KeiKeu and Uptown Hog, now fill the same floor. The Wisner Bar, with its 16 taps, has stayed put the whole time.
None of that turnover closed the building for a single day. While McCroskey Street sat dark waiting on one restaurant's plumbing, Mill Market simply swapped a few doors and kept its posted hours the entire time. That's the actual difference between the two models sitting a short drive apart in the same town. A single-tenant build-out lives or dies on things you can't see until you open the walls. A multi-vendor hall absorbs a bad fit or a closed concept the way a highway absorbs one slow lane, without the whole road shutting down.
Leah Callahan put the idea behind the place simply when it opened: "I hope this is a place where people can feel rest after busyness." Three years and a handful of vendor changes later, that's still functionally what the building does, even as the names on the doors keep shifting.
What's Actually Open This Fall
With the PaPPo's wait behind us, the next few weeks give Nixa residents an actual reason to be outside before the weather turns. The city's events calendar has a run of dated, free options at McCauley Park and the Aquatics Center worth putting on the fridge:
- August 29 — Movies in the Park screens Superman at dusk, free, with concessions available.
- September 7 — Doggie Dive-In at the Aquatics Center, 3:30 to 5:00 p.m., closing out pool season by letting dogs into the water on Labor Day.
- September 18 — Mother Son Extravaganza at Nixa Parks and Rec, registration closes September 15.
- September 26 — the season's final Movies in the Park, Harold and the Purple Crayon, also at McCauley Park.
- October 23 — Halloween Spooktacular, 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., McCauley Park, free.
One small planning note if you're a farmers market regular. The Nixa Area Farmers Market at Highway 14 and Main runs May through September, which means it will already be closed by the time Halloween Spooktacular rolls around in late October. If you've got a Saturday morning routine built around that market, this is the stretch to use it before it wraps for the year.
Two Ways a Restaurant Comes Back
None of this is really about pizza or waffles. It's about two different kinds of risk sitting in the same small town. A building that looks ready can hide problems that add months to a timeline nobody controls. A hall built for many small kitchens can lose a third of its original vendors and never miss a Tuesday lunch rush. If you've wondered why some Nixa storefronts sit empty for what feels like forever while others seem to constantly reinvent themselves without ever closing, that's the mechanism. It's not luck. It's the difference between one lease and eleven.
For now, McCroskey Street finally has its restaurant back, and Mill Market has two new stalls worth trying if it's been a while since you've been through the line. Either way, there's more reason than usual to be out this fall before Nixa's calendar quiets down for winter.
We're 417 Property Pros, and we spend as much time paying attention to what's opening and closing around Nixa as we do to what's for sale here. If you ever want to talk about what's actually happening in this market, on either side of that conversation, reach out anytime. Work With Us.
