What's New in Downtown Jenks After Dark
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
Walk from Laurannae at 212 E. Main to Slim Chickens at 418 W. Main and you've covered the walkable core of downtown Jenks in about ten minutes on foot. That geometry has always been there. What's new is what happened at both ends of it this year.
Former Jenks Mayor Vic Vreeland described the old rhythm of Main Street to KRMG this way:
"It's kind of like two separate cities. During the day, you see people walking around, going into different stores. In the evenings, it changes, you've got the restaurants and live music."
What he didn't have to spell out is the gap in between. For years, Main Street handed off cleanly from its daytime shopping crowd to its evening crowd, and the block itself went quiet in the hour that belonged to neither. That's the gap four small businesses filled in this year, one on each end of the walk and two in the middle.
Slim Chickens opened at 418 West Main Street on January 30, 2026. It's the sixteenth location for Oklahoma franchisee AP Restaurant Group and the brand's tenth in the state. On paper that's a routine franchise expansion. On the ground, it means the west end of Main now has a fast-casual dinner option that simply didn't exist there seven months ago. If you're finishing an evening walk near the west end and don't want to drive somewhere else for food, there's now a reason to stop that wasn't on that corner at the start of the year.
That matters more than a single opening usually would, because the west end had spent years as the quieter half of downtown. A national franchisee choosing that address over a suburban pad site elsewhere in the metro doesn't happen without traffic data behind it.
Stand at the corner of Main and 1st and you'll see something that shouldn't work on paper. Jenks Coffee Co. opened at 103 E. Main in October 2025. Pure Kitchen and Market opened directly across the street at 102 E. Main the same month. Two coffee-forward concepts, one intersection, both still busy. In a smaller downtown that kind of overlap usually cannibalizes one of the two.
Co-owner Justin Wenzel described the effect to KRMG not long after opening: "By everyone coming here, all the businesses are like, 'Hey, we see your coffee cups in our store, you're driving business for us.'" His business partner, Britny Pittman, put it more plainly to the same station: "We haven't seen Main Street like this in a long time, which is awesome." Pittman also co-owns Dwell in Jenks, a boutique a few doors down, which tells you something about how many storefronts on this block are held by people betting on more than one concept at a time.
Pure Kitchen's arrival carries its own weight. Owner Cynthia Beavers had run Pure Food and Juice in Brookside for years before customers kept telling her the same thing. As she told TulsaPeople, "I would hear people come in all the time and say 'I love your food, it's amazing. If you were in south Tulsa I would eat here every day.'" So she looked south and found the space in Jenks, a 100-year-old former antique store that took almost a year to build out. The original Brookside location closed in January 2026, not because the concept failed, but because Beavers had already moved her attention to the new address.
The building at 212 E. Main used to be a KFC. It closed in 2024 and sat empty until owner Kimberly Cronkhite overhauled it to feel like her existing Broken Arrow bakery. It reopened as Laurannae, an espresso bar and bakery, in mid-July 2026. Same seasonal drink menu, same pastry case, same relaxed room done in earthy tones as the original.
What's different in Jenks is the outdoor space. The patio seats 60 under cover, with a large adjoining lawn built for gatherings. Cronkhite told the Tulsa Flyer she leaned into the design work herself: "I love the design part of it, and so that's where my talents come alive. I really enjoyed designing this space and putting pieces together and making it feel like Laurannae BA, but different." Live music on weekends, movie nights, trivia, and pop-up markets are already part of the calendar, with line dancing, yoga, and cake classes likely to follow.
Put Laurannae at the east end next to City Hall Steak & Cocktail, which opened in September 2024 inside the former Jenks City Hall building as part of a 30,000-square-foot redevelopment, the largest in downtown Jenks history, and the east end now holds its own after dark the way the west end just started to. Executive Chef Ben Alexander told TulsaPeople the goal was never to overdress the concept: "We wanted a community restaurant with less pressure and more of a hometown feel." The menu still has its showpiece, a 44-ounce tomahawk steak priced at $210, but the everyday draw is a burger and a seat at the bar. Maggie's Music Box, a few doors down, has been the block's live-music anchor through all of it.
Foot traffic like this doesn't stay invisible for long, and downtown Jenks has spent 2026 arguing about where to park because of it. Bryan Wilks, who co-founded the citizen-led Ten District effort that's driven much of this revitalization, told KRMG that parking was one of the first problems his group tackled: "We got the city to tear down a building and now have about 75 spots back here."
That fix wasn't the last word. The Jenks Planning Commission approved a downtown master plan this spring that now heads to city council. Arwen Roark, who owns Roark Acres on Main Street, told KJRH she worries the plan's redesign could push away her elderly and less mobile customers. Downtown insurance agent Brian Smith said he supports the plan's look but shares the same underlying worry about where people will leave their cars. City Planning Director Marcae Hilton has said the plan calls for adding 92 parking spaces to address exactly that feedback.
Before any of that goes to a vote, the city tested it. From March 13 to March 22, 2026, the city blocked parking spaces between 1st and 2nd streets on Main with small trees and landscaping so businesses could try outdoor dining and shopping without them, and so residents could weigh in on what a lower-parking Main Street would actually feel like to use. The city collected more than 700 survey responses on the pilot, and the reaction split about how you'd expect. Pittman, weighing in again in her role at Dwell in Jenks, told KJRH the feedback in her store was positive: "You're never going to please anybody 100 percent. Change is hard, but I think we need to see some change down here for sure."
None of that argument would be happening if the block weren't busy enough to make parking a live issue. The debate is its own kind of evidence for what the new openings already show.
Two dates bracket the back half of this summer, one already behind you and one still ahead:
Either one gives you a reason to park once near the Downtown Commons and walk the block instead of driving from stop to stop. A year ago that walk had a dead stretch in the middle of the evening. Now it doesn't, and the businesses filling in the gap are still new enough that most of downtown is just getting used to having somewhere to be after five o'clock.
If you've lived in Jenks a while, none of this needed a map. You already know which storefront used to be a KFC and which corner has two coffee shops that somehow both stay full. What's worth noticing is that the block finally works as one continuous evening instead of two separate errands, and that took four small businesses landing in the right two spots inside the same year to happen.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a specific address in Jenks, whether that's a home you already own or one you're thinking about, I'm Tasha Bates, and I'd love to connect.
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