If you have driven Route 28 through O'Hara Township on a weekday afternoon, you have probably passed the building at 900 Gamma Drive without giving it a second look. It sits across from RIDC Park, the office and industrial complex that has anchored this stretch of the township for decades, and for most of this year it kept a schedule that matched the park around it. Doors open at 7 a.m. Doors closed at 3 p.m. Monday through Friday only. If you worked in RIDC Park, you knew it was there. If you didn't, there was no reason to.
That building has changed hands and menus more than once. It was a Max and Erma's for years, then Periwinkle's Bakery and Café, and in January 2026 it became Gordo's Cafe and Cantina, a scratch bakery and Mexico City-style street food counter run by Brian Gorder, who also owns Gordo's Tacos and Tequila in Mount Washington. The opening made local news for the cronuts and cruffins alone. But the part worth paying attention to now, eight months later, is what happened to the hours.
A Menu Built for a Lunch Break
When Gordo's opened its doors on January 12, it was built around a single customer: the RIDC Park employee looking for breakfast or lunch between meetings. The hours reflected that exactly. Seven in the morning to three in the afternoon, weekdays only, aligned to a traditional office schedule. Gorder told local reporters at the time that customers from across the street were already showing up, and that the goal was to become a fixture for the park itself.
The food never felt like a typical office park cafeteria stand-in. Gorder grinds his own masa from heirloom corn sourced from Oaxaca for the tortillas and chips. The pastry case runs pecan sticky rolls, biscotti, and a rotating cruffin lineup in flavors like chocolate chip and coffee cake, next to a sandwich called the Brisket Biscuit Bomb that comes in four different builds. It was ambitious food attached to a narrow window of time. You could only get it if your workday happened to overlap with theirs.
Three Months In, the Schedule Told a Different Story
By April, Gordo's had expanded into dinner and bar service. That is not a small operational shift for a business that opened as a breakfast and lunch counter. Adding a bar program and a dinner menu means new inventory, new staffing, and a bet that people will drive to RIDC Park on purpose, after 5 p.m., for reasons that have nothing to do with their job.
The current posted hours, still in effect as of this September, show exactly how far that bet went:
- Monday through Thursday: 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.
- Friday: 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.
- Saturday: 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.
- Sunday: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
That is not an office park schedule anymore. That is a neighborhood restaurant schedule, with Friday and Saturday nights running as late as anything on Freeport Road. The gap between the two versions of this business, the one that opened in January and the one operating today, is the actual story here. Gordo's did not just add a few evening hours to catch stragglers. It rebuilt itself around an entirely different customer.
Gorder was fairly direct about who that customer was meant to be from the start.
"We want to be a pillar of this community. But we're not just here for the office park. We're here for the Fox Chapel area and that's what we want, something for everybody, and we've got the cronuts."
RIDC Park Has Been Doing This Quietly for a While
Gordo's expansion is the most visible recent example, but it fits a pattern that RIDC Park's own management has been building for longer than most residents have noticed. RIDC's development arm has reported completing a storefront project along Gamma and Alpha Drives, the same corridor where Gordo's sits, aimed at giving the park's traditionally corporate footprint a stretch of small, walkable retail. RIDC has also run an annual food truck event that brings park tenants together outdoors, a low-key signal that the property has been trying to function as more than a place where people clock in and leave.
None of that is dramatic on its own. A completed storefront project and a yearly food truck gathering do not rewrite a neighborhood's identity by themselves. But they explain why a business like Gordo's had the room to make its bet. RIDC Park was already nudging toward something more mixed than a pure office district. Gordo's staying open past dark is the first result of that nudge that a resident driving home from somewhere else would actually notice.
What This Actually Changes for Someone Living Nearby
If you live in O'Hara Township, the practical shift is straightforward. RIDC Park used to be a place you drove past. Now it's a place you can drive to on a Friday night and get a full dinner with a bar program, in a building perched right along Route 28, without having to head into Fox Chapel proper or across the river for options.
The food itself has not been diluted to fit the longer hours. The scratch bakery and the Mexico City street food concept, braised and smoked meats, house-pressed tortillas, are the same at 8 p.m. on a Friday as they were at 8 a.m. on a Tuesday when the place first opened. What changed is simply the assumption baked into the original hours: that nobody outside the office park would want to come.
That assumption turned out to be wrong fast enough that the business rebuilt its entire schedule around it within a single quarter. For a corner of the township that has spent decades being defined by its 9-to-5 rhythm, that is a meaningfully different fact than the one most people carry around in their heads about RIDC Park.
If you are the kind of O'Hara resident who tracks these small shifts, whether it is a new restaurant's hours or how a familiar stretch of road is starting to feel different after dark, that instinct for noticing what's changing close to home is exactly the kind of local read that matters when you're thinking about buying or selling here too. Stephanie Heisel works this part of the Pittsburgh area and pays attention to these details for the same reason you might: because they tell you something about where a place is actually headed, not just where it's been. If you're curious what else is shifting in O'Hara or ready for a conversation about your own next move, reach out for a free home valuation and a local perspective grounded in what's actually happening on the ground.
