Inside The Forge: What's Actually Open at Ocala's New Midtown Food Hall

Three blocks north of the downtown square, a set of century-old brick buildings that used to house the Ocala Iron Works, a 1930s Chevrolet dealer, and the WMOP radio station has been reopened as something Ocala hasn't had before. The Forge sits at 343 NE 1st Avenue, and as of late July it is finally serving food after two years of construction rumors and pushed dates.

If you live in Marion County, you have probably driven past the sign a hundred times waiting for a real answer. Here is the real answer. Six concepts are open, the hours are set, and the thing that actually separates The Forge from every other new dining project downtown has less to do with the menus than with a permit.

What's open during the soft opening

The soft opening began on July 20, and a grand opening date has not been announced yet. During this phase the complex is running daily from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., which is narrower than the eventual 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. window that city records show the building is licensed for. Come now if you want short lines. Come later if you want the full picture.

Four to five restaurants sit inside the main building along with kiosks, container kitchens, and shared bar space. When everything opens, the property will seat more than 650 guests and hold more than 300 parking spaces on site.

The liquor license is the actual story

Most new dining concepts downtown compete on food. The Forge competes on how you move through the food. The complex holds a liquor license that lets customers walk freely around the site with their drinks, which is uncommon in Ocala. That single detail is why the layout works the way it does. You can order a cocktail at the Hammock, wander over to Ignite for sushi, cut across the courtyard to Just Desserts, and never have to close a tab or finish a glass to change rooms.

Practically, this means The Forge functions less like six restaurants sharing a wall and more like a small district under one roof. Groups that never agree on dinner get to stop arguing. A table of four can order from four different kitchens and meet back in the common area. For residents who have been driving to Winter Park or Gainesville when they wanted that kind of format, the trip just got shorter.

The building has a longer résumé than most restaurants

The Gibsons preserved a lot of the exposed brick and original bones on purpose. Both main buildings are more than a century old. They started life as the Ocala Iron Works, spent the 1930s as Turnip Seed Chevrolet, and later became the WMOP radio studios before sitting quiet for years. The redevelopment kept the industrial character and layered a modern food-hall program on top of it.

The engineering and architecture work stayed local, handled by Miles Christian Anderson Engineers of Ocala, with design elements from Walker Design out of Orlando. The ownership team is Joel and Sheila Gibson alongside Wendell Landry, Carlos Sanchez, and Santiago Reynolds of the Midtown Eatery Group. Joel Gibson came out of an engineering and manufacturing background, which explains a project of this scale in a town where most new restaurants open one at a time in second-generation strip space.

How The Forge relates to Midtown Station

The Forge is not opening in a vacuum. Midtown Station, a smaller multi-vendor dining concept, opened in late 2024 just a couple of blocks away. Paddock Market has also been running out of the former Sears space at Paddock Mall for the past several months with its own vendors and restaurants. If you are keeping a mental map, the food-hall format has now landed in Ocala in three distinct places within roughly two years.

For a resident, that reshapes an ordinary Friday. Downtown used to be a choice between a specific restaurant and a specific reservation. It now supports a walking evening where the plan is the neighborhood rather than the address. That is a genuine change in how a night out here works, and it is the kind of shift that quietly moves real estate value in the surrounding blocks over time.

A neighbor's cheat sheet

A few things worth knowing before you go:

• The address is 343 NE 1st Avenue, three blocks north of the Downtown Square. If you use the Downtown Square as a landmark, you cannot miss it.
• Parking is on site, with valet available, which is a real departure from the usual downtown parking hunt. A new city parking garage on SW 3rd Avenue, replacing the former Mt. Moriah Baptist Church site, is expected to open this summer and will add more nearby spaces.
• The projected traffic is around 3,000 visits per week once fully open, with the World Equestrian Center crowd factored in. Weeknight visits during the soft opening are quieter than weekends.
• Alcohol service is site-wide, so plan a designated driver or a rideshare if you intend to sample.
• Hours are 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. right now. That will expand as more tenants come online.

Why this matters if you already live here

Ocala's dining scene has grown steadily for several years, anchored by staples like Symmetry Coffee, Brick City Brewing, Pi on Broadway, and the World Equestrian Center's on-site restaurants. What The Forge adds is not another restaurant. It adds a format. A place where you can bring out-of-town family, veterans passing through for a reunion at the horse park, or neighbors who have never agreed on a menu in their lives, and let everyone eat what they want in the same courtyard.

The soft opening is the good window. Menus are still shaking out, the last few tenants are still moving in, and the crowds have not caught up yet. If you have been waiting to see whether The Forge would actually deliver on two years of promises, this is the month to walk over and form your own opinion before the grand opening turns the volume up.

If you are thinking about a move within Marion County and want a steady read on how downtown Ocala is changing, Corbin Washington Hopkins knows the streets around the Square and the neighborhoods that feed into them. Let's connect when you are ready to talk about what that means for your next home.