Bethlehem's Southside Reset Last Year. This Fall's Celtic Classic Is the First Real Test.
Doors opened at 4 p.m. Bar service only. Punk n Preppy took the small stage from five to eight, and by the time the last round went out, ten years of regulars had said their goodbyes to Southside 313 Bar & Grille. Owner Bill Dech's Facebook announcement put it plainly: "All good things must come to an end or so they say." The pub at 313 E. Third Street, open since August 2015, closed for good last August, just as Bethlehem's fall festival season was gearing up.
That timing turned out to matter more than anyone realized at the time. Three Broke Blokes Grille had barely settled into its space downtown. Barbecue Boys had only just unlocked its doors on the Southside. Anyone who spent last year's Celtic Classic weekend looking for dinner on Third Street walked into a neighborhood mid-turnover, with one fixture gone and its replacements still finding their footing. A full year later, none of that is new anymore. The 39th Celtic Classic Highland Games & Festival returns September 25 through 27, 2026, and this time the new lineup has had four full seasons to prove whether it actually stuck.
Southside 313 was Bill Dech's first restaurant, built with partners Bruce and Kim Campbell into a 20-seat bar with booth and patio seating that became known as much for its house pickletini as for the "313 Balls," a scoop of potato, cheddar, Old Bay, and shrimp finished panko-style. Dech told local reporters running three restaurants at once had become too much, and rather than sell 313 outright, he closed it and put its liquor license up for sale. The staff got the option to transfer to the family's other two spots, The Nest Bar & Grille on East Fourth Street in Bethlehem and Bagpiper's Pub in Allentown, and the pickletini recipe moved with them. Regulars looking for a familiar face behind the bar will likely find one at either location. They just won't find it on Third Street anymore.
That's a real loss for the stretch of Southside between the Lehigh Valley Charter High School for the Arts and the Taylor Flats development, a corridor that's seen steady turnover for years. But a closed storefront on a busy block rarely stays closed for long in this neighborhood, and it didn't this time either.
Downtown, inside the Moravian Book Shop on Main Street, 3 Broke Blokes Grille held its ribbon cutting in July 2025. It's an offshoot of Clam Jam Boil & BBQ, the mobile food business that built a following around the Lehigh Valley before going brick and mortar, and it shares its space with Lost Tavern Brewing's Bethlehem taproom, running the same Tuesday-through-Sunday hours. The menu leans into "comfort food with a Cajun twist": a Three Pigs Chili built from pulled pork, bacon, and ground pork, a Ragin' Cajun Gumbo with shrimp, clams, andouille, and chicken, and a Phandemonium Cheesesteak made from shaved New York strip. It's a different kind of spot than 313 ever was, sitting inside a historic retail building rather than a standalone corner bar, and it's on the opposite side of the river from where the old pub sat.
On the Southside itself, the replacement for late-night hours arrived from a different direction entirely. Barbecue Boys opened at 306 S. New Street in mid-September 2025, the second location for Lehigh Valley native brothers Andrew and Dean Zannakis, whose first spot is across the river in Phillipsburg. It's fast casual, built around brisket and mac and cheese, and it runs later than 313 ever did, staying open until 3 a.m. Thursday through Saturday. Andrew Zannakis has said he expected to end up in finance until his father brought home a backyard smoker when he was fourteen. That backyard hobby is now the reason Southside has a late-night option that didn't exist before last fall, running well past the hour 313 used to call last call.
Put those two together and the picture from a year ago wasn't a neighborhood with fewer places to eat. It was a neighborhood mid-swap, with the after-hours crowd about to shift two blocks over and the daytime crowd about to get pulled across the river, all inside the same few weeks.
Here's what made last September such an awkward moment to judge any of this. Southside 313 had gone dark only weeks earlier. Barbecue Boys had been open less than two weeks by the time Celtic Classic weekend hit. Anyone forming an opinion about Bethlehem's new dining lineup during that festival was really just watching an opening month, not a track record. This year is different. The Celtic Cultural Alliance, founded in 1988, is running the 39th annual Celtic Classic Highland Games & Festival September 25 through 27, free to attend, with five stages running more than 100 hours of Celtic music. The U.S. National Highland Games Championship brings the country's top ten point earners in stone lifting, hammer throw, and caber toss to town, the Tartan Parade steps off from City Hall on Saturday morning, and the weekend rounds out with a Haggis Bowl where fifteen competitors race to eat a pound of haggis, an Irish Soda Bread Muffin Baking Contest sponsored by King Arthur Baking Company, and a Celtic Poetry Contest open to writers of every age. Attendance typically runs past 200,000 over the three days, making it the largest single draw on Bethlehem's annual calendar.
That scale is exactly why this year's edition works as a real test. Three Broke Blokes Grille has now run a full year of Main Street dinner service. Barbecue Boys has closed out a full year of late Southside nights. Neither is the new kid anymore, and this festival weekend is the first time either has had to handle Celtic Classic crowds with an actual season of practice behind them instead of a soft opening.
If your old routine ran through Southside 313, here's roughly where the pieces have landed, a year into the swap:
None of these fully replace what 313 was. A ten-year run builds a kind of familiarity that even a full year elsewhere hasn't matched yet. But the neighborhood didn't go quiet, and it didn't stay in transition either. By the time this year's Tartan Parade steps off from City Hall, the new answers to "where should we eat" will have a full year of Saturday nights behind them instead of a few awkward weeks.
That's worth remembering the next time someone says a neighborhood's food scene is shrinking. Sometimes it's just settling in, and a year is usually enough to tell the difference.
If you're the kind of Bethlehem resident who tracks every opening and closing on Third Street and Main, you already know the neighborhood better than most market reports ever will. BHHS Paul Ford Realtors has been paying attention to this same stretch of the Lehigh Valley for a long time, and whenever you're curious what that kind of neighborhood knowledge means for your own home's value, a free valuation is a good place to start.
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