CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A dueling-piano bar, a pub and a two-story Panini's Bar & Grill are among a handful of new retail tenants joining the Flats East Bank, a downtown Cleveland waterfront project where offices, a hotel and several restaurants will open in June.

Most of the retailers are part of the project's $146 million second phase, which also will include 200 apartments near the Cuyahoga River. The exceptions are a cafe and a newsstand, which will open in the lobby of the new Ernst & Young Tower. The 18-floor office building, a 150-room Aloft hotel and a riverfront boardwalk are part of the $275 million first phase, where construction is winding down.

Local grocer Costas Mavromichalis, whose family owns stores in the Warehouse District and University Circle, will run the cafe. He joins previously announced first-phase restaurants including Ken Stewart's, Willeyville and Lago.

Meanwhile, the developers are lining up tenants and cobbling together public and private money for their second act.

On Tuesday, the Wolstein Group and Fairmount Properties said they've booked more dining and entertainment -- most of it new to Northeast Ohio -- that might open in 2014 or 2015. And they provided more details about a 15,000-square-foot seasonal nightclub, now called FWD (and pronounced "Forward"), that they first mentioned in 2011.

"We grew up here, and we want to be part of the resurgence," Bobby Rutter, one of the club's owners, said in a written statement. "We are creating a summer destination for Clevelanders, tourists and business visitors."

A rendering shows the planned Panini's Bar & Grill at the Flats East Bank project, near the edge of the Cuyahoga River. Panini's, a local chain, started in the Flats in the 1980s.

Another entertainment venue, the Big Bang dueling-piano bar, will join the planned Toby Keith's I Love This Bar & Grill and the Flip Side burger joint as the Flats project reaches toward the river. Launched in St. Louis in 2001, the Big Bang has locations in Tempe, Ariz.; Nashville; and Columbus.

Other phase two tenants include BBR, a Columbus-born sports bar that hosts live music; a Chicago-area pub called the Beer Market (which, according to its website, also will take a space at the Uptown project in University Circle); and Panini's Bar & Grill, a local sports bar chain planning a 10,000-square-foot Flats restaurant with outdoor patios, fireplaces and boat-docking.

Panini's, which has nearly 20 locations across Northeast Ohio, started on the east bank of the Flats in 1986.

With the new leases and other deals in the works, the developers have less than 25,000 square feet of retail space left in the project.

"Our family's dream of 20-plus years is now so very close to reality," Iris Wolstein said of remaking the Flats, a former entertainment district that slid into seediness and then sat fallow. "My late husband, Bert, would be so proud to see the interest from tenants locally and nationally who chose to invest in the Flats."

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