Hilliard's Restaurant Scene Is Building From Both Ends of Town at Once

Two very different builders are filling in Hilliard's dinner map this year, and neither one is waiting on the other to finish.

On the east side of town, a $200 million mixed-use development is leasing space to national and regional food brands one deal at a time. Across town, a five-block downtown grid is doing what it has done since 2017: letting neighbors open their own restaurants and letting customers carry a drink between them. Both tracks are moving fast right now. What's worth noticing is that they run on completely different economics, and this fall, for the first time, they're about to produce competing dinner options within a few months of each other.

The TruePointe math

TruePointe sits on 27 acres east of I-270 at 4457 Trueman Blvd, and it's the kind of project that gets built by a developer with a spreadsheet rather than a family with a lease. The first apartments opened last summer. The food lineup has been assembling in phases since, and it's now dense enough to plan an evening around without leaving the parking lot.

Currently open at TruePointe:

• Qahwah House
• Smoked Lick BBQ
• Drunch Eatery + Bar
• Old Scratch Pizza
• Teriyaki Madness

Coming this fall: Medley Kitchen, a concept from restaurant group Culinary Collectives, owned by Derek Bush and Justin McMaster. Bush has more than 20 years in hospitality, including leadership roles with Cameron Mitchell Restaurants and Ohio State's Hospitality Management program. The menu will lean on shared-plate formats, tapas, dim sum, and mezze-style dishes built around ingredients that show up across different cuisines. Bush has framed the idea around a belief that "the best food in Columbus isn't widely publicized," an argument for a neighborhood-anchored concept inside a development built for regional reach.

That contrast is the whole story of TruePointe. Teriyaki Madness is a national franchise. Medley Kitchen is a local chef's bet, placed inside someone else's real estate. Both are renting from the same landlord.

A few miles over on Hilliard-Rome Road, the same investor logic showed up again in April 2026, when CAVA opened its first Columbus-area location at 1790 Hilliard-Rome Rd, ahead of planned locations in Polaris and Grove City. The Hilliard store employs between 25 and 40 people and is raising funds locally for Ohio-based IMPACT Community Action as part of the chain's community giving program. It isn't part of TruePointe, but it's the same signal: national chains are treating Hilliard as a test market rather than an afterthought.

Old Hilliard's slower math

Old Hilliard runs on a completely different clock. The Designated Outdoor Refreshment Area, or DORA, started on Main Street back in 2017 to cover Thursday night concerts at Hilliard's Station Park. It expanded in 2020 to four days a week during the pandemic, then to seven days a week in 2021, adding Franklin Street and a run of new businesses to the footprint. This year the DORA is active daily from noon to 9 p.m. through October 31, covering a stretch of Main, Center, and Franklin Streets.

The businesses inside that footprint weren't chosen by a leasing office. They're independent storefronts that opened one at a time: Otie's Tavern & Grill, Crooked Can Brewing Company and Center Street Market, HillGarten, Sexton's Pizza at Junction by Westwood, Legacy Smokehouse, Abner's Casual Dining, Starliner Diner, Local Cantina, Yabo's Tacos, and Benito's.

HillGarten is a good example of how that side of town gets built. Marty and Sandy Nowak opened the German-style beer garden on Main Street in the summer of 2022. Marty has said he built more than 80 percent of the space himself, working on it early in the morning before his day job and again in the evenings.

"It was just a labor of love, a lot of blood and tears."

That's a different capital structure than a $200 million development east of I-270, and it shows up in the pace. TruePointe adds a tenant every few months on a leasing schedule. Old Hilliard adds a business when someone decides to build one.

The project that borrows from both playbooks

There's one build this year that doesn't fit cleanly into either track, and it's the one to watch. In June 2026, the Hilliard Development Corporation, a city-partnered nonprofit, agreed to let Hilliard-based real estate firm The Westwood Collective purchase and redevelop the former Chase bank property at 4056 E. Main St. The plan calls for a sit-down Italian restaurant to move into the old bank building, plus a new mixed-use building on the adjoining lot with dining and retail on the ground floor and a limited number of luxury apartments above. More parking is being added to handle the growth.

The Chase branch itself didn't disappear. It relocated to a newly built location at 4199 Parkway Lane, freeing up the old Main Street site for something denser.

What makes this project different from TruePointe is where it sits: inside the historic downtown grid, walkable from the DORA footprint, a few blocks from Hilliard's Station Park. What makes it different from HillGarten or Center Street Market is who's building it: a professional developer, not an individual entrepreneur. Westwood Collective's founder and CEO, Andy Warnock, has deep family roots in Hilliard, and he's framed the project as personal.

"As a Hilliard local and business owner, it's especially meaningful to invest in the community my family calls home."

The city's downtown manager, Angela Zody, called it "a tremendous investment in the future of Downtown Hilliard." No restaurant name or opening date has been announced yet, which means this project is still a bet in progress rather than a finished addition, but it's the first one built on downtown land using TruePointe's financing model.

What was already crowded this month

Before any of the fall openings land, Hilliard already had its biggest single weekend of the year. The 15th annual Columbus Food Truck Festival's Hilliard edition ran August 14 and 15 at the Franklin County Fairgrounds, with organizers projecting more than 25,000 attendees across the two days, along with live music and family activities.

The Fairgrounds site does double duty here. It's the same ground the Hilliard Ohio Historical Society uses for its own events, including Heritage Day and the Historical Village tours at Weaver Park. A food truck festival built for 25,000 people and a 1860s living history tour share a parking lot, which says something about how much of Hilliard's calendar still runs through a handful of shared civic spaces rather than any single commercial corridor.

Where this leaves the map

By the time Medley Kitchen opens this fall, Hilliard will have three separate restaurant expansions wrapping up inside roughly the same twelve-month stretch, using two entirely different funding models. That hasn't happened on this scale before, at least not since the DORA itself started as a four-block experiment in 2017. For anyone who already lives here, it means dinner options are multiplying on both ends of town at once, and the drive between them is starting to matter less than which model built the restaurant you're walking into.

Hilliard's Station Park keeps its Thursday concert series, Celebration at the Station, running through August, with the splash fountains and amphitheater still doing the same job they've done since the park opened: giving Old Hilliard a reason to gather that doesn't depend on any single restaurant's hours.

None of this changes what a house is worth on its own, but a downtown that's adding this much density this fast tends to show up in how buyers talk about a neighborhood a year or two later. If you're curious what that kind of change looks like for your own address, Hart Property Advisors offers a free home valuation, no obligation attached.