Walk down Broadway on a Saturday morning right now and you will smell biscuits before you see the sign. Drive out toward Buckeye Parkway that same afternoon and you will pull into a parking lot, order on a screen, and be back in your car in under ten minutes. Both are Grove City in 2026. Neither is the whole story on its own.
Something worth noticing has been happening over the past several months. The businesses opening on foot-traffic Broadway and the businesses opening along the parkway and arterial roads are not the same kind of business, and they are not opening for the same reason. One corridor is filling in with independent operators who want you to park once and stay a while. The other is filling in with regional and national chains who want you to be in and out. If you have felt like Grove City has two different rhythms lately depending on which side of town you are running errands, that is not in your head. It is showing up address by address.
Broadway Is Becoming A Place You Walk To
The clearest recent example sits at 3911 Broadway. Broadway Standard Southern Charm Home Cooking opened its doors on March 30, serving breakfast and lunch from 7 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. daily. The owner, Myles Deschner, spent over a decade managing bars along Nashville's Lower Broadway before relocating to Columbus, and he built the concept around the feeling of showing up somewhere that already knows you. As 614now reported, Deschner described the goal as a place where "it's like eating comfortably at your own home or eating dinner at your grandma's house."
A few doors down, at 4009 Broadway, DHC Chicken opened in April serving Korean fried chicken. If the name sounds like something you have seen before under a different sign, that is because it is. Reviewers on Yelp have noted that the concept was previously known locally as CM Chicken before rebranding, with new Grove City and Gahanna locations opening under the DHC name. Same food, same footprint, new identity, and it landed on the same short stretch of Broadway as Broadway Standard, a two-minute walk apart.
That stretch is not incidental. It sits inside the same few blocks the city keeps investing its public calendar into. The Grove City Chamber Farmers Market runs Saturday mornings through early September a few streets over, and the Food Truck Festival & Shop Hop closes down Park Street and Broadway for an evening every summer. When a city keeps scheduling free public events on the same blocks where new independent restaurants keep opening, that is two different kinds of investment pointing at the same square footage. One is public money and staff time. The other is private risk from people betting their own savings on foot traffic. Both are betting on Broadway.
Buckeye Parkway And London-Groveport Road Are Still Built For The Drive-Thru
A few miles away, the story reads differently. Cava opened its doors at 4120 Buckeye Parkway on June 10, marking the fast-casual Mediterranean chain's third central Ohio location in a matter of months, following a Hilliard Rome Road opening in April and a Polaris Parkway location on May 20. Cava has also confirmed a fourth Ohio location coming to Upper Arlington later this year.
Bojangles is next in line. The Southern-style chicken chain is planning to open at 2815 London Groveport Road, a site that will replace a former KFC, with construction expected to begin in September and an opening targeted for fall 2026. It will be the chain's fifth restaurant in the Columbus market, following locations in Hilliard, Heath, Delaware, and Circleville, part of a broader plan announced in 2021 to bring roughly 45 Bojangles locations to Ohio over several years.
Neither of these sites was chosen for a stroll-up crowd. Buckeye Parkway and London-Groveport Road are built for people running errands between other errands, which is exactly the customer these chains are chasing. There is nothing wrong with that kind of convenience. It is just a different bet than the one Broadway Standard and DHC Chicken are making a mile or two away.
Here is what that split looks like when you line the two corridors up side by side:
| Corridor | Recent openings | What it's built for |
|---|---|---|
| Broadway / Town Center | Broadway Standard (3911 Broadway, March 2026), DHC Chicken (4009 Broadway, April 2026) | Walkable, sit-down, foot traffic from festivals and the park |
| Buckeye Parkway / London-Groveport Rd | Cava (4120 Buckeye Parkway, June 2026), Bojangles (2815 London Groveport Rd, planned fall 2026) | Drive-thru or quick-counter, regional chain expansion |
The Fall Calendar Keeps Pulling You Back To Broadway
If you want more proof of where the city has been placing its bets, look at the recent and upcoming run of free events. The Grove City Town Center Bourbon & Spirits Festival was scheduled for August 8 at Town Center Park. Movies in the Park was scheduled to screen Wicked For Good on August 12 at the same park address on Park Street. The Back to School Bash follows on August 15, also at the park. Then on September 19, the Grove City Area Chamber of Commerce runs its 36th Annual Arts in the Alley Community Parade, starting at the corner of Southwest Boulevard and Broadway, with this year's parade themed around the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
That is four separate public draws in six weeks, every one of them within walking distance of the same blocks where Broadway Standard and DHC Chicken just opened. The city is not guessing where people already gather. It is scheduling around it.
None of this means the parkway side of town is losing relevance. Cava and Bojangles exist because there is real demand for fast, dependable food on the roads people already drive every day, and that demand is not going away. But if you have noticed yourself parking near Town Center Park more often this year, staying for dinner instead of grabbing something on the way home, you are not imagining a trend. You are living inside one that started showing up in permit filings and lease signings months before anyone wrote it down.
What This Actually Changes About Your Week
For a lot of Grove City residents, this split already shapes the calendar without anyone naming it out loud. Weeknights run through Buckeye Parkway or London-Groveport Road, quick, efficient, and built around getting somewhere else. Weekends increasingly pull toward Broadway, where a festival, a parade route, or a new breakfast spot gives you a reason to park the car and stay.
If Grove City keeps growing the way the last several months suggest, that pattern is likely to sharpen rather than fade. The Town Center core is becoming the place you plan an evening around. The parkway corridor is becoming the place you solve a Tuesday. Knowing which is which saves you the guesswork the next time someone asks where to grab dinner in town.
Whenever the conversation eventually turns from where to eat to where to live, that is the kind of neighborhood texture worth knowing before you look at a single listing. If that day comes for you or someone you know in Grove City, Castro Group is glad to talk it through. Let's connect.
