For more than a year, the storefront at 3911 Broadway sat behind paper covered windows. It used to be Pontone's Music. By the fall of 2025, word around town was that a new diner called Broadway Standard would take over the space, with an opening target of late November. November came and went. The paper stayed up through the winter.
That kind of delay usually means one of two things: the project stalled, or somebody was building something from scratch and refused to rush it. In this case it was the second. Broadway Standard finally opened its doors in the Historic Town Center months behind its own schedule, and by spring it was serving made-from-scratch Southern breakfast and lunch seven days a week. A few blocks over, two other storefronts filled in on a completely different timeline, arriving almost exactly when their companies said they would. That difference is the most interesting thing happening on Broadway this year, and it says more about how the corridor is actually growing than any list of "what's new to eat."
Three storefronts, three timelines
Here's the corridor as it stands heading into fall 2026.
| Name | What it is | Address | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Broadway Standard | Nashville-inspired Southern diner | 3911 Broadway | Open, breakfast and lunch daily, 7 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. |
| DHC Chicken | Korean fried chicken, rebrand of CM Chicken | 4009 Broadway | Open since May 6, 2026 |
| Cava | Fast-casual Mediterranean bowls and pitas | 4120 Buckeye Parkway | Open since June 10, 2026 |
Broadway Standard is the story locals already half know. It's owned by Standard Restaurant Group LLC and led by Myles Deschner, a Grove City native who spent more than a decade managing bars on Nashville's Lower Broadway before coming home to open his own place. The menu leans hard into the concept: chicken and waffles, fried catfish, biscuit flights, Tennessee hoe cakes, and a house rule that every meal comes with complimentary fritters, two sides, and a dessert that changes with the season.
"We are looking forward to bringing our southern charm back to Ohio," Deschner said before the restaurant opened.
That's a single-location, first-time restaurant built around one person's return to their hometown. It's also the one that took the longest to actually open.
Two chains that arrived on schedule
DHC Chicken and Cava tell a different story, and it's not a story about Grove City specifically.
DHC Chicken is a rebrand of Choong Man Chicken, a South Korean fried chicken chain that entered the U.S. market in 2017 and has been steadily filling in Central Ohio ever since: Henderson Road in northwest Columbus in 2021, Pickerington in 2022, Westerville in 2023, a Grandview-area location in 2025, and a Gahanna spot that opened in the same late-April window as the Grove City build-out. According to 614NOW, the chain has six Columbus-area locations in the works. Grove City's 4009 Broadway location wasn't a one-off bet on the neighborhood. It was the next stop on a route the company had already mapped.
Cava moved even faster. The Mediterranean chain opened its first Ohio location in Cincinnati in March 2026, then added Hilliard in April, Polaris in May, and Grove City on June 10, all inside about ten weeks. A fourth Central Ohio location in Upper Arlington was already confirmed before the Grove City doors opened. Cava landing on Buckeye Parkway wasn't a Grove City decision so much as a Central Ohio expansion schedule that happened to include Grove City that quarter.
None of this is a knock on either business. A fast-growing chain that shows up on time and a first-time restaurant that takes an extra five months to get the biscuits right are just different kinds of businesses, and Broadway now has both. The point is that if you're trying to read the corridor as evidence of a locally driven restaurant boom, only one of the three arrivals actually is that. The other two are proof that Grove City is now considered a reliable stop on regional rollout maps, which is its own kind of vote of confidence, just a different one.
What that split actually looks like on the ground
Walk the two ends of town and the difference is visible. The Historic Town Center on Broadway, where Broadway Standard and DHC Chicken sit a block apart, is still the walkable core: brick storefronts, the farmers market pavilion, Town Center Park. The newer retail cluster along Buckeye Parkway, Stringtown Road, and Hoover Road, a short drive from downtown, is where Cava landed alongside Burlington's new store at 1739 Stringtown Road and where AcutePet Urgent Care, SafeSplash Swim School, and an indoor play space called Little Diggers have all opened or announced openings this year on Hoover Road. A fifth Bojangles location is also headed to that side of town, at 2815 London Groveport Road, replacing a former KFC, with construction starting this month and an opening targeted for later this fall.
That's the pattern: the drive-to corridor is absorbing chain expansion at a steady clip, while the walk-to core downtown is where a genuinely local concept finally found its footing after a year of delays. Both are growth. They're just not the same kind, and conflating them is how you end up with headlines that oversell an "independent restaurant renaissance" that's really one restaurant and two well-timed franchise openings.
The calendar is catching up to the storefronts
Grove City Chamber's Farmers Market wraps its 37th season this month, closing out a run of Saturday mornings in the Historic Town Center that's been going since before most of these storefronts existed. As that ends, the corridor doesn't go quiet. The Food Truck Festival & Shop Hop returns to Town Center on Friday evenings, October 2, 16, and 30, running 4 to 9 p.m. with multiple trucks and shops staying open late. Grove City's Old Time Harvest Day takes over Century Village at Fryer Park on Sunday, October 4, and the Chamber's Boo Off Broadway community event lands on Broadway itself on Saturday, October 24.
Every one of those events puts foot traffic within a block or two of Broadway Standard and DHC Chicken. That's not a coincidence so much as how a downtown works: the city schedules its public events where the walkable storefronts already are, which means the restaurants that opened this year on Broadway specifically are set up to benefit from a fall calendar that predates them.
The read for anyone paying attention to Broadway
If you've been keeping half an eye on the empty storefronts around town, the honest version of this year's story is that Grove City got one new restaurant, built by someone with roots here who took the time to open it right, and two additional stops on regional chains that were already expanding into Central Ohio regardless of what Broadway looked like. Both things are worth knowing. Only one of them tells you anything about Grove City in particular.
Between the Food Truck Festival & Shop Hop on Fridays, Old Time Harvest Day on October 4, and Boo Off Broadway later that month, there's no shortage of reasons to walk the corridor before the year turns over. Bring an appetite. Just know which storefront is telling you Grove City's story and which one is telling you Central Ohio's.
If you're keeping an eye on Grove City for reasons beyond dinner plans, whether that's watching how a neighborhood's business mix shifts over time or wondering what a downtown corridor like this one means for home values nearby, Columbus Prime Realty tracks these changes as part of how we serve buyers and sellers in this neighborhood every day. Get your free home valuation to see how the local market looks from where you sit.
