What's New In Hilliard This Summer: A Local's Field Notes
August 6, 2026
August 6, 2026
For most of its life, Hilliard has been a one-anchor town. You met people at Station Park or you met them at the fairgrounds. That is no longer quite true. The city now runs on two dining and gathering hubs, sitting almost four miles apart, connected by a rail bed that used to carry freight. If you have lived here even a few years, the geography of a Thursday night has quietly changed underneath you.
This is a short field guide to what that looks like in summer 2026: what opened, what's opening, what to do with a free evening, and where to send the in-laws when they show up unannounced.
Old Hilliard remains the historic core. Station Park, Center Street, the caboose, the DORA cups. Nothing about that has changed except that the Old Hilliard DORA now runs year-round from noon to 9 p.m. daily for guests 21 and up, which means a walk with a drink is no longer a seasonal privilege.
The second anchor is TruePointe, the 27-acre mixed-use development east of I-270 at 4457 Trueman Blvd. It has been assembling itself in phases, and the food lineup is now dense enough to plan an evening around. Qahwah House, Smoked Lick BBQ, Drunch Eatery + Bar, Old Scratch Pizza, and Teriyaki Madness are already open, with Medley Kitchen arriving this fall.
Between the two, the Heritage Rail Trail runs 6.1 paved miles from the edge of Station Park north to Cemetery Pike near Plain City, with an elevation gain of nineteen feet across the entire route. It is not a trail that will impress anyone from Colorado. It is, however, the reason you can leave your car in one place and eat somewhere else.
Three separate stories, one pattern. Hilliard is getting food it did not have twelve months ago.
CAVA, 1790 Hilliard Rome Rd. The Mediterranean fast-casual chain opened its first Columbus-area location in Hilliard on April 29, 2026, ahead of planned Polaris and Grove City sites. The Hilliard store employs between 25 and 40 people and is raising funds for Ohio-based IMPACT Community Action. The choice of Hilliard as the first Columbus market is worth pausing on. Chains with three announced locations typically lead with Polaris.
Medley Kitchen, TruePointe. Construction has begun on a chef-driven concept from Culinary Collectives, the group led by Derek Bush, opening this fall at 4457 Trueman Blvd. The menu is built around the idea that shared ingredients produce different dishes across cultures, and it will run tapas, dim sum, and mezze-style plates on a rotating menu. Bush previously worked in leadership roles with Cameron Mitchell Restaurants and Ohio State's Hospitality Management program, which is not a résumé that usually lands in a suburban mixed-use.
A sit-down Italian restaurant, 4056 E. Main St. The former Chase bank on East Main, empty since the branch relocated to 4199 Parkway Lane, is being redeveloped by The Westwood Collective. Plans call for an Italian restaurant in the old bank building and a new adjoining structure with ground-floor dining and retail plus a small number of upper-level apartments. According to reporting from NBC4 in June 2026, the Hilliard Development Corporation entered the sale agreement with Westwood, whose founder Andy Warnock is a Hilliard local.
Three openings in three different price bands, in three different corners of the city, in a single calendar year. If you had told a resident in 2021 that this would happen, they would have wanted to see the sourcing.
Celebration at the Station returns to Hilliard's Station Park with a 6:30 p.m. start. There is no concert on Thursday, July 2.
| Date | Act |
|---|---|
| June 11 | Trailer Park Ninjas |
| June 18 | The Flex Crew |
| June 25 | Shucking Bubba Deluxe |
| July 16 | Lt. Dan's New Legs |
| August 6 | Conspiracy |
| August 13 | Fleetwood Gold |
The Independence Day programming is the outlier. The parade steps off at 9 a.m. Saturday, July 4 from the Franklin County Fairgrounds and works its way through downtown. Freedom Fest follows that evening at Roger A. Reynolds Municipal Park from 5 to 11 p.m. with Cole Swindell headlining, a Kid Zone, food trucks, and fireworks. This is one of the larger single-day audiences the city draws all year. Park early or walk in from a neighborhood you can already walk in from.
A few other dates worth writing down:
Most write-ups treat the Heritage Rail Trail as a nice-to-have amenity. It functions better than that if you use it correctly.
The trail begins at Station Park in Old Hilliard, passes Homestead Metro Park at roughly the one-mile mark, and continues past Hayden Run Metro Park before opening into farmland on the run north to Cemetery Pike. More than half of the 6.1 paved miles run parallel to a four-mile bridle path between Cemetery Pike and Hayden Run Road, which is why you occasionally share sightlines with a horse trailer.
For a resident, the practical calculus is this. You can lock a bike at Center Street, eat at Sexton's or Starliner Diner, ride out to Homestead for the loop, and be back in ninety minutes without ever putting the car in gear. The trail also connects to soccer fields, tennis courts, and school property along its length, which is why you see so many families using short segments rather than end-to-end mileage.
The Old Hilliard business district has been a slow-build story rather than a headline story. Worth a lap on foot before writing off the six blocks.
Retail is thinner but present. MAK Home Furnishings carries work from Ohio artisans, Old Hilliard Coin & Fine Art doubles as a gallery for local artists, and Packrat Comics has been in business since 1993 and hosts Free Comic Book Day each spring.
Two often-overlooked civic pieces sit inside the same walkable footprint. First Responders Park holds two pieces of steel from the World Trade Center site along with a pergola built to echo the Twin Towers façade. It is one of the largest 9/11 memorials of its kind, and it sits three blocks from where you buy your coffee. The Historical Village at Weaver Park and a second caboose at Homestead Park anchor the town's railroad memory. Combined with the Early Television Museum, which remains the only one of its kind in the country, that is a denser cluster of small-museum programming than most Columbus suburbs offer.
A concrete example is more useful than a checklist.
Friday evening. Park once in Old Hilliard. Walk with a DORA cup between Center Street and Station Park. Eat at Starliner or Sexton's. If it is a Thursday rather than a Friday, add the 6:30 concert.
Saturday morning. Strength or yoga in Station Park at 7 or 8 a.m., then coffee. Ride the Heritage Rail Trail out to Homestead Metro Park and back for an easy ten miles.
Saturday evening. Drive over to TruePointe. Rotate through the current lineup while you wait for Medley Kitchen to open in the fall. This is where guests from out of town tend to be most impressed, because it does not read like a suburb they were expecting.
Sunday. Historical Village 1 to 5 p.m. or the Early Television Museum, depending on the age of the kids you have on your hands.
You will notice this itinerary does not include the two shopping-center corridors on Cemetery Road or Hilliard Rome Road. Those still exist, and CAVA is now on the second one. They simply do not compete with the two anchors for the part of the summer that is worth planning around.
If you are thinking about what any of this means for your own block, or for the value of a home you have owned for a while as Hilliard's map keeps shifting, Deborah Parris is happy to talk through it. Request your free home valuation and get a read on where your property sits in a market that is not standing still.
Your Next move starts with a conversation.
DEBBIE PARRIS
3160 Kingsdale Center Upper Arlington OH 43221