Memorial Drive vs. Zane Square on Lancaster's Food Map

On July 30, Grove City's development office posted seven words to social media: "Bojangles is coming to Grove City, Fall 2026!" Construction there is scheduled to start in September. Lancaster's Bojangles, approved by our own Board of Zoning Appeals back in January, still has no start date, no opening date, and no update from the company.

That gap is the most useful thing a Lancaster resident can understand about where this town is actually gaining places to eat. The chain corridor on North Memorial Drive generates the headlines. The blocks around Zane Square generate the doors that are open on a Friday night.

The corridor ledger, five months into the year

Here is where the North Memorial Drive and Ety Road buildout actually stands as of late August 2026.

One of those four is a restaurant. The other three are documents.

The Chick-fil-A is the real one, and it is worth giving it its due: the city's first, operated by Julia Herrington, roughly 100 full and part-time jobs, and an opening tied to a $25,000 company donation to Feeding America in support of the Mid-Ohio Food Collective. Five months in, it has settled into the traffic pattern most residents predicted for it.

The other three occupy a category that local news coverage tends to flatten. A zoning approval is not a lease signing. A reported site is not a permit. And a chain naming your town in a growth list is not the same as that chain scheduling your town.

Why Lancaster sits in a queue

The Bojangles situation is the clearest illustration, because the sequence is public. Franchisee Jeff Rigsby signed an agreement in 2021 to develop roughly 45 restaurants, about 15 of them in the Columbus market. Those 15 come in an order:

1. Hilliard, 2023
2. Heath, later in 2023
3. Delaware, summer 2025
4. Circleville, February 2026
5. Grove City, fall 2026

Lancaster is not absent from that program. Lancaster is behind it. Our Board of Zoning Appeals did its part on January 12, unanimously granting two exceptions for a drive-thru and outdoor dining plus an area variance allowing the building to go up without a pitched roof, on plans showing roughly 3,000 square feet and 27 parking spaces at the old In The Ball Park card shop site between Sheetz and Burger King. The city cleared the path. The developer's calendar has not reached us.

Dutch Bros follows the same logic with a sharper edge. A February report put the chain at the former Memorial Car Wash lot at 802 N. Memorial Drive, across from The Pit Stop Liquor Store, with construction not yet started and a possible late-spring opening floated. By June, the company had announced its first central Ohio location for Prairie Township on West Broad Street in the fourth quarter, with permits filed on Sawmill Road and North Hamilton Road. Lancaster was not in that announcement.

The practical rule: a national brand's site on Memorial Drive tells you what Lancaster's traffic counts have earned. It does not tell you what year you will be ordering there.

Downtown runs on a different clock entirely

Two miles away, the mechanism is not a regional development schedule. It is one operator, one building, one lease. That is why the downtown side of Lancaster's food map keeps changing while the corridor waits.

Hadouken at 122 N. Columbus Street is the current example: a barcade pairing vintage cabinets and pinball with a craft cocktail list, pool and ping pong and a DJ upstairs, open until midnight midweek and 2:30 a.m. on Friday and Saturday. Nobody's regional franchise committee approved that. Somebody in Lancaster decided to do it.

The rest of the cluster is built the same way, and it is dense enough to make an evening rather than a stop. Ale House 1890 has had drinks on its footprint at 149 W. Main since 1890 and expanded the building in 2014. Double Edge Brewing is around the corner at 158 W. Chestnut. The Downtown Bistro and Bar 123 has been running since 2018. Square Seven pours Crimson Cup and builds sandwiches on meats and cheeses from Bay's Food Market, which is the kind of supply chain no drive-thru will ever replicate. Add Bob's Backyard BBQ, O'Huid's, Maria's, Bootleggers, Santino's, Downtown Fruit Passion, The Well, and Whit's for the walk home.

What holds them together is the DORA. Downtown's Designated Outdoor Refreshment Area is the quiet infrastructure that turns a list of businesses into a single room. You are not choosing one place. You are choosing a district, with a drink in hand between stops. Memorial Drive cannot offer that at any traffic count.

The building stock is following. The Shumaker, the former shoe factory being converted to lofts and retail with state historic tax credits, was slated to open this spring. Anchor Hocking, founded here in 1905, still runs in town and still supplies the Glass City identity that the rest of the district leans on. Square 13, just north of the central business district, remains one of the better concentrations of early-19th-century architecture in the country. Zane Square itself has been public ground since Ebenezer Zane laid out the town in 1800, with the cast iron and zinc Fiske fountain dedicated in July 1890 and Mike Major's bronze Sherman added in 2000.

The October collision nobody schedules around

The two clocks produce one genuinely awkward Saturday this fall, and it is worth knowing now.

The 176th Fairfield County Fair runs October 11 through 17 at 157 E. Fair Avenue, the last of the Ohio season, with free admission that first Sunday and $10 for anyone 10 and over the rest of the week. For seven days the whole town's evening traffic reroutes east. Then Destination Downtown Lancaster has scheduled its Fall Festival and Bark in the Park for Saturday, October 17, noon to five, with free hayrides, live music, vendors, and a pet costume contest in Zane Square.

October 17 is the fair's closing Saturday. If you have kids in both orbits, that is a two-venue day, and the parking math is not forgiving. Plan the fair for the morning and downtown for the afternoon, or reverse it, but do not assume you will improvise it.

The rest of the fall calendar is more cooperative:

• September 11 and 12: Lithopolis Honeyfest on Columbus Street, Friday 3 to 7 and Saturday 10 to 7, free admission, free parking, free shuttle, with the mead and wine tasting and the used book sale at The Wagnalls Memorial.
• Weekends in September and October: pick-your-own apples at Bachman's Sunny Hill Fruit Farm.
• October 3 through 31: the pumpkin patch and corn maze at Hartland Farm, Saturdays and Sundays, noon to six.
• December 1: the Advent Window Walk begins, 27 nighttime displays including the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio, the Fairfield County District Library, and the Fairfield County Foundation.
• December 6: WinterFest and the tree lighting downtown, with the Glass Town Countdown to follow on New Year's Eve.

Notice which side of town that list belongs to. Almost none of it happens on Memorial Drive. The corridor is where Lancaster runs errands. The square is where it gathers.

What the two clocks tell you

Neither track is better. A Tuesday morning with three kids in the car wants Ety Road. A Friday in October wants Columbus Street and a DORA cup. The mistake is reading the announcement volume as a signal of where the town is actually thickening, because for most of 2026 the announcements and the openings have been on opposite ends of the map.

If you want a reliable test, watch for permits and paint, not press releases. When the Memorial Car Wash lot gets graded, the coffee is real. Until then, the most accurate answer to "what's new in Lancaster" is a short walk from the Sherman statue.

If you have been paying attention to how this town is filling in and wondering what that means for a particular street, a particular block, or a particular house, that is the kind of conversation Brandon Emmanuel enjoys most. Let's Connect.