If you've lived in Hilliard for more than a few years, you've probably already picked a side without meaning to. Maybe your Friday nights default to Center Street, a DORA cup, and whoever's playing at Otie's Tavern & Grill. Maybe you've started driving out to Trueman Boulevard instead, where the parking lot is bigger and the food options change faster than you can keep up with. Either way, the story you've probably told yourself is that Hilliard now has two downtowns competing for the same Saturday night.
That story is wrong, or at least incomplete. What's actually happening this fall is that the two ends of town are being stitched into a single loop, and the thing doing the stitching is the Heritage Rail Trail, a paved path that runs roughly six miles from Station Park north toward Plain City. Old Hilliard isn't losing ground to TruePointe. Both ends are filling in at the same time, and for the first time, a resident can treat a Saturday as one long, connected outing instead of a decision about which half of the city to commit to.
What's Actually Opening on Each End
Start with TruePointe, the 27-acre mixed-use development at 4457 Trueman Blvd, east of I-270. It's been assembling itself in phases for a couple of years, and the food lineup finally has enough density to plan an evening around: Qahwah House for coffee, Smoked Lick BBQ, Drunch Eatery + Bar, Old Scratch Pizza (a Dayton import), and Teriyaki Madness are already open. The next addition is Medley Kitchen, a globally inspired small-plates concept from Culinary Collectives and restaurateur Derek Bush, a Cameron Mitchell Restaurants veteran with roots in Ohio State's hospitality management program. Bush announced the name and menu concept in June: a dinner-only menu built around tapas, dim sum, and mezze-style plates that let the same ingredients show up in different dishes depending on the culture they're borrowed from. It's expected to open this fall and create more than 50 jobs, which is a meaningful number for a single restaurant in a suburb this size.
Meanwhile, Old Hilliard isn't sitting still. The former Chase bank building on East Main Street, empty for a while now, is being redeveloped by The Westwood Collective, whose founder Andy Warnock is a Hilliard local. The plan, confirmed by NBC4 in June, calls for a sit-down Italian restaurant inside the old bank and a new adjoining building with ground-floor dining and retail, plus a small number of upper-level apartments. The Hilliard Development Corporation, a city-partnered nonprofit, brokered the agreement, which tells you this wasn't an outside developer parachuting in. It was a local group deciding the historic core was worth reinvesting in rather than ceding to the newer development four miles away.
Add CAVA, which opened its first Columbus-area location at 1790 Hilliard Rome Road back in April, employing between 25 and 40 people. None of these are hypothetical projects still stuck in a rendering. They're either open or under construction with a fall timeline, which means the shape of the city is changing in a season you can actually plan around.
The Trail Is the Part Nobody's Talking About
Here's what most conversations about "two Hilliards" miss: the two ends of town were never actually separate. The Heritage Rail Trail, a paved multi-use path built along an old rail bed, runs from the edge of Station Park north toward Cemetery Pike, close enough to Plain City that the trail effectively connects two of the communities this region is built around. A resident who rides or walks the trail isn't choosing between Old Hilliard and the rest of the city. They're moving through a corridor that has Station Park on one end and, increasingly, real reasons to keep going on the other.
Pair that with Old Hilliard's Designated Outdoor Refreshment Area, which the city expanded to run year-round from noon to 9 p.m. daily for guests 21 and up. That's not new this year, but it matters more now than it used to, because it means the historic core still functions as a walkable, linger-friendly destination even while TruePointe pulls in a different kind of evening. You don't have to pick a lane. You can start at one end and let the geography carry you.
What a Weekend Built Around Both Ends Actually Looks Like
If you're trying to picture how this works in practice rather than in theory, here's a version of it:
- Friday evening: Park once in Old Hilliard. Walk a DORA cup between Center Street and Station Park. Grab dinner at one of the longtime spots that still anchor the block, like Starliner Diner or Flyers Pizza.
- Saturday morning: Get out early on the Heritage Rail Trail while it's still cool, heading north toward the edge of Plain City and back for an easy loop.
- Saturday evening: Drive over to TruePointe. Rotate through Smoked Lick or Old Scratch while you wait for Medley Kitchen's fall opening, and notice that this corner of Hilliard doesn't read like a typical suburban retail pad anymore.
- Sunday: Slow down. The Hilliard Historical Village at Weaver Park runs Saturdays and Sundays from 1 to 5 p.m. through September, which is a reasonable way to close out a weekend that started with a rail trail and ended with small plates.
None of this requires choosing a permanent side. It requires knowing both ends exist and are worth the drive or the ride between them.
The Weekend That Actually Proves the Point
If you want a single moment that captures where Hilliard is right now, it's the back-to-back weekend of September 12 and 13. On Saturday, For the Love of Hilliard runs from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. in Downtown Hilliard. It grew out of a collaboration between Destination Hilliard, the city, and local businesses to fill the gap left when Hilliardfest was discontinued, and the structure is different from the old street festival. Instead of closed streets and a midway, activities and vendors are set up on the properties of more than 20 participating businesses. The draw is the Shop Local Passport: visit brick-and-mortar businesses, collect stamps with purchases, and earn an event tote, with five or more stamps entering you to win gift baskets of Hilliard merchandise and gift cards. It's a festival built to push foot traffic into actual storefronts rather than a stage in the middle of the street.
The next day looks completely different. The city's own Fall Festival runs from 1 to 4 p.m. at Roger A. Reynolds Municipal Park, with showtimes at 1:30 and 3 p.m. It's built for families: hayrides, a pumpkin patch, a petting zoo, inflatables, face painting, and a live dog show from Performance Dogs of Ohio, with food trucks booked through the Central Ohio Food Truck Association. If you have kids who want inflatables and a petting zoo, Sunday is your day. If you want to see who's actually running the counter in Old Hilliard right now, Saturday is the one that matters.
Two events, two very different formats, one weekend. That's not a coincidence so much as a preview of how the rest of the fall calendar is going to feel: Old Hilliard events built around walking into shops, TruePointe and city-run events built around bigger, more spread-out programming.
If You Already Live Here
None of this is a pitch to move anywhere. You're already here. What's changed is that the mental map you've been using, the one where you pick Old Hilliard or you pick the newer development and stick with it, doesn't match how the city actually works anymore. The trail was always there. What's new is that both ends of it now have enough reason to visit that the six miles in between stop feeling like a commute and start feeling like part of the plan.
Worth knowing if a friend or neighbor ever asks what your street is actually like to live on day to day, or what a house near the trail versus a house near TruePointe tends to offer differently: that's exactly the kind of hyperlocal read Keli M Fisher spends her time on, for Hilliard and the towns around it. If that conversation ever turns into a real one, reach out and get your instant home valuation or just ask what she's seeing on your specific block.