The last six days of August in Grandview Heights run on a familiar rhythm. A pre-dawn crowd forms at Ray E. DeGraw Park on Sunday morning. The following Saturday, a half-mile of Grandview Avenue closes to cars and fills with vendors, dogs, and folding chairs. If you have owned a home here for more than a couple of years, you already know the shape of the week.
What you may not have tracked is how much of the storefront lineup along that same corridor has turned over since the 2024 Hop. Three of the spaces you will walk past on race morning and Hop night are either brand new to the block or brand new to Ohio. The calendar is familiar. The map underneath it is not.
The week in date order
Two dates carry the week. Both live within a fifteen-minute walk of each other, and both start and finish inside the same district.
- Sunday, August 23, 7:00 a.m. The OhioHealth Grandview Yard Half & Quarter Marathon steps off at Ray E. DeGraw Park in Grandview Yard, followed at 7:20 a.m. by the Purple Heart 5K. The half is 13.1 miles, the quarter is 6.55 miles, and the 5K is 3.1. Course loops tour Grandview Heights, Marble Cliff, Upper Arlington, and The Ohio State University area, and proceeds from the 5K benefit the Upper Arlington Community Foundation. Finish-line food, drink, and music at the Byers Xtra Mile Finish Line Party wrap things up back at DeGraw.
- Saturday, August 29, 5:00 to 9:00 p.m. The August Grandview Hop, the third of four 2026 dates run by the CYP Club, closes Grandview Avenue from 1st Avenue to 5th Avenue. Free, all ages, more than two hundred vendors, live music at multiple points along the street. New this year, a Community Courtyard at Grandview Center rotates through themed attractions across the summer, including a Classic Car Showcase, a Columbus Sports Pavilion, Chalk the Courtyard, and a Pet Expo with a pop-up dog park.
Both events are anchored to the same half-mile spine. That geographic compression is the thing that makes late August in Grandview feel dense rather than scattered, and it is also what makes the storefront turnover on that spine actually matter.
Three storefronts that weren't here last August
If you last did the Hop in summer 2024, three doors along your route now open onto something different.
1417 West Fifth Avenue: Biscuit Belly
The corner of West Fifth and Grandview Avenues sat quiet through most of last year. Hot Chicken Takeover shut the location in September as part of the brand's broader wind-down, and by October the chain had closed all remaining stores. Louisville-based Biscuit Belly took the space and opened its first Ohio location there on June 2, 2026, run under founder and CEO Chad Coulter. The menu is biscuit-forward: biscuits and gravy in sausage or mushroom, plus a dozen biscuit sandwiches. For race morning, that address is a short walk from the finish line at DeGraw and worth knowing about before the 5K crowd figures it out.
775 Yard Street: Dim Sum Asian Bistro
The Jason's Deli space inside Grandview Yard turned over in late 2025. Dim Sum Asian Bistro, from Tyler Ma of Dublin's Ty Ginger Asian Bistro, took the box at 775 Yard St., Ste. 190, and now runs a 55-item dim sum menu alongside the broader Chinese menu, with steamed dumplings, buns, congee, sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves, and fried shrimp balls on the featured list. Hours are 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday and 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekends, which means the 10:30 Saturday and Sunday openings are new options for a late race brunch or a pre-Hop early dinner.
The former Crispy Coop: Serious Dumplings
Further down the corridor, signage is up for Serious Dumplings, sometimes marketed as Serious Sanji, a chain with existing locations in Florida, Wisconsin, and Illinois. This is the brand's first Ohio store, taking the former Crispy Coop space, with a menu built around handmade dim sum, Shanghai-style shengjian, and xiao long bao. An opening date has not been confirmed. If the buildout finishes ahead of the September Hop, Grandview will have two independent handmade-dumpling operations inside a five-minute walk of each other, which is a genuinely new condition for the corridor.
What that turnover changes about race morning
Race morning has always had a supply problem. Two thousand runners plus family and pacers flood a small handful of coffee and breakfast counters between 8:30 and 10:30 a.m. The 2024 map for that window leaned heavily on longtime tenants like Stauf's, Brekkie Shack, and Winans Coffee & Chocolate inside the Yard.
The 2026 map adds two openings that expand the runway in different directions. Biscuit Belly on West Fifth pulls a portion of the runner-family crowd south and west of DeGraw and gives you a hot, sit-down option that is not another egg sandwich counter. Dim Sum Asian Bistro's 10:30 a.m. weekend open time lands almost exactly when half marathoners are finishing and looking for something warm that isn't breakfast food. Neither replaces a Yard fixture. Both change the shape of where the post-race crowd disperses to at 10:45.
What it changes about Hop night
Hop night runs on a different logic. The street closes, foot traffic tops out somewhere in the thousands, and the restaurants along Grandview Avenue and just off it become the release valve for people who want a real dinner instead of a food truck. Grandview Yard sits one block north of the closure and functions as overflow, which is why the Hofbräuhaus patio and Pastimes Pub & Grill fill up first.
The 2026 wrinkle is that the overflow now includes two Chinese menus at very different price points and formats: Dim Sum Asian Bistro's full-service handmade menu inside the Yard, and, if it opens in time, Serious Dumplings' fast-casual counter on the Avenue itself. Fifth by Northwest, the block just north of the Hop's northern boundary, adds Biscuit Belly to a dinner rotation it did not have in 2024. None of this shows up on the CYP Club's event map. It shows up in how long the wait is at Figlio at 7:15 p.m.
The anchors that didn't move
Turnover reads sharper against what has stayed put. Inside Grandview Yard, Hofbräuhaus, Agapé Mediterranean, Pastimes Pub & Grill, Brekkie Shack, Habaneros Fresh Mexican Grill, and Winans Coffee & Chocolate are the same names they were two summers ago. On the Avenue, Third & Hollywood, Grandview Café, Aab India, Mazah Mediterranean Eatery, Aladdin's Eatery, Local Cantina, Yats Cajun Creole, Figlio, Panzera's, Rotolo's, Grandad's, La Tavola, DK Diner, and Knotty Pine Brewing are all still where you left them. The Avenue Steak Tavern still runs Monday wine nights and weekday happy hour from 4 to 6 p.m. in the bar and on the patio.
Long-tenured operators like those give a corridor its baseline. New operators reveal how the baseline is being tested. Right now the answer is that West Fifth is absorbing biscuit-forward breakfast, Grandview Yard is absorbing handmade Chinese, and the Avenue itself may soon absorb a second dumpling concept. Three moves, one half-mile, one calendar year.
Reading the pattern
The story an outsider tells about Grandview Heights is usually about walkability. The story a resident tells is closer to churn. Independent operators cycle in and out of a small number of high-visibility storefronts, and the anchor tenants stay long enough that newer arrivals get instantly compared against them. That is why an August like this one matters. Race Sunday and Hop Saturday will bring somewhere on the order of twelve to fifteen thousand people onto the same six blocks, and by the September Hop on the 26th, everyone who lives here will have formed an opinion about at least one of the three new doors.
If you have been in Grandview Heights long enough to remember when Hot Chicken Takeover, Jason's Deli, and Crispy Coop were the tenants at those three addresses, this is the week to walk the corridor with fresh eyes. It will not look like this again next year.
Planning a move within Grandview Heights or considering a sale on one of the streets between Goodale Boulevard and West Fifth, The Anne DeVoe Group works this corridor closely and would welcome the conversation. Schedule a free consultation.
