Sweet Racks Put Down Roots in Grandville. The Mall Corridor Made a Different Bet.

Josh Hance spent twenty years working in IT before his mother died. He has said that loss changed how he thought about time, so in early 2020 he quit his day job to run a barbecue food truck full time, two weeks before pandemic shutdowns hit the restaurant industry hardest. Sweet Racks & Smokin' Butts BBQ kept showing up anyway. Parking lots, catering gigs, the Downtown Grandville Fall Fest, wherever West Michigan wanted brisket and pulled pork. Six years after that truck first hit the road, on January 21, 2026, it got a mailing address for the first time: 2996 28th St SW, tucked into the Oakestown Mall strip between Borgman Ford and Belle Tire, a few doors down from The Corner Record.

That's one way a Grandville restaurant opened this year. Over along the Rivertown Parkway corridor, restaurants have been opening a completely different way. If you eat in Grandville on a normal week, it's worth knowing the difference, because these two openings aren't solving the same problem, and they're not competing for the same seat at the table.

The Corridor Is Filling In, Not Building Out

Look at what's actually landed at RiverTown Crossings this year and a pattern shows up fast: nobody broke ground on anything.

In April 2026, Celebration Cinema opened Oscar's Restaurant & Bar inside its own theater lobby, a renovation rather than a new building, serving pizza, wraps, burgers, and quesadillas alongside beer, wine, and cocktails to moviegoers who used to have to choose between dinner and a show. Theatre manager Austin Mueller framed it as completing a lobby project already underway, not starting one from scratch.

A few months earlier, in February 2026, Mr. and Mrs. Crab opened its second West Michigan location at 4505 Canal Ave SW, in the space that used to be Hong BBQ & Hot Pot. The seafood boil concept, known for customizable combinations of shrimp, crab, crawfish, and mussels finished in Szechuan-leaning sauces, had built its following at a Burton Street location in Grand Rapids since 2022. Grandville got the second address, but it got it by moving into a box that already had a kitchen, a walk-in, and a parking lot.

Then there's Only Pans Cafe, set to land in the RiverTown Crossings food court at 3700 Rivertown Parkway. Owner Alecia Winters has been running the business as a bakery since 2021, known for specialty cakes and pastries, and is also a Season 9 MasterChef contestant. The plan is Southern comfort food: chicken marsala, pasta and macaroni dishes, sandwiches on fresh sourdough, plus the gumbo and steak tacos she's already been serving at pop-ups. Winters told a reporter she was targeting a late July or early August 2026 opening. As of this writing that date hasn't been confirmed publicly, but the stall itself already exists. It just needs a new sign.

None of these three required new construction. A theatre added a kitchen to a space it already leased. A seafood concept walked into a restaurant that had already failed once. A bakery is expanding into a food court stall that's been there since the mall was built. If RiverTown Crossings feels like it's added restaurants without the corridor actually growing outward, that's exactly what happened. The mall isn't expanding. It's getting denser.

Downtown Had to Build Something From Nothing

Sweet Racks is the exception to that pattern, and it's worth sitting with why.

Every other name on this list moved into a space that used to be a restaurant, or was already zoned and plumbed for food service. Sweet Racks moved from a trailer into a storefront that had to become a restaurant for the first time. Forty-two dine-in seats, online ordering for takeout, hours running Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. That's infrastructure a food truck doesn't need and never had.

Hance has been clear that the truck isn't going anywhere. It'll keep working events the way it has since 2019, and the competition barbecue team behind it goes back even further, to 2009. But the storefront answers a specific complaint from six years of loyal customers: what happens on the days the truck isn't parked where you are. As Hance put it when the doors opened, "We've been busy enough that we thought we'd try the next ludicrous step and try a restaurant."

That's the second growth pattern in Grandville this year. Not infill. Not a corridor absorbing more tenants into existing walls. A single operator, proven over six years of parking lots and catering jobs, finally getting a fixed address because enough people kept showing up wherever the truck was.

Where the Two Scenes Actually Cross Paths

There's one place these two versions of Grandville's food growth have always overlapped, and it's downtown's annual Fall Fest, organized by the Downtown Grandville Development Authority together with the Grandville-Jenison Chamber of Commerce. It typically lands the first weekend of October, and it's the kind of event where the scarecrow contest lines the light poles along Chicago Drive and the Lit Pumpkin Trail runs around the Kent District Library branch on Friday night, with carved jack-o-lanterns dropped off anywhere along the route.

Sweet Racks has been a fixture on the food vendor lineup at past Fall Fests, parked alongside names like Big Ed's BBQ, Patty Matters, Street Frites, and Tippy Cow Ice Cream, with bands rotating through a stage that's hosted acts like Rory McCallan and Carrie and the McFerrinheits in recent years. That's the event where a truck built the following that eventually justified walls. This year, for the first time, residents walking that same festival will be able to skip the line at the truck and drive over to 28th Street for the same menu in a dining room instead, or do both.

The exact 2026 dates weren't posted at the time of writing, but it's the same weekend Grandville has planned around for years, and it's the clearest evidence that this city's two food growth patterns started in the same place. One truck proved itself downtown long enough to earn an address. A shopping corridor across town decided the fastest way to add restaurants was to stop building and start filling.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

If you're deciding where to eat this fall, the split is simple enough. Want dinner before a movie, a seafood boil that doesn't require a drive into Grand Rapids, or Southern comfort food inside the mall once Only Pans opens its counter? That's the RiverTown Parkway corridor, and it's growing by filling gaps that already existed. Want the barbecue that's been showing up at every Grandville event for six years, minus the wait for the truck's schedule to line up with yours? That's 28th Street now, open Tuesday through Saturday, with a dining room attached.

Neither pattern is more impressive than the other. One is a shopping corridor getting more efficient with the space it already has. The other is a small business earning permanence one plate at a time. Grandville added real dining options in both directions this year, they just arrived through different doors, and knowing which door you're walking through changes what you should expect when you get there.

If you're watching Grandville for reasons beyond dinner plans, that same instinct for reading a neighborhood's actual pattern, not just its headlines, is exactly what guides how we work with buyers and sellers here. Reach out to Liz Rhoda & Co Real Estate when you're ready to talk about what's next.