If you have lived in Lewis Center for more than a couple of summers, you have watched the center of gravity shift. Polaris still anchors the weekend errand loop, but the after-dinner walk, the Tuesday farmers market run, and the "let's just grab a scoop" impulse have quietly moved a mile north.
The reason is Evans Farm, and the surrounding Orange Road corridor is filling in around it. Between a 56-acre sports park that opened last year, a scoop shop from one of the region's oldest ice cream brands opening this spring, and a farmers market that runs every Tuesday from late June through mid-August, the summer of 2026 is the first one where you can plan a full week of evenings without leaving a two-mile radius of home.
Evans Farm is becoming a town, not a subdivision
The best way to understand what is happening here is to look at what has landed inside Evans Farm in the last eighteen months and what is scheduled to land next.
Jennings Sports Park, a 56-acre park with soccer and multi-sport fields, baseball and softball fields, batting cages and a multi-level pavilion on the western edge of the development, opened Spring 2025. That single addition changed the traffic pattern on Lewis Center Road on weeknights. The park sits inside a 1,250-acre master plan that was originally the Parade of Homes site and is being built around four-story mixed-use buildings with retail and restaurant space on the ground floor, apartments above, and plans for a recreation center, retirement community, elementary school, and fire and police sub-stations.
The commercial spine has been slower to fill in than the housing, but 2026 is the year that changes. Alongside the existing Sexton's Pizza and the ice cream and dental storefronts already in place, Parlor Doughnuts and The Fairways at Evans Farm are on the horizon. The most concrete arrival is Johnson's. The upcoming Lewis Center location will open at 5915 Evans Farm Drive within the Evans Farm community, and the shop will offer Johnson's full lineup of classic and seasonal ice cream flavors along with signature sundaes, ice cream cakes, novelties, and grab-and-go pints. It will be the brand's tenth central Ohio shop.
If you have been driving to Bexley or Clintonville for Johnson's, that trip is about to end.
Your Lewis Center summer week, mapped
Once you stack the new arrivals on top of what was already here, the week actually has a rhythm now. Here is what a typical Lewis Center summer week looks like if you follow the local calendar rather than the mall calendar.
| Night | Where | What |
|---|---|---|
| Tuesday | Market on Orange, 3467 E. Orange Rd | Open-air market, food truck, live music, 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. |
| Wednesday | Keystone Pub, Lewis Center | Chris Logsdon plays acoustic sets, 6:30 to 10 p.m. |
| Thursday | Jennings Sports Park | Rec league games and pavilion picnics |
| Friday | Sexton's Pizza at Evans Farm | Walkable dinner, patio if the wind is right |
| Saturday | Highbanks Metro Park or Alum Creek | Morning trail, afternoon reservoir |
| Sunday | Another Broken Egg Café, 8823 Owenfield Dr | Southern-style brunch in the old Panera space |
None of these are far apart. Market on Orange sits at the intersection of the market and the neighborhood: it started in 2021, runs Tuesdays from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. June through August, and pairs the market with a food truck and music each week. NBC4's 2026 market roundup confirms the specifics for this season: Tuesdays, June 30 through Aug. 11, 4:30 to 7:30 p.m., at 3467 E. Orange Rd.
That is a short window. Eight Tuesdays. If you miss more than three of them you have missed the season.
The new dining bench, decoded
Three openings matter this year because they change what "grab dinner" means when you do not want to drive to Polaris.
Johnson's Real Ice Cream at 5915 Evans Farm Drive. The chain is not new to central Ohio, but it is new to this side of I-71. Founded in Bexley in 1950, the brand has expanded quickly over the past two years, tripling its number of locations and opening three new shops in 2025 alone. The Evans Farm location fits the pattern of the last few openings: walkable neighborhoods, dense residential surroundings, small footprint.
Another Broken Egg Café at 8823 Owenfield Drive. The café is opening a second Central Ohio location in Lewis Center, taking over the former Panera Bread at 8823 Owenfield Drive, following the success of its first location at Easton Town Center. The Owenfield storefront had been dark for a stretch, and a full-service brunch concept in that spot changes the weekend rotation for anyone within a mile of Polaris Parkway.
Sexton's Pizza inside Evans Farm. Not new, but underrated as an evening anchor. It is walkable from most of the Evans Farm streetscape and is one of the few places in the immediate neighborhood where you can eat without getting back in the car.
The through-line is walkability. Evans Farm is a master-planned community designed with modern living and sustainability in mind, developed to combine New Urbanism principles with environmentally-conscious design, promoting healthy living, walkability, and connectivity. That design brief is finally showing up as an actual pedestrian scene on summer evenings, rather than as a rendering.
Wednesdays sound like the Keystone
If Tuesday belongs to the market, Wednesday belongs to Keystone Pub. Chris Logsdon plays every Wednesday from 6:30 to 10 p.m. at Keystone Pub Lewis Center, blending audience-participation tunes with a wide range of acoustic rock favorites spanning nearly five decades. The Polaris location of the same pub runs its own weekly music slot with John Schwab and Molly Pauken every Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Keystone Pub and Patio Polaris, where Schwab has spent 35 years playing solo gigs, corporate events, weddings with The John Schwab Party Band, and around 40 concerts a year as lead singer for McGuffey Lane.
You are unlikely to find that quality of resident musician on a weeknight in most suburbs this size. It is worth showing up once a summer just to see who else in your neighborhood shows up.
The outdoor half of the week
The dining side of Lewis Center gets the attention, but the outdoor infrastructure is doing most of the work. Jennings anchors the organized-sports side. The parks system anchors the unstructured side.
Highbanks Metro Park sits at 685 W. Powell Road, and Delaware County's park district runs day camps there through the summer. Highbanks Dragonfly Camp for ages 8 to 12 runs weeklong sessions from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Dragonfly Shelter, with fishing, creeking, kayaking, archery, and a cookout as weather permits. If your kids have aged out of the "throw them at the splash pad" phase, this is where they go next.
For a Saturday morning with less structure, the Hoover Reservoir side of Galena is fifteen minutes east. The Hoover Mudflats Boardwalk is a decent length, is free to walk, has osprey nesting at the far end, and offers views of kayakers, jumping fish, and blue herons, with fishing on the boardwalk itself. It pairs well with an early stop at the market or a coffee before it gets hot.
What to actually try this month
Rather than a top-ten list, here is what a first-time-through-the-new-lineup weekend looks like for a Lewis Center resident who has been on autopilot for a few summers:
- Walk into Evans Farm on a Friday evening and eat at Sexton's on the patio. Note the addresses of the storefronts that are still under build-out. That is your fall checklist.
- Hit Market on Orange on the first Tuesday you can. Bring cash. Stay for the food truck. This is the shortest-window event of the summer.
- Go to Johnson's the first weekend it is open. The Bexley original still runs a line on hot Saturdays; the Evans Farm shop will too for the first month.
- Take one Wednesday off from cooking and go to the Keystone. Sit close enough to actually hear the music.
- Book one Dragonfly Camp week at Highbanks before they fill. The waitlist notation on the current summer schedule is not a formality.
The read on all of this
The thesis is simple. For a decade, the Lewis Center map had one center of gravity, and it was retail. Polaris. That has not gone away, but a second center has emerged around Evans Farm and the Orange Road corridor, and it behaves less like a shopping district and more like a small town. A Tuesday market. A Wednesday music night. A short walk to pizza. A ballfield within earshot. An ice cream shop opening on a residential street rather than in a strip. If you moved here five years ago and have not looked up in a while, this is the summer to look up.
If you are thinking about the resale side of that shift, or you are watching Evans Farm build out and wondering what it means for the value of your street a mile away, that is the conversation we have every week. Josh Cooper and the MORE Ohio Team live in this market and track it block by block. When you are ready to talk, we are ready to work with you.
