Drive down Western Boulevard on any given afternoon right now and you will pass at least three active construction sites before you hit the light at Piney Green Road. Turn off onto Court Street on a Friday night and you will find something else entirely: a shared parking lot, a beer hall with no televisions, and a line for smash burgers that did not exist two years ago. Both of these are "new" in Jacksonville right now. They are not the same kind of new, and the difference tells you more about this town than either one does on its own.
This year alone, Jacksonville got a national grocery chain breaking ground, four new fast-casual restaurants, a LEGO store, a completely reimagined downtown block, and a $30 million museum that took 26 years to build. That is a lot to happen in one calendar year for a city this size. Here is what is actually going on, corridor by corridor.
The chain corridor is catching up
Western Boulevard has spent 2026 filling in fast. Guthrie's Chicken opened its doors at 3100 Western Blvd on May 27, the seventh Guthrie's location in the Carolinas, with a ribbon cutting at 10 a.m. and the first 100 customers walking away with a year of free chicken fingers. A few blocks down, the new Raising Cane's building at 1106 Western Blvd sat finished for weeks while the company trained roughly 160 part-time employees, with the chain setting July 13 as its opening date. Crumbl opened for Memorial Day weekend at 2075-R North Marine Boulevard, in the old RadioShack spot near Walmart, and immediately put 55 people on payroll. Chicken Bee, at 3040 Western Blvd, was still running on limited hours this spring while it finished hiring.
Then there is the grocery story, which is the one worth watching if you want to understand how fast this corridor is actually moving. Harris Teeter officially signed on to build a new store in the open field next to Academy Sports on Western Boulevard, a deal city officials confirmed as finalized back in January. By May, officials said the company was still working through final construction contracts, and by late June, the city was saying groundwork should begin soon. A national grocery chain does not commit to a project like that without running the rooftop counts first. When a chain that size finally moves from paperwork to construction, it is usually confirming something about the neighborhood that has already been true for a while, not creating something new.
North of downtown, a Marine veteran named Jonathan Chrisant turned a longtime LEGO side hobby into a franchise, opening Bricks & Minifigs on May 16 at 1122 Henderson Drive in New Market Square, right next to 910 Coffee. It is a small detail, but it is the kind of small business that tends to show up once a corridor has enough steady foot traffic to support something other than drive-through windows.
The other new downtown
A mile or so away, Court Street has been building something with a completely different personality. The anchor is The Clove Hitch Beer Company, opened December 15, 2023, by Haley Leo and Kevin Ryan, who chose to make Jacksonville their permanent home after Kevin's eight years of duty here as a Marine Corps Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technician. Haley teaches preschool on base. They named the bar after the clove hitch knot as a nod to Kevin's time in the Navy, and what started as a beer and wine hall with 16 taps rotating mostly North Carolina brews has since grown into something bigger than either of them expected.
Clove Hitch now shares its Court Street building with Overruled Smash Kitchen, which soft-opened to the public on September 26, 2025, plus Ransom Room and Hakata Downtown Ramen next door. Walk in through the front or the rear parking lot entrance and you can move between all of them without leaving the block, which is not something downtown Jacksonville could offer a few years ago.
One regular reviewer put it plainly:
"With the addition of Overruled Smash Kitchen and Ransom Room, it's the coolest place in Jacksonville, NC."
The street itself has been catching up to match. The Court Street stamped, dyed concrete project, which replaces the original bricks that were pulled out of the road years ago, is nearly finished. On the first Friday of every month, Riverfront Plaza hosts First Fridays, a food truck and vendor gathering that runs from 6 to 9 p.m. And on September 26, the third annual Downtown Jacksonville Oktoberfest, presented by The Clove Hitch, will shut the street down again.
Here is the corridor comparison in plain terms:
| Western Boulevard | Court Street | |
|---|---|---|
| Who's opening things | National chains (Guthrie's, Raising Cane's, Crumbl, Harris Teeter) | Independent owners (veterans, first-time restaurateurs) |
| What it replaced | Old Chicago, a former Red Lobster, a vacant RadioShack | Vacant storefronts and empty lots on a street that used to shut down at 6 p.m. |
| What it signals | Chains confirming rooftops that are already here | A downtown building its own identity from scratch |
| Best evidence | A Harris Teeter deal finalized months before the first shovel hits dirt | A soft-opening night that regulars still talk about a year later |
Neither corridor is more "real" than the other. But if you only pay attention to the drive-through windows on Western Boulevard, you are missing the half of Jacksonville's growth story that has an actual personality attached to it.
The one that took 26 years
Then there is the project that belongs in a category by itself. On June 8, the Carolina Museum of the Marine opened to the public at Lejeune Memorial Gardens, a few minutes from Camp Lejeune's front gate. The idea started in 1999 with three Marines, Maj. Gen. Ray Smith, Col. Bruce Gombar and Sgt. Maj. Joe Houle, and it took until this year and more than $30 million in state, county, city and private funding to finish. The 25,000-square-foot building broke ground in May 2024 and tells the story of 43 Marines and Sailors who served across North Carolina and South Carolina bases, from World War II through the Global War on Terrorism, including the first women Marines who served at Camp Lejeune from 1943 to 1945 and a section connected to the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, an event that reshaped this community's relationship with its own Marines.
Governor Josh Stein proclaimed June 8 "In Recognition Of The Carolina Museum Of The Marine Opening Day" statewide, noting that the opening lands the same year as the 250th anniversary of the United States and the Marine Corps itself. Admission runs from $8 for children to $14 for adults, with reduced rates for seniors, veterans, and active-duty service members, and a self-guided visit takes about two hours. The museum's café, MAGTF Cafe, is run by Milk Road Coffee, a veteran-owned shop already known downtown. The building is not just a museum, either. It is already booked for weddings and banquets, including a reunion for Jacksonville High School's Class of 1976 scheduled for this fall.
What it adds up to
Put those three stories next to each other and a pattern shows up that a single "new restaurants in town" roundup would miss. A national grocery chain is finally building here because the rooftops already justified it. A handful of local owners, several of them veterans themselves, built something with more character than the chains a mile away, one storefront at a time, with no corporate site study to lean on. And the town's own history, 26 years in the making, finally has a building to live in. None of these things happened because someone forced them to happen at the same time. They happened because Jacksonville has spent the last few years quietly becoming a place that could support all three at once, whether that showed up in a finalized Harris Teeter deal or a soft-opening night on Court Street that people are still talking about a year later.
If you already live here, none of this needs explaining to you the way it would to someone reading a list of "top new restaurants." You know which corridor you are actually excited about. If you are the kind of person who tracks these shifts because you are weighing whether Onslow County is where you want to put down roots, that is a different conversation, and it is the one we have every day at Buying NC. Reach out when you are ready to talk through what a place like this actually offers beyond what shows up on a map.
