Drive the length of 12th Avenue near the mall right now and you'll pass a construction fence, a freshly painted building, and a vacant pad that's already spoken for. Drive three miles west to 7th Street downtown and you'll find a family from Porterville scooping pizza dough by hand in a building that used to be a brewery. Both of these are part of the same restaurant wave hitting Hanford in 2026. They are not, however, the same story.
One of these openings started with a city survey. The other started with a family trying to undo a mistake made almost forty years ago. If you live here and you're wondering why your options for dinner suddenly doubled, the answer is that Hanford is growing along two completely different tracks at the same time, and knowing which track a restaurant is on tells you a lot about what to expect next.
The Corridor The City Asked For
A while back, the City of Hanford ran a resident survey asking people to rank the restaurants they most wanted to see move to town. The results weren't close. Olive Garden took first place with 1,918 votes, and Chick-fil-A came in second at 1,885, though Chick-fil-A actually pulled in more first-choice picks than any other restaurant on the list. BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse, Yard House, and Cracker Barrel rounded out the top five.
Most cities that run these wishlist surveys never see the top vote-getters actually show up. Hanford's did.
Olive Garden opened its first Kings County location on May 3, 2026, near the Hanford Mall at 12th Avenue and Mall Drive. Chick-fil-A has a site under contract in the same shopping center, a 6.5-acre parcel owned by the Tachi Yokut tribe and developed by broker Chris Ajluni of Marcus & Millichap, and the company has confirmed it's working through due diligence and city entitlement now. That corridor is also where Ono Hawaiian BBQ has confirmed its first Kings County spot, at the southeast corner of 12th and Glendale, and where Robertito's Taco Shop, a 24-hour chain known for carne asada fries and its signature RTS tacos, is set to open at 436 S. 11th Avenue. Neither has announced an opening date yet.
Read that sequence again. A resident survey ranked demand, a developer bought land along the corridor that survey pointed to, and national chains started filling it in roughly on schedule. That's not how chain expansion usually works. Usually a company picks a market based on demographics and drive-time data, and residents find out when the sign goes up. Here, the sign went up on the corner residents had already told the city they wanted it on.
The Regional Layer In Between
Not everything landing in Hanford is a national name chasing a survey result. A second, quieter tier is filling in commercial space along the city's older strips, and it's coming from just up the highway rather than from a corporate real estate department in another state.
Kabab City opened at 240 North 12th Avenue, in the building that used to be a Dickey's BBQ, and it's the sixth Central Valley location for a Middle Eastern concept that already has spots in Fresno, Fowler, Reedley, and Merced. Wimpy's Burgers opened at 418 N. Irwin St. on January 26, 2026, part of a homestyle burger chain that started in Tulare in the early 1990s and has since spread through Dinuba, Visalia, and Lemoore before reaching Hanford.
These aren't the restaurants residents ranked in a survey. They're regional operators who've already proven themselves in Tulare County and are working their way north one commercial vacancy at a time. If the 12th Avenue corridor is being built to a wishlist, this middle layer is just quietly filling holes in the map.
The Comeback Nobody Voted On
Three miles from that survey-driven corridor, downtown Hanford is having a completely different kind of moment, and none of it shows up in a city retail poll.
Poor Richard's Pizza reopened at 106 W. 7th Street on May 28, 2026, more than thirty years after its original Hanford location closed. The building it's in used to house Hop Forged Brewing Company. The pizzeria is owned by Cristian and Victoria Diaz, who bought the Porterville original for around $190,000 right after 2020 dining restrictions lifted and then spent four years waiting for the right Hanford spot to open up. Every day, the family commutes fifty minutes each way from Porterville to run it.
The Hanford location has history worth knowing if you're going to eat there. Richard Freeman opened the original in the early 1970s, and it became a local favorite fast, until a hired manager ran it into the ground and it closed in the late 1980s. Diaz says the goal now is simple: keep the recipes exactly as they were, especially the thin, crunchy "cracker" crust that made the place memorable in the first place. The new spot sits next to another downtown newcomer, Tacos San Marcos.
This is not a chain filling a demand curve. It's a family closing a decades-old loop on a building and a recipe that meant something to them long before it meant anything to a spreadsheet.
Superior Dairy Is Coming Back, Just Not Yet
The other downtown story moves slower, and if you've been waiting for it, you should know the timeline is longer than a season.
Superior Dairy has been scooping ice cream at 325 N. Douty St. for nearly a century, and the building falls inside the city's historic district, which means any visible change needs a historic resources permit. The shop stopped seating dine-in customers in March 2020 and never brought the pink vinyl booths back. In the spring of 2025, eight cousins from the Zonneveld family, who have deep roots in the local dairy industry, bought the business for $2.3 million.
Renovations kicked off on April 13, 2026, and the ownership has said the remodel will take an estimated nine to twelve months, which puts a realistic reopening somewhere in the first half of 2027, not this year. In the meantime, Superior Dairy is still selling ice cream out of a trailer near the original storefront. The plan is to keep the tin ceiling and the pink booths intact once the doors reopen, so the dine-in experience people remember stays recognizable rather than getting replaced with something newer and blander.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
If you're trying to keep track of what's actually open versus what's still just an announcement, here's where things stand as of this writing.
- Open now: Olive Garden (May 3, 2026), Poor Richard's Pizza (May 28, 2026), Kabab City, and Wimpy's Burgers (January 26, 2026)
- Confirmed but no opening date yet: Ono Hawaiian BBQ, Robertito's Taco Shop
- In the permitting or contract stage: Chick-fil-A
- Closed for a long renovation, not gone: Superior Dairy, expected back sometime in the first half of 2027
The pattern underneath all of it is worth remembering the next time a new sign goes up somewhere in town. Hanford's dining scene isn't expanding in one direction. The 12th Avenue and Mall Drive corridor is growing because national chains, a resident survey, and a developer's land purchase all pointed at the same spot at roughly the same time. Downtown is coming back to life because a handful of families with personal history in specific buildings decided those buildings were worth the wait, the permits, and in Superior Dairy's case, a year without a storefront at all.
Both are real growth. They just run on different clocks, funded by different kinds of money, for different reasons. Understanding which track a new building is on tells you whether to expect it next month or next year.
If you're thinking about what a neighborhood's daily rhythm actually looks like, not just its median price, this is the kind of texture worth knowing before you commit to a block. Golden Hills Real Estate works with buyers, sellers, and property owners across Hanford, Coalinga, and the surrounding Central Valley, and Johanna Rue-Duval Arroyo and her team are always glad to talk through what a specific street or corridor is actually like to live on. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready to talk it through.
