For months, the storefront at 126 West Main Street sat quiet. Gibby's had closed just before the 2024 Pumpkin Show, its longtime owners retiring after decades of feeding the town, and the space that used to smell like Friday night dinner specials went dark heading into that winter.
Someone finally turned the lights back on. But the story of what replaced Gibby's, and what opened at the other end of town a few months later, says more about how Circleville is actually growing than either restaurant does on its own.
The Space Everyone Watched
Black Diamond Circleville LLC took over the old Gibby's building with a plan to split it into two concepts: a Taproom up front and a full steakhouse behind it. The Taproom opened first, in spring 2025, built around Tavern-style burgers and sliders using meat from Train Station Meats & Market, a supplier already known around Circleville. The Steakhouse followed, though not quite on the early-summer timeline first announced. It didn't fully open until August 2025, a stretch that anyone who has watched a downtown renovation drag past its projected date will recognize as pretty normal for a from-scratch buildout.
Chef Alfonso Contrisciani, who also owns Alfonso's Italian Grille in Lancaster and Alfonso's Italian Bakery and Kitchen in Nelsonville, helped shape the menu. The bacon-wrapped scallops with apple butter cider brown butter coulis and the bourbon molasses pecan pie have become the dishes regulars mention first. Reviews on OpenTable and Tripadvisor land the food solidly above average for the area, with more than one diner comparing the prime rib favorably to what they'd pay for in Columbus, minus the drive.
Circleville wasn't an afterthought for the Black Diamond brand either. The company's roots are in Nelsonville, with tasting rooms that have spread to Shawnee, Greenfield, and Marietta, but Circleville was where the Steakhouse concept debuted first. Johnstown didn't get its own Black Diamond Prime location until March 2026, months after Circleville's doors opened. For a town of roughly 13,000 people, being the proving ground for a regional restaurant concept before a larger central Ohio market is a detail locals can point to.
The Circleville Herald summed up the town's mood plainly after the opening, noting the community had spent years agreeing on one thing they wanted downtown. The people behind the project described their own approach in a Facebook post announcing the opening: "We are an investment group of persons from South and SE Ohio investing in smaller communities." That's a specific kind of bet, one built around reviving an existing downtown storefront rather than building new.
On South Court Street, A Different Kind of New
While Main Street was working through its slow-motion reopening, a very different kind of restaurant growth was happening at the other end of town. Bojangles opened its first Circleville location at 1280 South Court Street in February 2026, its fourth restaurant in the central Ohio market after Heath, Columbus, and Delaware. The company hosted a private event for local first responders before the public opening, letting Circleville's fire department, police, EMTs, and medics sample the chicken sandwiches and biscuits before anyone else got a plate.
That opening wasn't a one-off. It's part of a franchise agreement with longtime operator Jeff Rigsby, who signed on in 2021 to bring about 45 Bojangles locations to the region over several years, with roughly 15 planned for the greater Columbus area. Circleville's is one stop in a much bigger regional rollout, sited on South Court Street where the highway traffic and drive-through convenience make sense for a chain building volume across a metro area rather than anchoring a single downtown block.
Here's how the two openings line up side by side:
| Black Diamond Steakhouse | Bojangles | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | 126 W. Main St. | 1280 S. Court St. |
| Opened | August 2025 (full Steakhouse) | February 2026 |
| Replaced | Gibby's, closed 2024 | New standalone build |
| Ownership model | Regional group anchoring a historic storefront | National franchise, local operator |
| What it signals | Downtown preservation-driven investment | Corridor growth tied to metro expansion |
What the Split Actually Tells You
Neither of these openings is unusual on its own. Small towns get chain restaurants all the time, and plenty of historic downtowns land a steakhouse now and then. What's worth paying attention to is that both happened in Circleville within about six months of each other, and they happened in two completely different parts of town for two completely different reasons.
Main Street's growth is tied to preservation. The city created its first downtown redevelopment district in 2016 and added four more covering East Main, Court Street, West Main, and Franklin Street in 2019, structured specifically to fund improvements to existing buildings rather than new construction. Groups like Uptown Circleville exist to keep that stretch of town active, and a project like Black Diamond's, which reuses a beloved building's bones rather than replacing them, fits that model directly.
South Court Street is growing along a different logic entirely, the same one that brings a fourth Bojangles to central Ohio because the math works for a franchisee expanding across a metro area, not because that particular stretch of road asked for it. Both kinds of growth are real, and both add something to daily life in Circleville. But they're not interchangeable, and conflating them misses what's actually happening here: a small town absorbing two different investment strategies at once, one rooted in what already exists downtown and one riding the momentum of a bigger regional market.
Why This Matters Before the Pumpkin Show
The Circleville Pumpkin Show runs October 21 through 24 this year, and it's the moment both sides of this story get tested at very different points in their history. The show pulls more than 400,000 visitors into a town of about 13,000 over four days, spread across more than nine city blocks of downtown. Black Diamond already went through one Pumpkin Show as a downtown business, since its Steakhouse opened in August 2025, just weeks ahead of that year's crowds. This October will be Bojangles' first, its drive-through and dining room facing festival traffic for the first time since opening in February.
Black Diamond's Main Street address puts it inside the festival's downtown footprint, the kind of spot a visitor might duck into for a sit-down dinner away from the fairground food booths. Bojangles, further from that footprint on South Court Street, is built more for the daily commuter and quick-service crowd that keeps coming through Circleville long after the show tents come down in late October.
If you already live here, none of this changes your Tuesday night. But it's worth knowing that the town's two biggest restaurant stories of the past year didn't happen by accident, and they didn't happen in the same place for the same reason. One rebuilt something the town missed. The other extended something a franchisee was already building across the region. Circleville got both at once, which is a specific kind of luck for a town this size.
If you're weighing a move to Circleville, or thinking about what a stretch of Main Street or South Court Street actually means for daily life here, Jordan Silcott has spent years working Central Ohio's smaller communities and can walk you through what a neighborhood is really like beyond the listing photos. Let's Connect.
