The Oregon District's New Restaurants Keep Opening Next Door to the Old Ones
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
Walk down Wayne Avenue past Wheat Penny Oven & Bar this fall and you'll pass a storefront that wasn't serving breakfast a year ago. It is now, every day from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., and the people cooking in it are the same two people who have run Wheat Penny since 2013. They didn't need to look for a location. They just needed the space next door.
That's the part of this year's Oregon District dining news that a quick scroll through "new restaurants in Dayton" search results won't tell you. The neighborhood isn't pulling in a wave of first-time restaurateurs chasing a hot address. It's watching the operators who already built its reputation choose to expand sideways, one storefront over, rather than start something new across town. If you live here or spend your weekends here, that distinction changes how you should think about the next few months on Wayne Avenue and Fifth Street.
Liz Valenti and Dave Rawson had been thinking about a second concept for more than two years before Piccolo Orsetto opened. They already run Meadowlark in Kettering and Wheat Penny in the Oregon District. Rather than scout a third neighborhood, they took the space at 521 Wayne Avenue, in the historic Dietz Block building, immediately next door to Wheat Penny. It's the first adjacent brick-and-mortar expansion the pair has made since Wheat Penny opened thirteen years ago.
A few blocks over, Patrick and Casey Van Voorhis made a similar call. They run Grist, the handcrafted pasta restaurant on West Fifth Street known for eggs sourced from a family farm. When they were ready to open a second place, they didn't take it out of the neighborhood. They signed a lease in January 2025 on the former Roost Modern Italian space at 524 E. Fifth Street and spent a year and a half turning it into Resonant, a tasting-menu restaurant unlike anything else currently running in the Dayton area.
And this month, Jack and Natalie Skilliter are doing it a third time. They founded the original Corner Kitchen at Wayne Avenue and Fifth Street. That business changed hands to a Dallas-based restaurant group in 2021 and closed last year. Instead of walking away from the neighborhood, the Skilliters are opening a new concept, Whoa Dogs, two blocks from where they started, at the former Smokin' BBQ site on the corner of Fifth and Patterson.
Three different ownership groups, three different cuisines, and all three chose to stay inside a stretch of streets you can walk end to end in about ten minutes. That's not a coincidence worth glossing over. It's the clearest read available on how the people who actually run restaurants here see the district's near-term future.
Here's where things stand on the ground right now:
Five names, five different feelings, all inside a corridor most residents already walk for other reasons.
Resonant's opening wasn't the last headline it made this year. About eleven weeks after the Van Voorhises opened their doors, the ceiling in the dining room collapsed. The restaurant closed over a weekend while the couple sorted out repairs, an unwelcome reminder that renovating a century-old commercial building for fine dining comes with structural risk that no amount of planning fully rules out.
They didn't take long to get back open. On Wednesday, September 9, the restaurant posted an update to its Facebook page.
"We're back!"
Short, plain, and exactly the kind of update a neighborhood restaurant owes its regulars. If you had a reservation on the books during that stretch, you already know the story. If you didn't, it's worth knowing before you book: the dining room is open again, but it's also proof that even the most carefully renovated space in this corridor is still an old building doing old-building things.
Whoa Dogs is the newest name on this list, and it carries the most personal weight. Jack and Natalie Skilliter now live in Lisbon, Portugal, but they flew back to Dayton for three weeks in August to pick vendors, finalize signage, and get the space ready. Michael "Nails" Kubilius, who worked as sous chef at the original Corner Kitchen, is staying on the ground as general manager once the doors open.
The menu is straightforward on purpose: quarter-pound all-beef hot dogs, house-made chili, and soft serve in vanilla, chocolate, or swirl with custom toppings. Jack Skilliter, a Culinary Institute of America graduate, has framed it as an easy, affordable stop rather than a destination meal, the kind of place built for a quick lunch, a DoorDash order, or a scoop of soft serve after a show at the Levitt. Natalie Skilliter has talked about the project as a way to help bring life back to a corner that matters to both of them, even from thousands of miles away.
If you've been walking past that building at Fifth and Patterson wondering what's happening behind the papered windows, that's the answer. Watch for the doors to open in the coming weeks.
Here's the part that catches longtime residents off guard: while the restaurant count on this stretch is climbing, the district's signature street closure isn't expanding to match it. Out on 5th, the weekend program that shuts Fifth Street to cars between Wayne Avenue and Patterson Boulevard so restaurants can spill onto the pavement, used to run every weekend through September. In 2026 it was scaled back to just one or two weekends a month, starting the first weekend of May to line up with Oregon District Derby Day.
That means more restaurants are competing for fewer weekends of patio-friendly street space than the district has had in past years. If your plan is to hit several spots in one evening on foot, it's worth checking the closure schedule before you go rather than assuming Fifth Street will be car-free just because it's Saturday.
The district's other seasonal tradition, Taste of the Oregon, ran on Saturday, September 13, offering dollar-ticket samples from restaurants around the neighborhood with proceeds supporting the Oregon District Business Association's work on snow removal, planters, and block parties. If you missed it this year, it's an annual event worth putting on next September's calendar, especially now that there are several more kitchens in the rotation than there were the last time it ran.
None of this requires a special occasion. Start at Piccolo Orsetto for coffee and a Dutch baby, walk two blocks to see whether the papered windows at Fifth and Patterson have turned into an open sign, and end at Resonant if you're in the mood to book ahead for something slower. The distance between all three is shorter than most people's daily walk to their car.
What's changed on Wayne Avenue and Fifth Street this year isn't the neighborhood's identity. It's the number of doors the same trusted names are willing to open into it.
If you know this stretch of the Oregon District and you're the kind of person who ends up giving directions to first-time visitors, I'd love to hear which spot you send them to first. I'm always up for talking Dayton food as much as Dayton real estate. Rockin' Real Estate with Regina — Let's Connect.
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