Four Food Businesses Finding Their Footing Along Kettering's Dorothy Lane–Stroop Corridor

As the Dayton Daily News reported, Pratya Kaewkheaw said: "I always worked as an employee in the restaurant, but this time I'm stepping up to the owner."

That was about a year and a half ago, right before he opened Get the Pho Out at 10 W. Stroop Road, in the storefront a sandwich shop called W.G. Grinders had vacated inside the Castle Hills Shopping Center. He'd spent years working the line at other people's restaurants around Dayton before this one became his. That kind of story is easy to read as one small business finding its footing. Read four of them across this corridor and it starts to look like something else: a pattern this stretch of Kettering keeps repeating, on purpose or not.

A Fruit Stand Started All of This

The corridor's habit of launching things is not new. Before it was a chain of gourmet grocery stores with locations in Dayton, Centerville, Springboro, and now Mason, Dorothy Lane Market was a fruit stand at the corner of Far Hills Avenue and Dorothy Lane, co-owned by Calvin Mayne and Frank Sakada, back in 1948. It took five more years before the company built its first permanent store, and that one went up in Oakwood, not on this corner. The stand itself stayed put at Far Hills and Dorothy Lane. Whatever it is about that intersection, it's been giving small food ventures their first foothold since before most of Kettering's current housing stock existed.

Seventy-eight years later, the same stretch is doing it again, just with different names on the signs.

Four Openings, Two Years, One Corridor

Here's what's actually landed along East Dorothy Lane and the connecting stretch of West Stroop Road since 2024, in the order it happened:

None of these are national chains parking a franchise in a new market. Every one of them is either somebody's first restaurant or a small operation making its first bet on a second location. That's the detail that's easy to miss if you only notice the storefronts changing and don't ask who's actually behind the lease.

Sauce Before Storefront, Employee Before Owner

Rum Runners Cafe didn't start as a restaurant idea at all. Owner Jamie Campbell, a teacher and restaurant industry veteran, and a partner built a BBQ sauce line first, Rum Runners Sauces, and got it onto the shelves at Dorothy Lane Market and Dots Market before they ever signed a lease. The restaurant, a 3,500-square-foot space done up in prohibition-era art deco with black and gold and geometric patterns, came after the product already had a local following. That's a specific kind of local business trajectory: prove the food first, in somebody else's store, then build the room around it.

Get the Pho Out ran the reverse path. Kaewkheaw moved to the Dayton area because his aunt had opened Massaman Thai Cuisine on Patterson Road, and he spent four years working for Sue Whitted, who owns Thai Kitchen, Hello Thai, and Thai Village. When he opened his own place on West Stroop Road, Whitted helped him get there. The Dayton area's Thai food scene isn't a set of competitors so much as a small, connected group of people who worked for each other first.

Chilli's Wings & Fish is the clearest case of the corridor working as a test kitchen in the literal sense. The Kettering location at 1431 E Dorothy Lane was one of the chain's first two restaurants, the other in Dayton. Owner Ali Iqtaifan used the success of those first two to justify a third location in Hamilton, with Columbus already on his radar.

Dixie Dairy Dreem's move is smaller in scale but tells the same story from a different angle. The original shop in Moraine is still running. Kettering Towne Center was the bet that the business had outgrown a single storefront, and general manager Mackenzie Landis described the decision in plain terms: more room, more customers, more of what the shop already does well.

Why This Stretch Specifically

None of this happens by accident of geography. Kettering Towne Center and Castle Hills Shopping Center are both established retail centers with existing anchor traffic, parking already built out, and visibility from Dorothy Lane itself. For a first-time owner or a business betting on a second location, that's meaningfully lower risk than building from scratch or gambling on a strip with no foot traffic history. When a space like the old W.G. Grinders storefront sits empty, it doesn't stay empty long, because the corridor already has the infrastructure the next concept needs. The result is a stretch of road that recycles its vacancies into somebody's first shot rather than sitting still.

What Repeats, Repeats

The building code doesn't reserve this corner for first tries. The pattern holds anyway. A fruit stand became a regional grocery chain without ever leaving the neighborhood that started it. A sauce line became a sit-down restaurant two miles away. An employee at three other people's Thai restaurants became an owner in a strip center storefront. A Kettering storefront became part of a young wing chain's first proof of concept.

If the next vacancy along Dorothy Lane fills the way the last four did, whoever signs that lease probably isn't opening their fifth location. They're opening their first, or their second, and betting on the same corridor that's worked for everyone else on this list.

If you're the kind of person who tracks what's changing on your own street, or you're just deciding where to eat this week, Amber Lynn Dunn keeps an eye on this corridor as closely as anyone. Let's Connect.