The Union at Fishers District Has Nine Restaurant Leases and Zero Open Doors

Drive the corner of I-69 and 116th Street on any weekday evening and you will see steel framing, stacked pallets of brick, and a crane that has been part of the skyline near IKEA for well over a year. You will also see, if you have been paying attention to the news, a growing list of restaurant names attached to a development that still has no open doors. Piedra. Kitchen Social. Niku Sushi.Kitchen.Bar. Everbowl. Racha Thai. Flower Child. Dot Sugar. The Oakmont. A still-unnamed fine dining concept from Cunningham Restaurant Group, the Indianapolis group behind Rize and BRU Burger Bar. Nine food and beverage brands, four separate rounds of press releases, and not one confirmed opening date among them.

That gap is not a warning sign about The Union at Fishers District. It is how large mixed-use retail projects actually get built, and understanding the mechanism tells you something about how to read every future announcement on this corner.

The Lease List Grew Long Before Anyone Broke Ground

Thompson Thrift signed its first lease at The Union with Piedra, a Mexican restaurant from the Arechiga Restaurant Group, back in June 2024, nearly a full year before the project's groundbreaking ceremony. Kitchen Social and Niku Sushi.Kitchen.Bar followed that September. By the time Thompson Thrift officially broke ground in May 2025, the company's own release named Everbowl and Racha Thai as additional tenants and set a target of late 2026 for the commercial portion to finish construction. Cunningham Restaurant Group, Flower Child, Dot Sugar, and The Oakmont signed on in January 2026, adding a fourth wave of names to a list that had not yet produced a single open sign.

Here is that timeline laid out plainly:

Every one of those windows is a season, not a day. That pattern holds across every press release Thompson Thrift has issued on this project, and it is worth sitting with if you live anywhere near this corner and have been waiting for a specific restaurant to open.

What a Groundbreaking Actually Announced

The clearest example of how these timelines move sits with the hotel. When Thompson Thrift broke ground on the overall Union project in May 2025, the plan called for a 135-room AC Hotel by Marriott as part of a commercial section expected to finish by late 2026. Five months later, on October 29, 2025, Dora Hospitality held a separate groundbreaking ceremony specifically for that hotel, with Mayor Scott Fadness, Fishers Economic Development Director Megan Baumgartner, and Hamilton County Tourism President Karin Radcliff all in attendance. The official press release covering that ceremony put the hotel's opening at early 2027 instead.

Nobody hid this. It sat right in the same press materials that celebrated the shovels going into the ground. But it is easy to miss the shift when the language around a project stays celebratory and the dates keep moving in small increments buried in the third paragraph.

"My partners and I are proud to be here today to break ground on the first AC by Marriott in the state of Indiana," said Vincent Dora, president at Dora Hospitality.

That quote describes a genuine milestone, Indiana's first AC Hotel by Marriott. It also comes from the same event where the completion date quietly moved four months later than what the project's own groundbreaking announcement had suggested five months earlier.

Reading a Construction Site Better Than a Press Release

If you want to know when a restaurant at The Union is actually close to opening, the press release is the least useful tool you have. Better signals tend to show up in person, weeks or months before any company makes an announcement:

• Hiring signage taped inside a storefront window
• Construction fencing coming down around a specific unit rather than the whole site
• A health inspection posted for a business that has not yet opened
• Patio furniture or outdoor seating appearing outside an otherwise empty space
• Delivery trucks parked at a loading dock on a regular schedule

None of these show up in a Thompson Thrift press release, because a press release is written to announce a lease, not to report a build-out schedule. The 251-unit Union Flats apartment community above the retail space is targeting late 2026 for its first residents, which means people will likely be living above this retail corridor before all of it is staffed and open below them. That is a normal sequence in mixed-use development, but it is easy to read as a delay if you are only tracking announcements.

Two Restaurants That Actually Did Open This Year

None of this means every Fishers restaurant announcement runs slow. Two openings this year followed a much faster, more visible path from lease to open sign, and both sit less than two miles from The Union.

Cafe Patachou opened its eighth location at 8654 E 116th St in the Nickel Plate District in December 2024, with two patios flanking the building and one running parallel to the Nickel Plate Trail. Founder Martha Hoover described the preopening reception as overwhelming, and the space seats 100 inside.

Vicious Biscuit made its Indiana debut at Delaware Plaza, 8711 E 106th St, quietly opening in late December 2025 before holding an official grand opening celebration on January 24, 2026. Local franchise partners David Dessner, Steve Wise, Scott Liberman, and Neda Smith operate the location as Biscuit Boys LLC, and they have already partnered with Mudsock Youth Athletics, donating a percentage of sales on the third Tuesday of every month through the end of 2026. Fishers is set to serve as the flagship for roughly ten more Vicious Biscuit locations planned across Central Indiana.

Both of those restaurants moved from lease signing to open door inside a matter of months, not years. The difference is not the developer or the neighborhood. It is that Delaware Plaza and the Nickel Plate District were existing, finished retail spaces waiting for a tenant, while The Union is being built from the ground up alongside its own hotel, apartments, and office space. Ground-up construction and tenant finish-out simply take longer than moving into a space someone already built.

What This Means If You Live Near This Corner

If you have been planning a dinner out around whichever Union restaurant gets the next headline, plan around Delaware Plaza and the Nickel Plate District instead for anything you want to actually eat this fall. The Union will get there. Nine signed leases on a project with this much financial backing from Thompson Thrift, plus a hotel now under active construction, is not a sign of a stalled development. It is a sign of a development still in the phase where the paperwork moves faster than the buildings.

What is worth remembering the next time a new sign goes up at 116th and I-69 is that the date in the press release describes when the lease was signed, not when the doors will open. The gap between those two things has been consistent across every phase of this project so far, from Piedra's first lease in 2024 through Cunningham Restaurant Group's announcement last January. Watch the fencing, not the announcement.

If you are thinking about what a corner like this means for property values nearby, or you are weighing a move to be closer to where Fishers is actually growing, Sue Pfohl has spent decades tracking how these Hamilton County corridors develop in real time, not just when the press release says they will. Get a Free Home Valuation and start the conversation with someone who reads these timelines for a living.