Why would a restaurant that opened its doors in 1977 and never once expanded finally break that habit in 2026, and why did it pick a stretch of road two miles from where most of its regulars already lived?
Fujiyama Steakhouse of Japan held the line on a single location for nearly fifty years. The original restaurant started inside an Indianapolis hotel, built by John and K.C. Boespflug on a love of Japanese food and a desire to share it with Hoosiers. Half a century of hibachi tables, one address, no second location, not even when the surrounding city grew up around it. That changed on Friday, September 25, when the company opened its first new brick-and-mortar location in its history at 1535 W. Stones Crossing Road in Greenwood.
The company's own account of the decision matters more than the ribbon cutting. Staff members already lived south of Indianapolis, and Greenwood and Franklin residents had been asking for a location closer to home. A fifty-year-old business does not usually move on customer requests alone. It moves when the math around those requests changes, when enough rooftops and enough regulars accumulate along one corridor that a second location stops being a risk and starts being an obvious next step.
A road that stopped being a shortcut
Stones Crossing Road has spent the last several years quietly turning into something other than a connector between State Road 135 and the neighborhoods east of it. The Fujiyama opening is the most visible marker, but it is not the first anchor to land there.
Stone Creek Dining Company made the same bet in 2025, relocating its Greenwood restaurant to 1464 W. Stones Crossing Road and reopening on May 20 of that year. A white-tablecloth dinner spot does not relocate to a stretch of road on a whim. It follows rooftops and traffic counts, and both had clearly caught up with this corridor before Fujiyama ever filed paperwork.
Healthcare followed the same logic. Franciscan Health Imaging Stones Crossing opened in Greenwood in May 2026, bringing CT, MRI, ultrasound and walk-in diagnostic X-ray services to the corridor, along with mammography and DEXA scans through the attached Franciscan Rejuvenate Medical Spa. Franciscan's own announcement framed it as a convenience play for people already living in the area, not a bet on future growth. The patients were already there. The imaging center just closed the gap between where people lived and where they had to drive for a scan.
So the sequence reads less like a coincidence and more like a pattern: a dining relocation in 2025, a diagnostic imaging center in the spring of 2026, and a fifty-year restaurant chain's first expansion in the fall of 2026, all within a few blocks of each other on the same road.
What's already open, and what's still under construction
For anyone who lives along this stretch, the practical question is simpler than the history: what can you actually walk into right now, and what is still scaffolding and site plans.
Open today:
- Fujiyama Steakhouse of Japan, 1535 W. Stones Crossing Road, opened September 25, 2026, with executive chef Chad Ingram, who started as a dishwasher at the Indianapolis location at age 15, overseeing the new kitchen
- Stone Creek Dining Company, 1464 W. Stones Crossing Road, reopened at this location in May 2025
- Franciscan Health Imaging Stones Crossing, offering CT, MRI, ultrasound and diagnostic imaging since May 2026
Still taking shape a short drive south, at the intersection of State Road 135 and Stones Crossing Road, is the Swartz Crossing development. Commercial filings for the site describe an entertainment anchor in the Ark Sports Complex, a multi-court basketball and activity center built to host regional tournaments, alongside a Crew Carwash and plans for additional restaurant and retail space. None of that is open yet. It is worth knowing about because it explains why a legacy restaurant chain looked at this particular road and saw more than one good location's worth of demand.
The gap between the old hub and the new one
Old Town Greenwood and the Greenwood Park Mall have been the default answers to "where do we eat tonight" for anyone in this part of Johnson County for years, and neither is going anywhere. What has changed is that Stones Crossing Road no longer requires that drive.
That is a small but real shift in how daily life works if you live in Frances-Stones Crossing or the neighborhoods feeding into this corridor. A dinner reservation, a diagnostic scan, a Friday night out no longer default to a ten or fifteen minute drive toward downtown Greenwood. They are becoming errands you run within a mile or two of home, on a road that ten years ago was mostly agricultural land and a church parking lot.
The employment side of the story backs this up. Fujiyama's Greenwood location added to a combined staff of roughly 170 people across both restaurants, with Indianapolis employees training the new hires in the days before opening. That is not a pop-up. It is a company treating its second location, after fifty years of having only one, as a permanent fixture rather than an experiment.
What this looks like on a Tuesday
If you already live along Stones Crossing Road, the last twelve months have quietly rewritten a few of the answers you give without thinking:
Where do we go for a nice dinner without driving toward the mall? Stone Creek Dining Company has been sitting right here since May 2025. Where do we get an MRI without a referral to a downtown Indianapolis facility? Franciscan Health Imaging Stones Crossing has offered that since this spring. Where do we take out-of-town family for hibachi? As of September 25, the answer is a five-decade-old name that finally decided this road was worth a second address.
None of this required a rebrand of the neighborhood or a marketing push. It required enough people already living here, and enough businesses paying attention to that fact, for the corridor to stop functioning as a pass-through and start functioning as a destination in its own right. The Swartz Crossing development at State Road 135 will add to that story once its retail and entertainment components open, but the case for this stretch of road was already made before a single shovel hit that ground.
If you're weighing what's happening on your own block or wondering how a fast-changing corridor like this one shows up in local home values, the Jeff Paxson Team tracks these shifts across Greenwood as they happen, not after the fact. Get a free home valuation to see how the changes on Stones Crossing Road are showing up in your own neighborhood.
