Clemmons This Season: New Openings On Stratford And A Town Center Taking Shape At Village Point

If you have lived in Clemmons for more than a year or two, you already know the shorthand: Tanglewood on the weekends, Stratford Road for errands, the YMCA on Saturday mornings. What you may not have registered, because it is happening in pieces rather than in one ribbon-cutting, is that the map is quietly redrawing itself. Two restaurants are landing on South Stratford this year. A civic core is rising at Village Point. The farmers market is on a path toward a permanent home. Put together, the pieces amount to something Clemmons has never really had before: a center.

This post is a resident's read on what is opening, what is under construction, and where the small daily habits are shifting. If you have been away for a month, here is what changed while you were gone.

Two Openings On South Stratford

South Stratford Road has always been the spine of the food scene here, and this year it gains two new addresses worth writing down.

The first is Hawgfish Shack, a seafood-and-barbecue concept moving into 3260 South Stratford Road, the former Cimarron Steakhouse space on the edge of Clemmons. That address has been dark long enough that most drivers stopped looking at it. A shack menu built around seafood and smoked meat is a genuine shift for that corner.

The second is a name locals will recognize from Winston-Salem and Greensboro. Miam Breakfast House is opening its third Triad location in Clemmons, taking over the space previously occupied by Hawgfish BBQ and Seafood Shack on South Stratford. The Miam concept is breakfast and brunch driven, closing in the early afternoon rather than running a full dinner service. The principal owner also runs the Cagney's Kitchen chain, and the first Miam opened on Stratford Road in Winston-Salem in October 2023, followed by a Greensboro location earlier in 2026.

For residents, the practical takeaway is simple. The Stratford corridor is picking up two openings within a few blocks of each other, one built for weekend late mornings and one built for dinner. If your rotation has felt stuck between Villa Grille, 2520 Tavern and Full Moon Oyster Bar at River Ridge, the rotation is about to widen.

Village Point Is Becoming The Downtown Clemmons Never Had

Mayor Mike Rogers has said it plainly in interviews with the Clemmons Courier: Clemmons does not have a traditional downtown, and the work at Village Point is beginning to change that. That single sentence is the most important line of context for anything you have seen going up near the Village Point Greenway this year.

Here is the backstory in the shortest form possible. Novant Health assembled the 124-acre Village Point tract over roughly a decade and a half. In 2024, the Village of Clemmons purchased four parcels totaling 12.42 acres from Novant for a future town center. In August 2025, the Village broke ground on the first building, a 3,500-square-foot Operations Center that will house sheriff's deputies, extra village staff space and public restrooms. It is scheduled to be finished in the June-to-July window of this year. On June 8, 2026, MLA Design Group presented the next round of designs to the Village Council.

The funding piece is what pushed this from a slow-motion concept into an actual construction schedule. The project received a $4.8 million grant through the North Carolina Appropriations Act, championed by state Representative Jeff Zenger, aimed at the amphitheater and farmers market phases.

Here is where things stand as of the summer of 2026:

The word "airnasium" is worth pausing on. Village leadership has described it as a covered multipurpose facility that could host the farmers market on Saturdays and pickleball or basketball the rest of the week. That is a very different kind of civic building than a plain pavilion, and it hints at how the site is being programmed for weekday use, not just weekend events.

The Saturday Morning Habit Is Moving Toward Permanence

For now, the Clemmons Farmers Market still meets seasonally on Saturdays from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m. at the Jerry Long Family YMCA at 1150 South Peace Haven Road. It is a small ritual that quietly holds the community together, and it is expanding. Village events coordinator Lynette Fox has been adding vendors, and the roster has grown to include names you will recognize from around town: Sam's Ice Cream, the Struggle Bus, BYOB Berry Bowls, Stardust Lemonade and Cart Before the Horse Lemonade have all shown up at recent Village-hosted events alongside the regular market vendors.

If the market moves under the planned airnasium at Village Point in the next phase of construction, that Saturday-morning habit gets a covered home and a longer season. The YMCA has been a good partner, and last year's Clemmons Community Day drew an estimated 8,000 people to that campus. But the direction of travel is clear: a lot of the civic weight currently held by the Y is being redistributed toward Village Point.

Tanglewood Is Still The Anchor, With A Few Things To Know

None of this changes the role Tanglewood Park plays in a Clemmons week. The 1,100-acre former Reynolds estate is still the reason many of us live on this side of the county, and there are a few practical notes worth having in your back pocket this season.

The RV Campground season for 2026 runs March 1 through December 5, which matters if you have out-of-town family threatening a visit. The Aquatic Center runs 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. during its operating season at $8 per ticket, which is still one of the better recreation values in the county. The Arboretum's 26 gardens are at their fullest right now, and the trail network around Mallard Lake gets a lot quieter on weekday evenings than most residents realize.

If you have never stayed at the Manor House Bed and Breakfast on site, it is the restored 1859 residence of Will and Kate Reynolds. It is one of the more underused ideas for hosting relatives who insist on their own space without renting a hotel room across town.

The Festival of Lights will be back this winter, but the more interesting note for 2026 is that campers at the RV park receive free admission to it, which is a detail even long-time residents forget when they are booking family from out of state.

The through-line here is that Clemmons in 2026 is less a bedroom community with a park attached and more a village that is quietly assembling its own center. The Stratford openings, the Village Point construction, the farmers market's trajectory, and the steady programming at Tanglewood are not separate stories. They are the same story told in different registers.

What To Do With This

A few things worth putting on the calendar or the Notes app between now and fall.

• Watch for Hawgfish Shack's opening at 3260 South Stratford and Miam's opening in the former Hawgfish space, both slated for this year on the same road.
• Take a walk on the Village Point Greenway after the Operations Center opens this summer to see the first finished piece of the town center in context.
• Keep the Saturday market on the schedule at the Jerry Long YMCA while it still runs there, since the location is likely to shift once the covered pavilion is built.
• Book a Tanglewood tee time or a Manor House night before the Festival of Lights crowds arrive.

If you have owned a home here for a while, the practical question that starts to surface once a place develops a real center is whether your address is now positioned differently than it was three years ago. Proximity to Village Point, walkability to a future amphitheater, distance to the Stratford corridor, these things quietly reprice over time as the map fills in. If you are curious what your home looks like against a market that is being reshaped in real time, Heidi Christie is available to talk it through without any pressure to list. Schedule a free consultation when you want a read on where your address sits in the new Clemmons.