Drive west on Square Lake Road this month and you will pass a plain storefront getting its second life as a burger counter. Keep going a few minutes north on Franklin Road and you will pass thirty acres of undisturbed forest that, within two years, is set to hold a $17 million event venue built to seat 700 people for dinner. Nothing about the second site looks any different than it did last fall. That gap between what's visible and what's actually moving is the real story in Bloomfield Township right now.
Both projects are happening at the same time, inside the same township, along roads that cross less than two miles apart. One required a commercial lease signature. The other required a special land use hearing in front of the Planning Commission. Reading them side by side tells you something about how growth actually surfaces in a township that has almost no undeveloped commercial land left to build on.
The Corner You Already Drive Past
Patty & Press, the smashburger concept out of Detroit-based G&B Hospitality, has signed a lease at 42983 Woodward Avenue, in the former Zoup! space near the intersection with West Square Lake Road. Co-owner Goran Dimic told the local hospitality press the team is targeting a September or October 2026 opening, which puts the project right around the corner as of this writing. The location will share its building with a FedEx Office Print & Ship Center, and it sits in a stretch of Woodward already anchored by Chicken Shack, Jimmy John's, and Cold Stone Creamery, with downtown Pontiac just to the north.
Dimic's reasoning for the site was straightforward: the intersection already carries heavy traffic, and the space had sat open since the prior tenant left. That is the pattern for most retail change along Bloomfield Township's Woodward and Telegraph corridors. A tenant leaves a storefront, another signs a lease, and the turnover is visible because it happens on a road everyone already drives. The township's own economic planning documents describe this corridor as largely auto-oriented and already built out, which is another way of saying: this is where a new restaurant goes because there is nowhere else zoned for it to go.
Patty & Press already operates a location on Van Dyke Avenue, where the menu centers on smashburgers like the Truffle Smash and the West Coast Smash. The Bloomfield Township location will be the company's next stop after a Shelby Township opening last December, and for now it is the one project the team is focused on completing.
The Thirty Acres You've Never Noticed
Three miles away, off Franklin Road just north of Square Lake, chef Zack Sklar is building something almost nobody driving past would have any reason to know about yet. The project, working title Bloomfield Hollow, is a $17 million, 30,000-square-foot event venue rising on 30 acres of forest, with a sunken amphitheater built into the design. Sklar told the Detroit News the region has plenty of hotel ballrooms but nothing built specifically to host 600 to 700 people for a sit-down dinner outside of one, and that gap is what the venue is meant to fill.
Sklar is not a stranger to Oakland County dining. He owns Mex and Beau's Grillery in Bloomfield Hills, Social in Birmingham, and Como's in Ferndale, and he runs Cutting Edge Cuisine, the catering company that will service events at the new venue and that marks its 20th year in business in 2026. The project cleared a Planning Commission public hearing for its site plan and special land use request on June 15, 2026, and the township's own notice confirms the request went through that process rather than a standard commercial permit. Groundbreaking is expected later this year, with an opening projected for late 2027.
Unlike the Patty & Press storefront, there is no sign up yet, no social media account, and nothing visible from the road. The only public record of the project right now is a planning commission agenda item and two pieces of trade press. If you didn't already know to look for it, you would have no reason to notice that the forest along that stretch of Franklin Road is about to become something else entirely.
Two Kinds of Approval, One Township
The contrast between these two projects is not really about money or ambition. It's about what kind of land each one needed. Patty & Press moved into a space that was already zoned, already built, and already wired for a restaurant. Its approval process was a lease signature. Bloomfield Hollow is converting raw forested acreage into a large-capacity commercial venue, which is a fundamentally different category of township review, one that requires a public hearing precisely because it changes what a piece of land is allowed to hold.
That difference explains why one project is visible from a moving car and the other isn't. Storefront turnover announces itself. Special land use approval does not, unless you are the kind of person who reads planning commission notices for fun. Most residents aren't, which means the two most consequential developments in the township this year are moving at completely different speeds of public awareness, even though they were approved within months of each other.
What the Township Wants You to See This Weekend
That gap in visibility is part of why the Township hosts its own annual Open House, and this year's is Sunday, September 27, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Township Campus on Telegraph Road, just south of Long Lake Road. The Bloomfield Township Fire Department is running a live demonstration at noon, the Police Department is bringing a dunk tank that benefits Special Olympics along with a driving simulator borrowed from the Oakland County Police Academy, and every department is expected to have its own table and activity.
It's a low-key event on paper, but it functions as the one afternoon a year when the township's own machinery becomes walk-up legible. The same commission that heard the Bloomfield Hollow special land use request, the same fire crews who will eventually inspect that finished venue, the same staff who process every lease and every permit along Woodward, all show up in one place with no agenda item required to talk to them. If you want a sense of how the township actually functions between one planning commission vote and the next, this is the closest thing to a public tour.
Bloomfield Township doesn't announce change the way a downtown does. There's no single strip where every new business puts up a sign in sequence. Instead there are two corridors moving on two different clocks: the retail turnover along Woodward and Telegraph that anyone can watch happen, and the special land use approvals working through forested parcels that only show up in a meeting notice until the day the trees come down. Both are real growth. Only one of them currently looks like it.
At Cindy Kahn Real Estate, we track both kinds of change as a matter of course, the storefront leases and the planning commission agendas alike, because both eventually shape what a Bloomfield Township address is worth to the people living inside it. If you're curious about how a specific project or parcel near you is moving through the township's process, Cindy Kahn is always glad to talk through what we're seeing.