Route 35 Keeps Replacing Restaurants. Route 36 Never Had To.

If you've sat in the waiting room at the Hazlet Motor Vehicle Commission office, you've had a clear view of Hangar 36 through the plate glass of Airport Plaza, its sign built around a biplane silhouette, its dining room done up with the kind of aviation touches that make you wonder if the name is just a theme or something more literal. It's more literal. The parking lot you circled twice looking for a spot sits on the old runway of Walling Field, a general-aviation airport that operated at the corner of Route 36 and Middle Road into the early 1960s before the land became a shopping center and, eventually, the address on your MVC renewal notice.

A mile away on Route 35, Hazlet Town Center just finished a different kind of transition. The space that housed TGI Fridays for years sat empty after the chain's 2024 Chapter 11 bankruptcy forced it to close, and on August 3, 2026, Buffalo Wild Wings opened in its place, a 7,400-square-foot sports bar that became the brand's 21st location in New Jersey.

Both are Hazlet commercial strips. Neither is trying to be the other. Understanding why is a decent shortcut to understanding how this town actually runs, whether you're picking a dinner spot tonight or just tired of not knowing what that airplane sign is about.

A Parking Lot Built on an Actual Runway

Airport Plaza isn't named for the DMV counter that processes your registration. The land was Walling Field, documented in William B. Longo's history "Hazlet Township" and confirmed by the plaza's own management, which built its identity on the site's back story rather than burying it. Small planes flew out of that stretch of Route 36 for decades. By the time the airfield closed in the early 1960s, the property was already headed toward the retail future it has now, but the name stuck, and so, evidently, did the memory, because when a new restaurant moved in decades later, it built its entire concept around honoring that history instead of ignoring it.

Hangar 36 opened in the spring of 2025 in the space long occupied by a Perkins, and rather than smoothing over the transition, the new owners leaned into it. The menu names, the signage, even the framing of the plaza itself in the restaurant's own materials treat the aviation past as the point, not a footnote. It sits alongside a lineup that includes Bao Dumplings & Bao Tea, Angela's Pizza & Restaurant, a Carvel, and a KFC, none of which arrived because a corporate chain somewhere else went bankrupt and needed a new box to fill. They're just there, and have been for a while.

Route 35 Runs on a Different Clock

Hazlet Town Center tells a different story, and it's not a worse one, just a more familiar kind of retail churn. The plaza's tenant list reads like a highway strip built for national anchors: Aldi, Planet Fitness, Bank of America, Wawa, Panera Bread, Bubbakoo's Burritos, and Burlington. When TGI Fridays went under in 2024, the box didn't reinvent itself the way Airport Plaza's old Perkins did. It sat vacant until a franchisee decided it was worth filling with something bigger, wings-and-screens, built for weekend crowds rather than regulars who know the owner's name.

Munson Restaurant Group, the operator behind the new Buffalo Wild Wings, framed the opening around exactly that kind of gathering. Marketing Manager Joe Tripodi put it this way when the opening was announced:

"Hazlet sits in the middle of communities where people already gather around sports, family outings and shared experiences, and that connection is what makes bringing this restaurant here so meaningful."

That's a fair read of what Route 35 is for. It's the corridor built to catch whoever's driving through, and it does that job well. The new location is expected to employ around 100 people, which says something about the scale a highway box like this is built to support once it's occupied. But it also means the strip's character depends less on any single business sticking around and more on whichever chain currently needs a spot on Route 35.

Here's how the two corridors actually stack up against each other right now:

Neither approach is wrong. One is built to absorb whatever chain needs a location next. The other has spent sixty years being reused without ever needing the kind of refresh Route 35 just went through.

The Rest of Hazlet Isn't Sitting Still Either

The two commercial strips aren't the only place Hazlet has been busy. Six new pickleball courts opened at Beers Street Park on October 17, 2025, built on the site of the old tennis courts next to Beers Street Elementary School. That's on top of the six courts already running at Veterans Memorial Park since July 2023 and a single court at Freedom Park, giving the town three separate places to play depending on which end of Hazlet you're coming from.

There's more on the way. Township records from October 2025 point to a planned 25,000-square-foot indoor recreation facility at Veterans Park, on the site of the old outdoor roller hockey rink, backed by $1.275 million in combined state and county funding secured so far. It's designed to hold pickleball courts, a multipurpose athletic court, and a fitness area under one roof, which would give Hazlet its first indoor option for a sport that's clearly outgrown its original two outdoor complexes.

None of this is retail churn. It's the kind of quiet civic investment that doesn't show up on a highway sign, but it's just as real a signal about where the town is putting its money as a new sports bar is.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

If you're picking where to eat tonight, the difference between the two strips is worth knowing. Airport Plaza rewards showing up more than once. Hangar 36 built its whole identity around a history most people drive past without noticing, and the plaza's other tenants, Bao Dumplings & Bao Tea, Angela's Pizza, have been there long enough that regulars know them by name rather than by brand. Route 35 will keep working the way highway strips work, which means whatever's filling that former Fridays box today might be something else in five years. That's not a knock on Buffalo Wild Wings. It's just what a strip built for volume looks like.

If you're deciding where to spend a Saturday, Beers Street Park's new courts give you an option that didn't exist a year ago, and the indoor facility being planned at Veterans Park means pickleball season in Hazlet might stop being a season at all.

Knowing which corridor does what, and why one of them sits on an actual runway, is the kind of detail that turns "I live in Hazlet" into actually understanding the place.

If you're curious about more of what's changing in Hazlet, from new openings to what's happening at the township level, Viviana Mejia keeps close tabs on towns like this one because she works in them every day. Reach out anytime to talk about the neighborhood, in English or Spanish. Hablemos.