Drive past Valencia Town Center on McBean Parkway this month and you will pass a construction fence wrapped around the old Sears building, dark since the store closed years ago. A few minutes later your phone might buzz with a headline about ten new dining and entertainment destinations coming to the same mall. Read the press release and you would think the whole property is transforming at once. Walk the actual halls and you will find gelato cases and a renovated Lululemon sitting a hundred yards from a shuttered anchor that will not open again until sometime in 2027.
Both things are true. The gap between them is the story, and it is the reason the fastest-moving restaurant news in Valencia this year is not happening inside the mall at all.
The Announcement Everyone Shared
On April 30, 2026, Centennial, the Dallas-based company that bought Valencia Town Center for $199 million in 2023, announced a wave of ten new tenants adding more than 175,000 square feet across dining, entertainment and retail. The list reads like a lifestyle center's dream lineup: Round1 Bowling & Arcade, KPOT Korean BBQ & Hot Pot, Bushfire Kitchen, Bacio di Latte gelato, Slice House by celebrity pizzaiolo Tony Gemignani, Wafflecomb, the electronics and jewelry retailer Trelen, longtime Southern California skate shop Pharmacy Boardshop, and expansions for J David and Pandora. General manager Michael de Leon framed the additions as an attempt to make every visit feel different, pointing to Round1's arcade energy and KPOT's shared-table format as the kind of contrast the center wanted.
What the announcement does not spell out clearly is timing, and timing is everything if you are trying to plan an actual weekend. Some of these are small-format tenants that can open in months. One of them is not.
| Tenant | Category | Realistic timeline |
|---|---|---|
| KPOT Korean BBQ & Hot Pot | Dining | Already listed as an active location on the brand's own site |
| Bacio di Latte, Wafflecomb | Dessert | Small-footprint, part of this summer's debuts |
| Lululemon | Retail (renovation) | Reopened, not a new build |
| Trelen, Pharmacy Boardshop, J David, Pandora | Retail | Standard suite build-outs, weeks to months |
| Bushfire Kitchen | Dining | Mid-size restaurant build, no confirmed date beyond 2026-27 window |
| Round1 Bowling & Arcade | Entertainment anchor | 125,000-square-foot rebuild of the former Sears box, targeted for 2027 |
Nine of the ten names on that list are the kind of tenant improvement a mall can execute in a single lease cycle. One of them, Round1, is a ground-up conversion of a 125,000-square-foot department store that has sat empty since a 2019 plan to bring in a Costco and luxury cinema fell apart in 2021. That is not a small distinction. It is the difference between a restaurant you can book this fall and an arcade you are still a year or more away from walking into.
The Box That Explains the Timeline
The Sears building has a longer history than the press release lets on. Westfield originally floated a redevelopment there in 2019 that would have brought in a Costco with rooftop parking, a luxury cinema and a gym. That plan died in April 2021. For most of the years since, the anchor sat dark while Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield defaulted on a $195 million loan tied to the property and eventually sold the mall to Centennial in September 2023.
Even after the sale, progress was slow enough to draw public frustration. When the Santa Clarita City Council blessed a flexible redevelopment framework for the property in June 2024, Mayor Laurene Weste described the mall's roughly 111 acres as having gone stagnant, telling city staff it was not good to have that much land sitting idle in the center of town. As of February 2026, with construction on Round1 underway but the broader Town Center Specific Plan absent from the city's own five-year budget discussion, council members were still pressing for answers. Councilman Bill Miranda put it plainly at a budget meeting, asking whether there was anything the city could do to push things forward, since the mall's own team had not presented what he called a genuine "game mover" for the coming year.
That is the context worth knowing before you get excited about an arcade. Round1's Japanese-import arcade games, professional billiards and its planned YUU Japanese Food Hall sound great, and they are real. They are also arriving on a timeline shaped by a five-year municipal planning process and a decade of false starts on that same footprint. Nothing about that history moves faster just because a press release uses the word "milestone."
Where the Restaurant Growth Is Actually Landing
While the mall works through its multi-year anchor conversion, the fastest new dining options in Valencia have opened somewhere else entirely.
CAVA opened its Valencia location at 27055 McBean Parkway in the Valencia Promenade shopping center in early March 2026, a separate property from Valencia Town Center. The fast-casual Mediterranean chain has been expanding aggressively across Southern California, and this location came together and opened in a matter of months, not years, because it did not require converting a dead department store.
A few miles away, Yard House and Texas Roadhouse are both planned for the River Oaks Shopping Center along Magic Mountain Parkway, part of a broader run of restaurant announcements across Santa Clarita Valley in 2026. Neither of those openings depends on what happens with the old Sears anchor. They are proceeding on their own strip-center timelines, which in this market has consistently meant faster turnaround than anything tied to the mall's specific plan.
The pattern holds even inside the Town Center itself. The tenants that are actually seating customers this year, KPOT among them, are the ones that only needed a standard suite build-out. The tenant everyone is talking about needed a construction crew, a demolition permit and a multi-year redevelopment agreement with the city.
What This Means If You Are Planning an Actual Weekend
If you live in Valencia and you are trying to figure out where to eat this fall, the practical takeaway is simple. Do not wait on the mall's headline additions. Plan around what is already open or genuinely close:
- KPOT for Korean barbecue and hot pot, already operating according to the brand's own location listing
- CAVA at Valencia Promenade on McBean Parkway for a faster Mediterranean option outside the mall entirely
- Bacio di Latte and Wafflecomb for dessert once their small-footprint builds finish this year
- Yard House and Texas Roadhouse at River Oaks Shopping Center once those leases translate into open doors
Save your excitement about Round1's bowling lanes and karaoke rooms for 2027. The 125,000-square-foot buildout is real, and when it opens it will likely be the biggest entertainment addition Valencia has seen in years. It is just not a this-year plan, whatever the press release's tone might suggest.
None of this means the mall's transformation is empty talk. Centennial has a track record of turning around aging regional malls elsewhere in the country, and the company has been explicit that it sees Valencia Town Center becoming a live-work-play destination over time. But "over time" is doing real work in that sentence, and a resident planning dinner this weekend needs the near-term map, not the long-range vision.
Understanding which announcements convert into actual doors quickly, and which ones are still working through permitting and construction, is the same skill that matters when you are reading a market update or a listing description. The headline is rarely the whole story. The timeline underneath it usually is.
If you are keeping an eye on how Valencia is changing, whether because you are weighing a move or simply want a clearer read on what is actually happening in your own neighborhood, the Rodney Johnson Team pays attention to details like these every day. Reach out to schedule a Confidential Market Consultation and get a straight answer instead of a press release.
