At a Santa Clarita budget meeting back in February, a city councilman asked the kind of question that gets asked when patience runs out in public. Bill Miranda wanted to know if there was anything the city could still do to move the Valencia Town Center's redevelopment along, because the mall's own team hadn't shown up with what he called a "game mover" for the coming year.
That was February 2026. Eight months later, here's where things actually stand: one of the ten businesses the mall announced with fanfare in April has opened its doors and started serving customers. The other nine are somewhere between under construction and still on paper. If you live near McBean Parkway and you've been wondering which of those splashy announcements you can actually walk into this weekend, the answer says less about the mall's marketing team and more about how retail redevelopment actually works.
The List Everyone Saw in April
On April 30, 2026, Centennial, the Dallas-based company that bought Valencia Town Center in September 2023, announced a wave of ten new tenants adding more than 175,000 square feet of dining, entertainment, and retail space. The list read like a lifestyle-center wish list: Round1 Bowling & Arcade, KPOT Korean BBQ & Hot Pot, Bushfire Kitchen, Bacio di Latte gelato, Slice House by celebrity pizzaiolo Tony Gemignani, Wafflecomb, electronics and jewelry retailer Trelen, longtime Southern California skate shop Pharmacy Boardshop, plus expansions for J David and Pandora. General manager Michael de Leon described the goal as making 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 press release didn't spell out was timing, and for a resident trying to plan an actual dinner, timing is the only part that matters.
The One That Already Opened
On Friday, September 11, 2026, Bacio di Latte held its grand opening at Valencia Town Center, at 24201 Valencia Blvd, Suite 2670. The gelato shop took over the space that had been Mayan Jewelers at The Patios. The Santa Clarita Valley Chamber of Commerce hosted the ribbon-cutting, and the guest list said something about how much attention this small storefront pulled: U.S. Representative George Whitesides, Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo, Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, and LA County Assessor Jeff Prang all showed up to present certificates.
That's a lot of elected officials for a gelato counter. It's also proof that at least part of the mall's April announcement was real and close, not aspirational.
The One That Won't Open Until 2027
Now compare that to Round1 Bowling & Arcade, the marquee name on the same list. Round1 is taking over the roughly 125,000-square-foot space at the southeast end of the property that Sears vacated years ago, and it's set to include Spo-cha, the brand's sports-challenge concept, along with a YUU Japanese Food Hall. Construction was underway as of early 2026, according to the Santa Clarita Valley Signal, but the opening isn't expected until early 2027.
Do the math on that gap. Bacio di Latte went from announcement to ribbon-cutting in under five months. Round1 will take close to two years, assuming nothing slips further, which is a reasonable thing to assume given that the space sat empty for years before Round1 signed on and a 2019 plan for a Costco and luxury cinema at the same site fell apart in 2021 before a shovel ever hit dirt.
Why the Gap Isn't a Coincidence
The pattern here isn't random and it isn't unique to this mall. It's the difference between leasing an existing storefront and converting a dead department store.
Bacio di Latte moved into a jewelry store's old footprint. The plumbing, the electrical, the bones of the space were already built for retail. Swap the signage, install a gelato case, open the doors. CAVA followed the same playbook a few miles away: the fast-casual Mediterranean chain opened its Valencia location at 27055 McBean Parkway in the Valencia Promenade shopping center in early March 2026, a separate property from the mall entirely, and it went from lease to open sign in a matter of months because it didn't need to convert anything.
Round1 is a different kind of project. A former department store the size of a small stadium needs new HVAC, new load-bearing work for bowling lanes, new everything. That's not a five-month build. It's a multi-year one, layered on top of a mall property that Mayor Laurene Weste once described as having gone stagnant across its roughly 111 acres, back when the city council approved a flexible redevelopment framework for the site in June 2024. The mall currently carries one vacant anchor of its own, the space Forever 21 left behind when it closed in 2025, alongside Macy's, JCPenney, Regal Cinemas, H&M, and Gold's Gym.
None of this means Centennial's plan is empty talk. It means a resident reading a press release needs to sort the list into two buckets: storefront leases that move fast, and anchor conversions that move on a different clock entirely.
| Business | Type of space | Status as of September 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Bacio di Latte | Former jewelry storefront | Open since September 11, 2026 |
| CAVA | New-build strip center space (Valencia Promenade) | Open since early March 2026 |
| Round1 Bowling & Arcade | Full anchor conversion (former Sears) | Under construction, targeting early 2027 |
| Yard House, Texas Roadhouse | Planned strip center space (River Oaks) | Announced, following separate leasing timeline |
The Restaurants That Didn't Wait on the Mall at All
That last row matters if you're mapping out where to eat this fall. Yard House and Texas Roadhouse are both headed to the River Oaks Shopping Center along Magic Mountain Parkway, a different property from both the mall and Valencia Promenade. Neither opening depends on anything happening at the old Sears site. They're moving on their own strip-center timeline, which in this market has consistently meant faster turnaround than anything tied to a department-store conversion.
If your read on Valencia's dining scene has been shaped entirely by the mall's press releases, this is the correction: some of the fastest-moving food news this year isn't happening inside Valencia Town Center property lines at all. It's happening at Valencia Promenade and River Oaks, where landlords are filling existing boxes instead of rebuilding them.
What This Means for the Next Six Weeks
None of this is abstract if you're deciding where to spend a Friday night between now and Halloween. Fright Fest returns to Six Flags Magic Mountain for its 33rd year on select nights from September 18 through November 1, 2026, with the park running daytime hours until 7 p.m. and Fright Fest taking over from 7 p.m. to midnight on Thursdays and Sundays, and until 1 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. New for this year are two haunted mazes: Final Destination: Death's Playground, which takes over the space long held by Condemned, and Wolves' Blood, a werewolf-themed maze designed by Knott's Scary Farm's Gus Krueger. The Conjuring Universe has been rebuilt from the ground up, and Trick 'r Treat has moved into the former SAW maze location.
Pair a Fright Fest night with a stop at Bacio di Latte beforehand, since it's a five-minute detour from the park and it's actually open, unlike the bowling alley you might have read about in April.
The Real Takeaway
The mall's ten-tenant list isn't fiction. It's a real plan with real signed leases behind it. But a press release compresses a two-year buildout and a five-month lease-up into the same paragraph, and that flattens the timeline into something that sounds more immediate than it is. If you want to know what's actually walkable this weekend, watch which category a business falls into: existing storefront, or dead anchor waiting on a full rebuild. That distinction has told you more about Valencia's retail calendar this year than any single press release has.
We track these shifts because they're part of what makes a neighborhood worth knowing well, not because a gelato shop or a bowling alley changes anyone's home value. If you're curious about what else is moving in Valencia this year, or you just want a second pair of eyes the next time you're deciding what a local announcement actually means, Armando & Valerie are always happy to talk shop. And if the fall season has you thinking about your own next move, our team offers a Get a Free Home Valuation to help you see where you stand.
