Drive down Calabasas Road on a Saturday morning and you will pass the farmers market setting up its stalls across from Sagebrush Cantina, then round the corner toward The Commons and hit a stretch of chain-link fencing where a parking area used to be. Both scenes are new this year, and neither one is really about shopping. Look closely at what is opening, what is closing, and where, and a pattern shows up that the average "new restaurants in Calabasas" roundup will not tell you: the town is not just adding storefronts this year. It is quietly deciding where its center of gravity actually lives, and the answer is turning out to be more complicated than "the mall."

The Commons Trades a Movie Screen for Front Doors

The Commons at Calabasas has been the town's default answer to "where do we go" since it opened its Mediterranean-tiled walkways back in 1998. Twenty-eight years later, the property's own leasing team has said the quiet part out loud: a multiplex made sense before streaming, and it does not anymore. The movie theater is going away, not to be replaced by another single anchor tenant, but by something the shopping center has never had before, which is people who actually live there.

The plan calls for 12 to 14 new shops and restaurants along the west side of the property, a stretch of new greenspace and walking paseos, and 80 apartment homes built above a new parking structure. The Calabasas City Council approved it unanimously in December 2023, after roughly two years of meetings where residents pushed and shaped the design. Construction did not actually break ground until January 2026. That two-year gap between a unanimous yes and the first fence going up is its own quiet lesson for anyone who assumes approval means action. As of this summer, the current phase, running from July through September 2026, has crews building out the new restaurant and retail shells while the parking structure for those future apartments takes shape behind them. The center has been careful to keep the rest of the property running through all of it. Existing shops and restaurants stay open, and weekend valet still operates near Sugarfish from 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

What is notable is not the construction itself. It is what the center is choosing to become. A shopping mall adding apartment homes to its own footprint is an admission that retail alone does not hold a town's attention the way it used to, and that the fix is to make the place somewhere people sleep, not just somewhere they park.

The New Restaurants Aren't Waiting on the Mall to Finish

While The Commons rebuilds from the inside, the town's restaurant growth is not funneling exclusively through it. Some of the year's most talked-about openings picked street addresses instead.

• Jon & Vinny's, the California-Italian spot from chefs Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo known for handmade pastas and wood-fired pizza, opened on July 27 at 23538 Calabasas Road, directly across from Sagebrush Cantina in Old Town, not inside the shopping center at all.
• Salsa & Beer Mexican Grill put up signage this summer at 4895 Las Virgenes Road. Owner Gabriel Huerta is finishing construction on a location the company first tried to open back in 2020 before those plans stalled. The brand already runs four locations, including one in Lake Balboa and three in North Hollywood, built around the flavors of Jerez, Zacatecas.
• Superba Food + Bread, the Venice Beach bakery-cafe concept from founder Paul Hibler, opened inside The Commons last year, an 1,800-square-foot space with seating for 100 and a full bakery program, and set the template for what the center wanted its food tenants to look like.
• Cheesesteaks by Matū followed this year, also inside the shopping center, now listed as open in the property's own directory.

Read those four together and the split is telling. The concepts that went inside the shopping center, Superba and now Cheesesteaks by Matū, are building on infrastructure and foot traffic the center already has. The ones staking out new ground this year, Jon & Vinny's and Salsa & Beer, picked street-facing Old Town and Las Virgenes Road addresses instead. Calabasas is not consolidating its dining scene into one building. It is growing it on two tracks at once.

Old Town Doesn't Need the Mall to Draw a Crowd

The Old Town corridor already had its own weekly draw before any of this started. The Calabasas Farmers Market has run every Saturday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Calabasas Road, just west of El Canon Avenue and across from Sagebrush Cantina, for years, rain or shine, with free lot parking. It is the kind of fixture that never needed the shopping center's foot traffic to survive.

Jon & Vinny's chose to open its doors on that same stretch of road, within sight of the market and the cantina. That is not a coincidence so much as a bet that Old Town's gravity is real and separate from The Commons' own pull. A town that used to have one obvious social anchor now effectively has two, running on different schedules and different crowds, a few minutes apart by car.

The Ranch Side of Town Stays Wild on Purpose

Not everything in Calabasas is being built up this year. King Gillette Ranch, 588 acres of open meadow and low ridgeline at the lower end of the Las Virgenes Valley, hosts Nights of the Jack again this fall, the immersive Halloween trail that turns the ranch into a one-mile walk of hand-carved pumpkins and light installations for about six weeks each year. The 2026 run is billed as a reimagined version of the trail, and based on the pattern of recent years it should run from late September into early November.

The ranch does not get shops or apartment homes. Its value to the town is precisely that it stays open and undeveloped the other ten and a half months of the year, then hosts one large seasonal event and returns to being empty acreage. Put next to the construction at The Commons and the new leases on Calabasas Road, it is a reminder that not every part of town is expected to densify. Some of it is valuable specifically because it does not.

What This Adds Up To

None of this is one story. It is three things happening on three different timelines: a 28-year-old shopping center converting part of itself into housing after a two-year approval process finally cleared, a restaurant scene expanding on both sides of that center's walls at once, and 588 acres of ranch land holding its ground as the one piece of town that gets busier for six weeks and then goes quiet again. Add in a roundabout project the city has underway elsewhere, expected to run through winter 2027, and this is a town with more than one construction zone active at the same time, for more than one reason.

The takeaway for anyone who already calls Calabasas home is not that there is a new place to eat, though there is, or that the mall is under construction, though it is. It is that the town's shape is being redrawn in real time, and the redrawing is happening in three different places that do not depend on each other. Old Town gets busier on its own terms. The Commons gets residential on its own terms. The ranch stays open on its own terms. Whichever corner of town you already gravitate toward, this is the year that corner got a little more defined.

If you are watching these changes because you are thinking about what they mean for your own property, or simply want a local read on how a specific block or street is shifting, Getzels Group has been tracking Calabasas at this level of detail for years and is glad to talk through what any of it means for you.