Century City's Restaurant Boom Is Only Half Open

Walk the second floor of Westfield Century City on a Tuesday evening and you'll pass a stretch of butcher paper still taped over the glass where Pink Taco used to be. The signage inside promises Rumi's Kitchen, the Atlanta-born Persian restaurant chef Ali Mesghali grew into five locations across Atlanta, Alpharetta, Houston and Washington, D.C. before bringing it home to the city where he grew up. As of late July, the chain's own site still listed Century City as a Spring 2026 opening, with no updated timeline posted since. Spring is long gone. So is most of summer. The paper is still on the glass.

That gap between what's promised and what's actually plated is the real story of Century City's dining scene this year. The press has moved fast on the good news: a David Chang restaurant, a three-Michelin-star chef, a design-forward sushi room. All of that is true and all of it is open. But treating the mall's restaurant lineup as a finished renovation misses the more useful fact for anyone who actually eats here on a Wednesday night: half of what's been announced hasn't shown up yet, and the property is leaning harder than it lets on into restaurants that opened years before this "boom" started.

What's actually ready right now

Start with what you can walk into tonight. Katsuya Century City, chef Katsuya Uechi's fourth Los Angeles location, opened in 2025 with an open-air garden terrace and the kind of modern Japanese menu that treats spicy tuna on crispy rice as a given rather than a novelty. A few doors down, Casa Dani brought three-Michelin-starred chef Dani García's Spanish-Mediterranean menu west, mirroring his New York original with camel leather seating and a chilled shellfish display near the open kitchen. The Andalusian tuna carpaccio and the wagyu flatiron are the two dishes people keep mentioning.

David Chang's Super Peach opened on the mall's first level in October 2025, his first new restaurant since Bāng Bar in Las Vegas back in 2021. It leans Korean-inspired with a California accent, wagyu kimbap and slow-roasted baby back ribs on a menu built around a green-toned dining room and a kinetic split-flap board that spells out phrases instead of just showing wait times. Cafe Knotted, the Korean dessert brand known for brioche doughnuts filled with cream and jam, opened alongside it with the kind of pastel, soft-lit interior built for a mid-afternoon sugar break. And Very Thai, an Asian concept that had been in the works through late 2025, was already serving by the time The Infatuation checked in on January 28, 2026, calling it the restaurant that opened just ahead of Rumi's Kitchen's now-stalled announcement.

That's five real, open, reviewable restaurants inside about a year. It's a legitimate run for a mall that spent most of the 2010s known more for Bloomingdale's and an AMC than for anything you'd plan a dinner around.

The space between the announcement and the storefront

Here's what the roundup articles don't say clearly enough: at least three more concepts announced in that same run have either stalled or gone quiet.

Rumi's Kitchen is the clearest case. The chain's own future-openings page still lists Century City as its West Coast debut with a "Spring 2026" target, unchanged as of late July. This would be Rumi's first restaurant in California, following locations in Atlanta, Alpharetta, Houston and Washington, D.C., and the buildout is a real one: two private dining rooms and a patio meant to look out over Santa Monica Boulevard. Nobody has withdrawn the project. Nobody has confirmed a new date either.

Mr. Chow Now, a fast-casual spinoff of the Beverly Hills institution just up the road, was still described as set to open soon in reporting from January 2026. Nothing in the reporting since confirms it has actually opened. And a bi-level Del Frisco's steakhouse, one of the mall's bigger footprints, closed and left an empty double-height space that hasn't been filled with anything new yet. Even Anthony Anderson and Cedric the Entertainer's AC Barbeque concept, discussed as in the works for the food court, has no confirmed opening to point to.

None of this means the mall's restaurant strategy is failing. The property's own leasing team has framed the current wave as a deliberate second act. A 2017 buildout brought in Eataly, Din Tai Fung and the upscale Mexican steakhouse Javier's, the first time the mall registered on anyone's dining map. Newly available space since then gave the property room to court what its leasing executives have called more market-defining names. That's a real strategy and it's mostly working. But a strategy in progress is not the same thing as a finished lineup, and if you're deciding where to eat this month based on a listicle from January, you're planning around restaurants that, in at least two cases, still don't exist.

The one thing that hasn't changed

While all of that churns, the Century City Certified Farmers Market has kept its Thursday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. slot at 10100 Santa Monica Boulevard without a redesign, a rebrand, or a delayed opening. It's been running long enough that longtime visitors have their routines down to the parking level: cut through the mall garage and take the pedestrian bridge over Avenue of the Stars rather than fighting street parking.

The market's reputation rests on the same handful of vendors people mention over and over. A Hawaiian chicken stand is regularly cited as the fastest-moving line in the market, useful information if you're on a lunch break with limited time. Beyond that there are empanadas, tamales, pupusas and Greek food stands that show up in review after review as the reliable lunch options, the kind of stalls that don't need a press release because they've already done the work of earning repeat customers one Thursday at a time.

That contrast matters more than it might first seem. A mall restaurant lineup gets rebuilt every few years around whichever concepts are trending in food media. A farmers market survives by being useful to the same people every week. If you're trying to figure out what Century City is actually like to live near, day to day, the market is a better answer than any of the new openings, because it's the one part of the food scene here that was never trying to be a story.

What it means if you're here right now

If you're picking a restaurant for tonight, Katsuya, Casa Dani, Super Peach, Cafe Knotted and Very Thai are the safe bets, all open, all reviewable, all delivering roughly what their early coverage promised. If you've been holding out for Rumi's Kitchen because you read about it back in January, it's worth checking the restaurant's own site before you make plans around it, since as of this writing the company hasn't posted anything past its missed spring target. And if you just want a reliable Thursday lunch without checking anyone's opening calendar, the farmers market on Santa Monica Boulevard has been doing that job for longer than any restaurant currently getting written up.

Century City is genuinely becoming a better place to eat. It's just becoming that in fits and starts, with some of the loudest headlines still waiting on a firm date, and the market that never made headlines quietly doing exactly what it's always done.

For more on what's changing across the neighborhoods we work in, from Beverly Hills to the Westside, The Carrabba Group keeps a close eye on the details that make each one worth living in. If you're weighing a move to Century City or just want a second opinion on the market, Work With Us.