Thursday mornings on Santa Monica Boulevard, the produce stands go up outside 10100 before the office towers across the street have finished filling their parking structures. By ten, there's a line for stone fruit. By early afternoon, the tables fold back into a truck bed and the block returns to looking like every other stretch of Century City, glass towers, valet stands, a mall that people have historically treated as a stop rather than a destination.
That contrast is the whole story here. For decades, Century City ran on a single clock: office hours, plus the occasional evening trip to Westfield for a movie or a department store run. What's changed in the last year isn't one flashy opening. It's that enough different pieces, a market that's been quietly running since before the mall's last major renovation, a rooftop sport imported from Europe, and a wave of restaurant openings backed by operators who don't miss deadlines, have stacked up into something closer to an actual week.
A Mall Built For Leaving, Not Staying
Westfield Century City has always had scale. The property spans more than 200 shops and restaurants, anchored by Bloomingdale's, Macy's and Nordstrom, sitting on Santa Monica Boulevard across from the Los Angeles Country Club. What it hasn't always had is a reason for people to stay past checkout.
That started to shift with the 2017 renovation, a billion-dollar overhaul that gave the center its first real dining identity through the arrival of Eataly, Din Tai Fung and the upscale Mexican steakhouse Javier's. Din Tai Fung still draws a line most weeknights. Eataly remains the only West Coast outpost of the Italian marketplace concept, and its three sit-down restaurants have stayed full since 2017. Those openings answered one question, whether Century City could hold a restaurant reputation at all. They didn't answer a second one: whether anyone would build a routine here that didn't start and end with a shopping trip.
The Anchor That Predates Every Celebrity Chef
The most durable weekly fixture in Century City isn't a restaurant with a design budget or a chef with a television deal. It's the certified farmers market that sets up every Thursday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 10100 Santa Monica Boulevard, drawing more than 30 local growers. It's been running for more than two decades, which means it predates the $1 billion renovation, the celebrity chef wave, and every restaurant this post is about to name.
That timeline matters for a simple reason. Everything newer arrived because Century City proved it already had a weekly habit worth building around. The market didn't need a rebrand or a press cycle to keep functioning. It's the baseline the rest of the neighborhood's calendar gets measured against, the one recurring commitment that was never in question.
The Openings That Actually Landed
The last twelve months brought the busiest run of restaurant openings the mall has seen since 2017, and the pattern among them is worth noticing. Katsuya's Century City location finished a redesign that added an open-air garden terrace, keeping familiar menu anchors like the spicy tuna crispy rice and baked crab hand rolls while introducing new dishes. Next door, Casa Dani, from three-Michelin-starred chef Dani García, opened in 2025 with Andalusian-leaning plates built around Iberico ham croquetas and fresh seafood paellas, designed to run alongside Katsuya rather than compete with it.
On the mall's first level, David Chang's Momofuku group opened Super Peach on October 19, 2025, his first new restaurant concept since Bāng Bar in Las Vegas in 2021, serving Korean-inspired dishes like wagyu kimbap alongside fried wings and mushroom noodles. And Very Thai, the first location outside Asia for one of Taiwan's largest restaurant operators, hit its own January 2026 opening target inside the space that used to house California Pizza Kitchen.
Four different concepts, four different cuisines, and all four opened on the timeline they announced. That's not a coincidence so much as an operating reality. Corporate-backed, multi-unit restaurant groups run construction and staffing like any other retail rollout, on a schedule, with contingency built in. If you've been waiting to try one of these, the wait is over. They're open now, and they've been open long enough to have worked out their kitchen timing and their reservation systems.
The One Address Still Behind Plywood
Not every announced opening has gone the same way. Rumi's Kitchen, the Atlanta-based Persian restaurant chain, announced its first California location for the mall's second floor, taking over the space that used to be Pink Taco. The plan included two private dining rooms and a patio facing Santa Monica Boulevard, with chef Ali Mesghali, who grew up in Iran and in Los Angeles, opening in the city where he was raised.
The restaurant's own website listed a Spring 2026 opening. Spring came and went. As of late July 2026, neither Rumi's Kitchen nor Westfield had posted a revised date, and the space remained under construction. It's a useful reminder for anyone building a calendar around a specific address: an announced opening date is a target, not a guarantee, especially for a first-time market entry without the construction infrastructure a national chain relies on. If you've been holding a birthday dinner or a client lunch for this one, it's worth having a backup plan a little longer.
A Rooftop That Assumes You're Coming Back
The other addition that says something about where Century City is headed isn't a restaurant at all. Padel Up occupies rooftop courts on the mall's Level 3, tucked between Nordstrom and AMC Theatres, open from early morning into the evening seven days a week. Padel, the racquet sport that blends tennis and squash inside an enclosed court, has been one of the fastest-growing recreational sports in the country, and Century City's version runs lessons, leagues and open play rather than a single novelty court.
A rooftop sports club only works as a business if people come back weekly, not once. That's a different bet than a restaurant opening banking on a single splashy debut. It assumes a standing Tuesday game, a lunch-hour lesson, a Saturday league, the kind of repeat visit that a matinee-and-shopping crowd never provided. The mall also leans into that same logic once a year with its Foodie Week, a nine-day run of exclusive menus and discounts across more than 25 Century City restaurants that returned again this June. An event built around dozens of participating restaurants only makes sense if there's a built-in audience that already eats here regularly enough to make the deals worth offering.
What This Adds Up To
None of these pieces on their own would mean much. A farmers market is a nice Thursday errand. A handful of restaurant openings is a news cycle. A rooftop padel club is a novelty until it isn't. Put together, though, they describe a neighborhood that's stopped being purely a place people pass through on their way somewhere else.
The market gives Century City its oldest and steadiest weekly rhythm. The last year's restaurant openings, the ones that actually opened on schedule, give it more reasons to stay past six. The rooftop club and the annual Foodie Week both assume a return crowd rather than a one-time visitor. And the one restaurant still behind plywood is a reminder that not every piece of that calendar has filled in yet. Century City in 2026 looks less like a mall with restaurants attached to it and more like a neighborhood that happens to have a mall in the middle of it. That's a meaningfully different place to spend a Thursday than it was even two years ago, and it's worth knowing which parts of that shift you can already count on.
If you're weighing what that shift means for property values, timing, or where to look next in this corner of the Westside, Harris & Partners tracks these patterns closely as part of how we advise clients across Los Angeles's trophy neighborhoods. Request a confidential consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
