Drive past Cactus Road and Tatum Boulevard on a Thursday evening and the fencing tells one story while the parking lots tell another. Cranes still work the north end. The Fender headquarters is going vertical. A 335-unit apartment building is halfway framed. And yet the surface lots outside Whole Foods, Blanco Reserva, and The Melt are full by six, with the Central Park block hosting a live band and a scatter of families on the lawn.
That gap between what looks unfinished and what already functions is the point of this post. The former Paradise Valley Mall, now branded simply PV, is a 100-acre, roughly $2 billion redevelopment by RED Development, and for Paradise Valley residents it has quietly become the closest thing the area has to a walkable dinner-and-errands district. The trick is knowing which pieces are live in July 2026, which are still weeks or months out, and how to sequence a night there without wasting a drive.
What's actually open right now
The tenants below are open to the public as of this summer. Anchoring the food side of the site:
- Blanco Reserva Cocina + Cantina and Flower Child, both from Fox Restaurant Concepts, on the west edge of the Central Park block.
- The Melt, the California burger and grilled-cheese chain, in its first location outside California.
- Velvet Taco at 12646 N. Tatum Blvd. #105, which opened its second Arizona location at PV in March after the Old Town debut.
- Trevor's Liquor, a wine bar and bottle shop built into the old Sears tire and battery shop, with exterior materials salvaged from the original structure.
- Whole Foods Market, which relocated from the corner of Tatum and Shea, plus Sephora on the retail side.
Living on the site: AVE Paradise Valley, the 400-unit apartment community that started leasing in the fall of 2024. Fender Musical Instruments Corp.'s new three-story Arizona headquarters opened last year and now anchors the office component.
Read that list against what the mall used to be, which was a dead building with a Dillard's, and the shift is obvious. Read it against what PV will be in eighteen months, and the picture changes again. The site is roughly half built, and RED's own timeline projects completion around 2030. What's open now is phase one of a much longer sequence.
The Life Time question is settled
The single largest change to how the site functions this summer is Life Time Paradise Valley, the athletic club's 92,000-square-foot eighth Arizona location, opening with Pilates and yoga studios, a spa, pickleball courts and a rooftop pool club. Membership here is priced at the club's usual upper tier, which is worth mentioning because it changes the daytime population of the site. The mall parking lots used to fill for evening dinner traffic. The Life Time lot fills at 6 a.m., again at noon, and again after work.
The residential side of that decision is still pending. Life Time Living, the club's for-lease luxury residential concept that shares amenities with the fitness club, is set to open in 2027, with a walkway connecting the two buildings and free club membership included for residents.
What's still weeks or months out
Four restaurant projects are visible from the sidewalk but not yet serving. Track them by opening window, not by hype:
- Harry & Izzy's, a standalone 8,300-square-foot building at the northeast corner of the park block, making its Arizona debut in 2026. This is the sister restaurant to St. Elmo Steak House, an Indianapolis institution since 1902, described by CEO Craig Huse as a blend of grill and steakhouse with St. Elmo staples including the shrimp cocktail and steaks, plus burgers and pizzas. The location's own site targets summer 2026 as the opening window at the PV redevelopment.
- Cala, the Clive Collective concept led by Food Network chef Beau MacMillan. The 6,500-square-foot restaurant is slated to open in 2026 west of Blanco Reserva Cocina + Cantina. Troyan, the co-founder, has said the PV version will feature a wood-fired kitchen and bold new flavor profiles alongside the same ambiance that put the Scottsdale original on the map. If you know the Senna House location, expect a related but not identical menu.
- The Vig PV, the eighth Valley location of the Arcadia-born tavern, with a menu recently revamped by chef Jeremy Pacheco including shareable starters like burrata with country bread and crispy calamari, plus soups, salads, tacos, sandwiches and larger plates from fish and chips to Poblano Chicken Enchiladas. Design nods to the 1970s era of the original mall, with dark woods, copper and adobe bricks sourced from one of the state's last remaining adobe suppliers.
- Too Sweet Cakes, the Bend, Oregon bakery's first brick-and-mortar Arizona location. The 1,700-square-foot bakery will feature a walk-up window for coffee, and inside, guests will be able to watch the team decorate cakes while they order pastries, breakfast sandwiches and other bites.
Also in the pipeline for 2026: Wren House Brewing Co., Federal Pizza from Upward Projects (only the second ever, more than a decade after the original), Hawaiian Bros Island Grill, Frost Gelato Shoppe, FACE FOUNDRIÉ, and Zara Nail Bar. RED has also teased a seafood-focused restaurant and a breakfast concept in active negotiation, per developer comments this spring.
Two useful things to know about that pipeline. First, the developer has been unusually candid about staggered openings, which means the "grand opening" of PV is not a single date but a rolling eighteen-month sequence. Second, the Central Park block is the organizing logic. Everything above orbits that lawn, which is why the site actually walks like a small district rather than a strip.
How this changes a Paradise Valley evening
For a Paradise Valley resident, the practical shift is that a walkable food-and-errands run no longer requires driving south into Old Town or west into Arcadia. Whole Foods, a workout at Life Time, dinner at Blanco Reserva or Velvet Taco, and a bottle at Trevor's is a single stop with one parking event. That was not true two years ago.
The interesting part is what this compression does to weekend patterns. Households that used to make one Arcadia trip for dinner and a separate Kierland trip for shopping now have a middle option that covers both, and it's inside the Paradise Valley postal footprint. Out-of-town guests who used to be handed a downtown Scottsdale itinerary can now be sent to the park block at PV for a lower-effort evening.
There is a real tradeoff. The site is still a construction zone on its north half. Wayfinding is imperfect. Some of the most anticipated names, Cala and Harry & Izzy's in particular, aren't serving yet, which means the current dining lineup skews casual. If you're planning a special-occasion dinner in July, the PV block is not yet the answer. If you're planning a Tuesday-night dinner with the kids, it might be the easiest answer in the neighborhood.
A note on what PV is not
PV is a redevelopment inside the City of Phoenix, not inside the Town of Paradise Valley. The distinction matters when residents talk about jurisdictional decisions, taxes, or zoning cases in casual conversation. It also matters when reading press coverage, because the "Paradise Valley" naming can be misleading. What PV does share with the Town is proximity, resident overlap, and the reality that this is now the closest large-format retail-and-dining hub for anyone living east of Tatum and north of Lincoln.
For sellers preparing a home in that catchment, PV is starting to show up in showing feedback the way Kierland Commons and Scottsdale Quarter do for their surrounding neighborhoods. That's a change worth watching over the next two selling seasons.
If you're weighing a move within Paradise Valley, or thinking about how the PV build-out changes the appeal of your current address, the Clayton Wolfe team tracks these shifts across the micro-markets we work in every week. Request a private consultation and we'll walk you through what it means for your specific block.
