You Already Ate at the New Commons. The Construction Hasn't Caught Up Yet.

If you had dinner at BLVD Steak last month, or grabbed a hand roll at KazuNori, or picked up a pistachio gelato at Bacio di Latte, you already experienced the "new" Commons everyone keeps talking about. That part happened quietly, one storefront at a time, over the course of 2025. What you are looking at right now, the chain-link fence where the movie theater used to be, the one-way cones rerouting the back lot, is a different phase entirely, and it started after the restaurants had already settled in.

That order feels backwards. Normally a shopping center clears out, bulldozes, and then unveils the new tenants with a ribbon and a press release. At The Commons, the good stuff arrived first and the visible mess showed up second. If you have been confused about what is actually finished versus what is still fenced off, that sequence is the reason.

The restaurant wave already happened

Start with what is simply true and open for business today. Superba Food + Bread opened on March 28, 2025, in the suite next to Polacheck's Jewelers, replacing The Kingdom. It is a full-day café built by the same team behind the original Venice Beach location, with a bakery counter, an outdoor patio, and a menu that runs from morning pastries to a bluefin tuna carpaccio at dinner.

Bacio di Latte moved into the spot vacated by Jeni's Ice Cream, bringing gelato made fresh daily from a recipe founded in 2011 by brothers Edoardo and Luigi Tonolli, including a hazelnut-chocolate giandujotto that has become the shop's calling card. A few doors down, KazuNori set up a 24-seat hand roll counter, its eighth California location, named for chef Kazunori Nozawa, the man credited with introducing the cylindrical hand roll to American diners roughly four decades ago.

BLVD Steak took over the CrossRoads space near King's Fish House, extending a Sherman Oaks original into a Calabasas version done up in emerald green, black, and gold, with private dining rooms and both indoor and outdoor seating. Zimmermann, the Australian fashion label, filled out the retail side with a standalone boutique.

Every one of these openings landed in 2025. By the time most residents noticed a fence going up around the old theater, the restaurant refresh was already finished business.

Then the fence went up

The Regency Calabasas theater played its final show on December 28, 2025. It was the third local theater closure in recent years, following prior closures in Agoura Hills and Westlake Village, and it left Calabasas without an on-site cinema for the first time since the center opened in 1998. A Calabasas High School student told the Calabasas Courier the closure made it harder to park and shop nearby, and another said flatly that she had grown up going there and was sad to see it torn down.

Ground broke on the replacement project, called Commons Lane, on February 3, 2026. City Manager Kindon Meik, Councilmembers David Shapiro, Alicia Weintraub and Ed Albrecht, and Mayor James Bozajian joined developer Rick Caruso at the ceremony. Caruso's CEO, Corinne Verdery, called it the property's next chapter after nearly 30 years as a community gathering spot. The plan calls for 80 apartments on the theater's old footprint and roughly 27,000 square feet of new retail and dining space, split across a dozen to 14 storefronts, connected by a pedestrian paseo.

So the timeline, in order: quiet restaurant turnover through most of 2025, theater closure at the very end of the year, groundbreaking in February, and now, as of this summer, active construction. The disruption residents are dealing with today is not what produced KazuNori or BLVD Steak. Those were already done. The fence is for round two.

What construction actually looks like this summer

According to the property's own construction update page, the current build window runs from July through September 2026. New shops and restaurants are having spaces turned over to incoming tenants for buildout during this stretch, while a separate crew works on the parking structure that will eventually serve the apartment building. As part of the reshuffle, a section of the two-way drive aisle between the two new buildings is being converted to one-way to keep circulation moving.

Parking has not disappeared. Complimentary self-parking remains available off both Calabasas Road and Park Granada, with short-term 10 and 30-minute spots near shop entrances for pickup orders, ADA spaces close to storefronts, and 20 Tesla Superchargers in the main lot near Citi Bank. Valet is running Friday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., staged near SUGARFISH by Sushi Nozawa and Polacheck's Jewelers. The north and south ends of the property, where Ralphs, Barnes & Noble, and most of the existing restaurant row sit, are largely untouched by any of this.

The current tenant directory backs that up. Alongside the 2025 arrivals, HiHo Cheeseburger has quietly opened in suite K-4, while Cheesesteaks by Matū is listed as coming soon in that same suite cluster, and Rivian has a coming soon placeholder for suite B-4. None of that required a groundbreaking. It is ordinary turnover happening alongside the bigger project, not because of it.

Here is the fuller picture, laid out by status rather than buzz:

What is still just a rumor, and what to actually expect this fall

Uovo has come up repeatedly as a possible addition to the Commons Lane lineup, but it has not been confirmed on the property's own tenant list, so treat it as a rumor until you see a lease sign go up. The apartments themselves are not opening this year at all. Fall 2027 remains the completion target for residential, with new retail expected to debut sometime in late 2026, meaning the paseo and green space that everyone keeps picturing in renderings are still a construction zone, not a finished plaza.

The practical upshot for anyone who lives nearby: if you have been waiting for a grand reopening to try the new restaurants, you are late. They have been open for over a year. If you have been waiting for the construction noise to stop before the center feels normal again, that wait runs at least through the fall, since the current phase is buildout, not ribbon-cutting. The two stories that residents tend to fold into one, new restaurants and ongoing construction, are actually sequential and mostly unrelated. Knowing which phase you are in changes how you plan a Saturday around it.

For now, the fastest route to a table on a Friday night is still the existing dining row on the north and south ends, where Ralphs, King's Fish House, and Marmalade Cafe sit untouched by any of the buildout. The construction fence belongs to next year's story, not last year's.

If you are watching how a place like Calabasas evolves and want a conversation grounded in what is actually happening on the ground rather than what a rendering promises, Larry Calemine has spent decades tracking these shifts across Calabasas and the West Valley. Schedule a private consultation to talk through what any of it means for your own plans in the neighborhood.