Century City's Mall Just Turned Into the Neighborhood's Best Restaurant Row

Walk into Westfield Century City on a Tuesday night and the first thing you smell isn't cinnamon pretzels or department store perfume. It's charred pork belly and soy-maple glaze drifting out of a restaurant with floor-to-ceiling green tile and a kinetic split-flap board spelling out inside jokes. That's Super Peach, David Chang's first new restaurant since 2021, and it sits on Level 1 near the Santa Monica Boulevard valet, a few hundred feet from Bloomingdale's escalators.

If you've lived in Century City for more than a year, you already know something changed. What you might not know is how deliberate it was, or that it created a split the neighborhood hasn't quite reconciled yet: two separate restaurant scenes, built for two different audiences, growing on opposite sides of the same half-mile.

The Food Court That Isn't One Anymore

For most of the last decade, Westfield Century City was the reliable lunch spot for the office towers ringing it. Din Tai Fung drew lines since it opened in 2018. Eataly, the only one in Los Angeles, has kept its three sit-down restaurants full since 2017. Those were destination-adjacent, sure, but the mall itself wasn't a destination.

That shifted fast. Casa Dani, from three-Michelin-starred chef Dani García, brought the same camel-leather booths and shellfish display that already worked in New York. A fourth Los Angeles location of Katsuya opened with an open-air garden terrace, a sleeker build than the chain's earlier spots. Cafe Knotted, the Korean dessert brand known for pastel brioche doughnuts, moved in on Level 2. Then came Super Peach on October 19, 2025, designed by INC Architecture and Design, the same firm behind Momofuku's Noodle Bar in New York.

Colin Shaughnessy, the executive vice president of leasing for Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, put it plainly in an October 2025 interview: the mall's 2017 investment brought in Eataly, Din Tai Fung, and Javier's, and a fresh round of available space finally let the property bring in what he called market-defining dining.

"We recently got some space back, which gave us the opportunity to bring in some market-defining dining."

A restaurant reviewer who covers the mall regularly put the shift in blunter terms this year, describing Westfield Century City as essentially a restaurant theme park these days. That's not the kind of line a mall earns by adding a sandwich counter. It's what happens when Level 1 and Level 2 fill up with chefs who have other, better addresses to choose from and pick this one anyway.

What's Actually Opening Next

The pipeline hasn't slowed. Rumi's Kitchen, the nationally known Persian restaurant group, has a location confirmed for the mall. A fast-casual spinoff of Mr. Chow is on the way. Tai Tong Food & Beverage Group is bringing its Thai Town Cuisine concept to the U.S. for the first time, choosing Century City over any other American city for its debut.

The most recent addition is the kind of detail only someone tracking city paperwork would catch. Dave's Hot Chicken filed a business tax registration with the Los Angeles Office of Finance for Suite FC8 on Level 2, listing a declared start date of Tuesday, September 15, 2026. Westfield already has the listing up as coming soon. Worth knowing before you plan a trip around it: that filing has no health permit and no certificate of occupancy attached yet, and the September 15 date is what the operator told the city, not a date the city has signed off on. Treat it as a target. The chain, which started as a folding table and a portable fryer in an East Hollywood parking lot in 2017, has since sold rights to more than 1,200 locations worldwide. Century City would be one of the more improbable stops on that route, tenders served a few doors down from Bloomingdale's shoe department.

Here's what that means if you're deciding where to eat this month:

• Already open and worth the wait: Super Peach, Casa Dani, Katsuya's fourth L.A. location, Cafe Knotted, Din Tai Fung, Eataly's Terra
• Confirmed but not yet open: Rumi's Kitchen, a Mr. Chow fast-casual concept, Tai Tong's Thai Town Cuisine, Dave's Hot Chicken (target date September 15, unconfirmed by permit)

Two Restaurant Scenes, A Few Hundred Feet Apart

Cross Avenue of the Stars, though, and the story changes shape entirely. The Century Plaza development, a $2.5 billion project from the Reuben Brothers wrapped around the restored Fairmont Century Plaza hotel and two 44-story residential towers at 115 Park Circle and 211 Elm Court, isn't chasing mall foot traffic. Its restaurant program was built for the people staying at the Fairmont, working in the office towers, or living upstairs in the new residences: Estiatorio Milos, KYU, and Sushi Noz were all signed to open there, aimed less at shoppers on a lunch break and more at a resident wanting a dinner reservation that isn't Din Tai Fung on a Tuesday.

That build-out has moved slower than the mall's. The restaurants signed on early to anchor the property's dining program, but the openings have taken longer to materialize than the initial announcements suggested, the kind of lag that's easy to notice if you've walked past dark storefronts on that side of Avenue of the Stars longer than you expected to. Two restaurant economies, a few hundred feet apart, have spent the past two years growing without much overlap in who they're actually serving. One is loud, mall-adjacent, and turning over new concepts every few months. The other is quieter, slower to open, and built around people who already live or work on that side of the street.

The Gap That's About to Close

The reason this split is worth paying attention to now, rather than treating it as background noise, is that the physical distance between these two dining scenes is shrinking. Metro's D Line extension toward Westwood includes a planned station for the Century City area near Constellation Boulevard. Once that stop is running, walking between the mall's restaurant row and the Century Plaza side stops being a decision that requires a car and starts being a five-minute stroll.

For a neighborhood built around office towers and destination shopping, that's a real change in daily rhythm. Right now, choosing between the mall's kinetic-orange Super Peach and Century Plaza's quieter shellfish counters is basically choosing a side of Avenue of the Stars for the night. Once the station opens, it stops being a choice between neighborhoods and starts being a choice between moods.

What This Means If You Already Live Here

None of this requires a car ride to notice. If your building sits closer to the Fairmont side, you've probably watched Milos or KYU take shape slower than you expected. If you're closer to Westfield, you've probably already stood in line at Super Peach on a weeknight without planning to. Both halves of Century City are getting more interesting to eat in at the same time, just at different speeds and for different reasons.

The mall didn't need to become this. Malls across Southern California, from South Coast Plaza to the Commons at Calabasas, have leaned on restaurants as anchor tenants precisely because online shopping hollowed out what used to fill that square footage. Century City's version of that pivot happened to land a chef with a national following, a Michelin-starred Spaniard, and a fried chicken chain with celebrity investors, all within about a year of each other. That's not the typical mall reinvention story. It's a faster, louder one, happening two blocks from a slower, quieter version of the same idea.

Century City residents have spent the last year eating their way through a neighborhood that's genuinely rewriting its own reputation, one restaurant lease at a time. Whether that turns into a single connected dining district or stays two separate scenes probably comes down to a train station that hasn't opened yet.

If you're watching this stretch of the Westside for reasons that go beyond dinner reservations, from what a Century Plaza residence actually reflects in demand to how transit access reshapes property value along Avenue of the Stars, that's the kind of read Yawar Charlie brings to Century City conversations every day. Contact Us when you're ready to talk about what any of it means for your own address.