The Promenade Isn't Becoming a Mall Again. It's Becoming the Hill's Rec Room.

Drive past the Promenade on a Saturday afternoon and the fountain still has kids in it, the way it did when the mall opened as the enclosed Courtyard back in 1981. What's changed is everything around that fountain. There's no Gap anymore. No Banana Republic, no J. Crew, no White House Black Market, no Abercrombie & Fitch. Borders closed in 2011. Saks Fifth Avenue, the last full department store anchor, pulled out in 2006. And in 2024, Ruby's Diner, the retro coffee shop that had watched over the ice rink for years, closed too.

None of that got replaced with another round of apparel stores. It got replaced with a bowling alley, a VR lounge, a claw machine arcade, and a basketball academy. If you've assumed the Palos Verdes Peninsula's old shopping center is quietly clawing its way back to being a normal mall, that's not actually what's happening. It's becoming something the Hill hasn't had in decades: a place built almost entirely around what to do with kids on a weekend, not what to buy.

What Actually Closed, and Why It Mattered

The mall's own site is unusually candid about the gap this is filling. It lists off what used to be there, Gablehouse, Mulligans, laser tag, bowling, and then asks directly: "where will our kids go now."

That's not marketing copy borrowed from a template. It's a specific admission that the Promenade spent years as a place with restaurants and retail but nowhere for a family to spend an actual afternoon. Saks closing in 2006 didn't cause that gap by itself, and Borders closing in 2011 didn't either. But by the time Ruby's Diner shut its doors above the ice rink in 2024, the pattern was clear: this had become a mall that people drove to for a specific errand, not a mall people lingered in.

The New Mix Isn't Retail. It's a Rec Room

Since 2022, under new ownership, the Promenade has been filling back in, and almost none of it looks like the tenant list from ten years ago.

Level Up Bowl & Bistro opened on the lower level beneath the Regal Cinemas in winter 2025, with 14 lanes, LED screens, VIP lounges, and a full bar. ZenesisX moved into a 9,000-square-foot space for VR and esports. Sky Photo set up shop. So did Kiddleton Claw Machine Zone and LAB Basketball Academy. None of these existed on the Hill five years ago in this form. A Peninsula family who wanted bowling or VR gaming used to have to drive down toward Torrance or the beach cities to find it.

Here's the comparison, tenant category by tenant category:

The apparel and books rows are essentially empty now. The entertainment and dining rows did all the growing. That's the story the tenant mix tells on its own, before anyone interprets it.

One Name Keeps Showing Up

Here's the detail that most write-ups of the Promenade's comeback skip over. The same operator is behind more than one of these new additions.

Gloria Lee opened Sugo Social, a New American restaurant, at the Promenade in 2025. She's also the person behind Looma Space, an indoor children's playground in Lomita, and she's the one bringing Mega Looma Epic Adventure Park to a 35,000-square-foot space between Level Up Bowl & Bistro and what's listed as The Sports Complex. The planned space includes arcade games, bumper cars, trampolines, karaoke, a photo booth, and private party rooms.

That matters because it means the Promenade's shift toward family entertainment isn't a coincidence of several unrelated businesses happening to open in the same year. One operator with an existing playground business in Lomita is betting a second time, at scale, that the Hill wants this specific kind of space badly enough to justify 35,000 square feet of it.

The Part That's Still "Coming Soon"

Mega Looma was originally aimed at a January 2026 opening. As of August 2026, coverage of the project still described it as slated to open "later this year," with no confirmed month attached, and the project's own site was still running an opening countdown rather than a fixed date. Golf Theory, mentioned alongside Mega Looma in local coverage back in March 2026, hasn't had a public opening update since.

So if you've been checking the storefront expecting bumper cars and trampolines, you're not missing anything. It hasn't opened yet. Everything else on this list has: Level Up Bowl & Bistro, ZenesisX, Sky Photo, Kiddleton Claw Machine Zone, LAB Basketball Academy, and the full run of new restaurants are already operating. Mega Looma and Golf Theory are the two pieces still catching up to the rest of the mall's timeline.

The Food Side Tells the Same Story, With Its Own Wrinkles

Pho Redbo took over the space Ruby's Diner vacated overlooking the ice rink, and it's built a reputation locally for its wagyu beef pho. A few doors down, Daisy Buchanan's Pizza Bar moved into the second-floor spot that used to be Red Brick Pizza, serving what the restaurant's own site calls a South Shore tradition, bar pizza that's been "a working-class tradition in the pubs, taverns and dive bars" of Boston since the 1940s, alongside pasta dishes and a beer and wine list.

Good Stuff PV, the South Bay burger and breakfast chain with locations from El Segundo to Redondo Beach, took the longest road to actually opening. Owner Cris Bennett said the company spent about a year and a half searching for a spot on the Hill before landing in the Promenade, and then hit a permitting delay that pushed the timeline further before the location finally opened. "It's nice to get this thing going again," Bennett said once the building permit came through. That's not a story about a mall in decline. It's a story about a mall where demand for a new tenant slot outpaced how fast the paperwork could move.

Round out the list with Sugo Social, Dilly D's Delicious Burgers, Terra Mia Woodfire Kitchen, Nara Boba, and Fika Fika Creamery, and the food lineup alone has grown by more than half a dozen names in under two years.

Put the Halloween Carnival on Your Calendar

The Promenade's Halloween tradition goes back to the 1980s, and the mall still runs it every fall as a multi-day event with trick-or-treating, rides, a haunted house, and a costume contest. Last year's carnival ran October 24 through 26. The 2026 dates hadn't been announced as of this writing, but if the pattern holds, it'll land on a similar late-October weekend. It's worth checking the mall's own event listings as the date approaches, especially if you're weighing it against other Peninsula fall plans.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

The Promenade was never going to get its department stores back. Saks left in 2006 and nothing of that scale has replaced it since. What's happening instead is more specific than a generic "mall revival" headline suggests: this is a shopping center reorganizing itself around family recreation, largely on the strength of a handful of operators, including one who's now built two entertainment concepts in the same building within a year of each other.

If you've been driving past assuming there's nothing new worth stopping for, that assumption is several years out of date. If you've been waiting specifically for Mega Looma, the wait continues a little longer. Either way, the Hill finally has an answer to the question its own mall was asking out loud: where the kids go now is right there, on Deep Valley Drive.

Whether you're weighing a move to the Peninsula or you've called it home for decades, having a clear-eyed read on how a neighborhood is actually changing, not just how it's advertised, is the kind of local knowledge that pays off when it's time to buy or sell here too. If that's on your horizon, Meghan Vittetoe would love to connect.