For years the joke about Century City was that residents lived above one of Los Angeles's better food courts and still drove to Beverly Hills for dinner. That joke is aging badly. Between early 2025 and this summer, the quarter-mile ring around 10250 Santa Monica Boulevard has absorbed a Michelin-decorated Spanish room, a David Chang restaurant, a Korean pastry counter with a cult following in Seoul, and Korea's largest beauty retailer. The reason to walk across the street has changed.
This is a short field guide for the people who already live here. Skip it if you know what a Bellrista is. Read on if you want a straight accounting of what has actually opened, what is about to, and how to string it into a Saturday that never touches Wilshire.
The dining shift that happened while you weren't looking
The single biggest change is that Westfield Century City has upped its dining game over the past year, unveiling several must-try restaurants that make the retail destination also one of the city's great culinary hubs, from Spanish-Mediterranean elegance to bold Asian fusion, sleek sushi, Korean desserts and celebrity-backed barbecue. The names matter, so here they are in one place.
Super Peach by Momofuku brings David Chang's high-energy vision to life with modern Asian fusion, from punchy small plates to slow-roasted baby back ribs and lobster noodles. It is the loudest of the openings and the hardest to walk into on a Friday. Casa Dani, from three-Michelin-starred chef Dani García, mirrors the New York original with Spanish-Mediterranean dining, refined tapas, gazpacho, paellas and inventive Andalusian-inspired dishes, with a chilled shellfish display near the open kitchen. Katsuya Century City opened in 2025 as chef Katsuya Uechi's fourth L.A. location, with an open-air garden terrace and a menu that runs from spicy tuna on crispy rice to baked crab hand rolls and yellowtail sashimi. Cafe Knotted, the Korean dessert and coffee brand, brings pillowy brioche doughnuts filled with creams and jams, specialty lattes, fruitades and soft-serve.
The pattern is not "more restaurants." It is that four separate reasons to leave the neighborhood for dinner or dessert have moved inside it. If you own a condo in one of the towers along Century Park East or Avenue of the Stars, your practical dining radius just shrank to something you can walk in flats.
A Saturday that never crosses Santa Monica Boulevard
Consider this less an itinerary and more a proof of concept. Every stop is within the Westfield footprint or a short walk of it.
- Morning coffee and a doughnut. Cafe Knotted for a filled brioche and a specialty latte. Bright room, small footprint, low commitment.
- A workout that earns lunch. Equinox has been the anchor fitness tenant since the 2017 renovation. Equinox and OrangeTheory Fitness both operate at the property.
- A K-beauty stop that used to require Koreatown or Pasadena. More on this below.
- Late lunch. Casa Dani for the paella window between one and three, when the room is loud but reservations are easier.
- A movie or the escape room. Entertainment at the property includes AMC, American Girl, Build-A-Bear, and The Escape Game LA.
- Dinner. Super Peach if you can get in, Katsuya's terrace if you cannot.
That is a full day inside roughly 1.3 million square feet of gross leasable area anchored by Bloomingdale's, Macy's, and Nordstrom. The car stays in the garage.
Why the Olive Young opening is the sleeper story
The dining names get the headlines. The retail opening most likely to change local behavior is Korean beauty retailer Olive Young, which opened its second U.S. store at Westfield Century City on June 13, 2026, following the successful debut of the company's first U.S. store in Pasadena the previous month.
Two things about that sentence deserve attention. First, the sequence: Pasadena first, then Century City. With locations now in Pasadena and Century City, OLIVE YOUNG continues to grow its presence in California and plans to expand into additional markets across the United States. The company placed its second store here, not in Beverly Hills, not on Rodeo, not in a standalone flagship. That is a read on where the retailer thinks the K-beauty foot traffic actually lives.
Second, the format. The Century City store is a 2,694-square-foot location featuring selections across skincare, derma care, makeup, beauty tools and wellness, bringing together bestselling products, viral trends and customer favorites from Korea. That is small enough to be a routine stop rather than a destination. If your morning already includes coffee and the gym, adding a fifteen-minute detour for skincare replaces the drive to Koreatown or the online cart with something you can do in shoes you already have on.
What is coming before the end of the year
The list of announced but not yet open concepts is worth tracking, because it tells you what the mall's leasing team is betting on for 2027.
- Very Thai. Asian favorite Very Thai is set to open soon.
- Rumi's Kitchen. Persian destination Rumi's Kitchen is set to open soon.
- A fast-casual Mr. Chow. A fast-casual extension of the iconic Mr. Chow is set to open soon.
- Live Más Café. A drinks-and-food concept from Taco Bell, aiming for a fall opening. According to reporting from local Westside blog Todd Rick Allen in July 2026, the concept serves the full Taco Bell menu with specialty drinks from a "Bellrista," including coffee, chillers, refreshers, energy drinks and seasonal creations, with a targeted fall opening.
Very Thai and Rumi's Kitchen are the interesting ones. Persian food in particular has a strong customer base along the Westside, and Rumi's arrival at the mall means residents of the towers along Century Park no longer have to drive to Westwood or Beverly Hills for it. The fast-casual Mr. Chow is a hedge on lunch pricing. Live Más Café is a hedge on the food-court's morning traffic.
The context that makes all of this legible
To read the current wave correctly, it helps to remember what Westfield Century City is at a structural level. It is a premium open-air shopping centre operated by Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield following a comprehensive reconstruction completed in 2017 that repositioned the property as one of the most productive retail destinations in the United States, placed between Beverly Hills, Brentwood, and Westwood, adjacent to the 120-acre Century City office campus. The mall's job is to serve three overlapping markets at once: residents in the surrounding towers, the office workforce, and destination shoppers from the rest of the Westside.
For most of the last decade, the dining program was calibrated for the office worker and the destination shopper. The 2025 and 2026 openings tilt it toward the resident. Super Peach is a dinner concept. Katsuya's terrace is a dinner concept. Cafe Knotted is a weekend afternoon concept. Olive Young is a routine errand. Together they fill out the parts of the day the previous tenant mix did not cover, which is exactly what a neighborhood retail core has to do to be more than a lunch spot.
That is the actual news buried in the individual openings. Century City has quietly stopped being a workday address with a mall attached. It is starting to behave like a walkable neighborhood core, with a dinner rotation, a coffee habit, and a K-beauty errand all inside the same block.
For neighbors thinking a step ahead
None of the above is a market call. It is a description of what the streetscape now looks like on a Saturday afternoon. If you already own here, the practical effect is simple: your daily radius shrank, and the ratio of things you can walk to versus drive to just moved in your favor. If you have friends visiting from out of town and used to route them straight to Beverly Hills or Santa Monica, the Westfield block is now a legitimate first stop rather than a dutiful one.
For the longer view on how these shifts settle into a neighborhood over years rather than seasons, the team at The Agents, led by broker Frank "Duke" Hogstrom, tracks Century City's condo market and the surrounding Westside submarkets alongside the Santa Clarita Valley. If you want to talk through what any of this means for your building, your block, or a future move, Talk with a Local Expert at theagentsscv.com.
