Drive down Calabasas Road on a Saturday morning and you will pass two very different stories about what is new in this city. At the Commons, construction fencing wraps around the spot where the Regency theater marquee used to catch the afternoon light. A few minutes away in Old Town, across the street from Sagebrush Cantina, a small bungalow with a full bar and a heated back patio has been quietly seating people for breakfast since early summer. One of these places is the future. The other already happened.
If you have been waiting for Calabasas to feel different this year, the wait is partly over and partly just getting started, depending on which corner you are watching.
The Corner That Already Filled Up
The most anticipated restaurant opening in Calabasas this year did not happen inside the Commons. It happened in the old Mulholland space on Calabasas Road, which closed in October of last year while its next tenant waited on permit approvals. That tenant turned out to be Jon & Vinny's, the California-Italian spot founded by chefs Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo, and by the time a local food critic checked in on July 29, the doors were open. The Infatuation's review called it the chain's ninth location and noted it might be "possibly its cutest," pointing to the bungalow layout, the full bar, the heated patio, and an attached Helen's wine shop. It is open daily from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., which means it now covers breakfast in a stretch of Old Town that has mostly run on lunch and dinner traffic.
That is one opening. It is not the only one. Over the past couple of seasons, the Commons itself has quietly added a run of new tenants that have nothing to do with the construction project next door: Bacio di Latte for gelato, HiHo Cheeseburger, the hand roll counter Kazu Nori, and BLVD Steak. All four are already open and running. If your mental picture of the Commons is still built around whatever it looked like a few years ago, these four alone are worth updating that picture for, and none of them required a single permit tied to the redevelopment currently fenced off a few hundred feet away.
So the honest accounting, as of this month, looks like this. New and open right now: four restaurants at the Commons, plus Jon & Vinny's in Old Town. New and still behind a fence: everything tied to the project called Commons Lane.
The Corner That's Still Behind a Fence
The Regency Calabasas theater closed at the end of 2025, and demolition and new construction began in early 2026 on the site, according to the project's own record. Rick Caruso, the developer behind the Commons since it opened in 1998, broke ground on the replacement project on February 3, a groundbreaking covered by The Acorn, which quoted Caruso's chief executive officer, Corinne Verdery, calling the center a place where "the community comes together" for nearly three decades.
What is actually going in is a 190,000-square-foot construction project on the theater site, adding 80 apartment homes on the south side of what the project calls Commons Lane, alongside roughly a dozen new shops and restaurants on the north side, according to Caruso's own project page, which puts the new retail and dining space at approximately 27,000 square feet with outdoor seating and a pedestrian paseo. Builders have said some of the stores and restaurants could open by the end of this year, with the apartments coming online in 2027.
That timeline matters if you are the kind of resident who checks on a construction site every few weeks expecting to see storefronts. Retail is the earlier half of this project, and even that earlier half is not guaranteed before the calendar turns. The apartments are a full year further out than that.
The scale of the project was not settled without some pushback. When the Calabasas City Council first approved the plan in December 2023, after two years of community meetings, Councilmember James Bozajian objected to the proposed building height, calling the 85-foot mark "extraordinary." The council's approval came with a condition: if the project grew larger during final design, it would have to come back before the council. The city's Community Development Director at the time said there would be no further expansion beyond what had been approved. That detail is worth knowing if you live close enough to the Commons to care what the skyline along Commons Way ends up looking like. The height ceiling was argued over in public, on the record, and it held.
What Keeps Running Underneath Both
None of this construction has touched the two things that make a Saturday in Calabasas feel like a Saturday in Calabasas. The Calabasas Farmers Market still runs every Saturday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 23504 Calabasas Road, the same lot it has occupied for years, just down the street from both the theater construction and the new Jon & Vinny's. It is a year-round market, not a seasonal one, which means it has been open through every phase of the Commons Lane groundbreaking without interruption.
The city's own civic calendar has kept its shape too. The City of Calabasas special events page lists the annual 4th of July Spectacular, a fun run, pet show, and splash party at the Civic Center, alongside community programming like the Listening Lounge and Open Mic at the Civic Center Amphitheater, where poets, storytellers, and musicians share the stage with first-time performers. These are not new additions. They are the same fixtures that run every year, regardless of what is or is not happening a few blocks away at the Commons.
That stability is worth naming directly, because it is easy to read a construction fence as a sign that everything in the neighborhood is in flux. It is not. The market still opens at 8. The Civic Center still hosts its regulars. The parts of Calabasas that do not depend on a shopping center's permit timeline have not slowed down at all.
So What's Actually New
Here is the thing worth sitting with. If someone asked you this month what is new in Calabasas, the honest answer is not "wait until the Commons Lane project opens." The honest answer is that it already happened, twice over, in two different places, and neither one required construction fencing. Jon & Vinny's filled the most-watched vacancy in Old Town. Bacio di Latte, HiHo Cheeseburger, Kazu Nori, and BLVD Steak filled out the existing Commons footprint before anyone broke ground on the new one next door.
What is still ahead is a longer story. The Commons Lane retail could land by the end of this year if the builders' own estimate holds, and the apartments are a 2027 story regardless of how the rest of the timeline shifts. Both are real, both are coming, and neither is here yet. Knowing the difference between what already opened and what is still under a tarp is a small thing, but it is the kind of thing that only becomes obvious if you are actually paying attention to this particular stretch of Calabasas Road, month over month, rather than checking in once a year.
That is the kind of local detail that tends to matter more than it seems like it should, whether you are deciding where to grab breakfast this weekend or just trying to keep an accurate picture of the place you live in.
If you have questions about how any of this touches property values, permitting, or what a project like Commons Lane tends to mean for a neighborhood over time, that is a conversation Madge & Hamilton Group is always glad to have. Let's Connect.
