Everyone's Talking About Din Tai Fung. Here's What Actually Opened At Chandler Fashion Center.

Drive along the south side of Chandler Fashion Center this month and you will hit orange barrels before you hit a parking space. The stretch near Harkins Theatres is fenced off, torn up, and mid-transformation. Walk in from the west side instead, past what used to be Sears, and you will find something different: a full parking lot, a line for live seafood, and teenagers carrying bowling shoes toward the escalator. Two ends of the same mall, two completely different realities right now.

That gap matters more than the headlines suggest. For the better part of a year, every story about Chandler Fashion Center has led with the same two names: Din Tai Fung and Wagyu House. Both are real, both are coming, and neither one is open. Din Tai Fung's Chandler location isn't scheduled until 2027. Wagyu House, Arizona's first, isn't scheduled until fall 2027. Meanwhile, the things you can actually walk into this weekend arrived with almost no fanfare in just the last month. If your mental picture of the mall is still built from a press release, it's out of date in both directions.

What Opened While You Weren't Looking

Here's what's actually open right now, not projected, not announced, open:

• Seafood City opened July 30, 2026, upstairs in the former Sears building. It's the state's first location of North America's largest Filipino grocery chain, with live seafood tanks, a cook-to-order counter, and a seven-restaurant dining hall inside.
• Johnny Rockets opened August 8, the Southeast Valley's first location, tucked into the food court with the usual burgers and hand-spun shakes.
• Garage, a Montreal streetwear brand new to the Arizona market, opened the same weekend on the lower level near Sephora.
• J. Crew Factory opened back in May, quietly, with none of the press attention the 2027 restaurants have gotten.

None of these needed a groundbreaking ceremony or a multi-year buildout. They moved into existing retail space and started ringing up sales. That's the version of "new" a Chandler local can actually use this weekend, as opposed to the version that shows up in a rendering.

The Old Sears Building Is Living Two Lives

If you haven't set foot in the old Sears building since it closed, the split inside is worth knowing before you go. Sears shut down in 2019 and sat empty for years while the mall figured out what to do with two full floors of vacant retail. Round1 Bowling & Arcade moved into the downstairs level last year, filling out the bowling lanes, arcade games, and karaoke rooms that now draw a steady weekend crowd. Seafood City took the upstairs this summer, meaning a building that spent the better part of six years dark now runs two separate operations stacked on top of each other, each with its own entrance and its own crowd.

That's a different story than the one usually told about this mall, which tends to jump straight from "Sears closed" to "Scheels opened in 2023" as if the building in between didn't matter. It did. The Sears space took longer to fill than the Nordstrom space did, and the two floors ended up with two entirely different tenants solving two entirely different problems: one for entertainment, one for groceries.

Where The Actual Construction Is Happening

The south side, the part with the barrels, is where the money and the multi-year timeline are going. Macerich is rebuilding the entertainment and dining district near Harkins Theatres from the ground up: a relocated splash pad, expanded patio space, a new entrance, and a lawn built for concerts and community events rather than just foot traffic between stores. Mall general manager Monica Greenman described the goal directly, framing the redevelopment around what Chandler households have already told the mall they want:

"Our goal is to focus on bringing retailers that the community wants, to create a convenience, a variety and experience they haven't seen in the East Valley."

That construction zone is also where Din Tai Fung will eventually sit, in a 14,000-square-foot buildout that swallows three former storefronts. Wagyu House will join it nearby in fall 2027. Neither one is a rumor. Both are simply slower projects than the food court refresh that already happened, and the timeline on the ground reflects that: Macerich's own materials put full completion of this phase at September 2027, more than a year from now.

The Piece Everyone Skips: The Boulevard Shops

There's a second wave of openings happening a few hundred feet from the main mall building, in a strip called The Boulevard Shops at Chandler Fashion Center. It's easy to miss because it doesn't share a roofline with the department stores, but it's part of the same leasing push. TRND Setters barber shop and Cleopatra Ink tattoo and piercing studio both opened this spring. Chi Cha San Chen, a Taiwanese tea house that has picked up three-star Superior Taste Awards from the International Taste Institute, was slated to open there in June, though no local coverage has confirmed the actual opening date since.

If you've only been tracking the mall itself, the Boulevard Shops openings are the kind of thing you'd walk past without connecting to the bigger redevelopment story. They're smaller, they're independent of the Sears and Harkins construction, and they're already live.

What This Means If You Live Nearby

A few practical things fall out of all this if Chandler Fashion Center is part of your regular rotation:

1. Expect parking and access changes on the south side through at least next year while the Harkins-adjacent district gets rebuilt.
2. You don't need to wait for Din Tai Fung to have a reason to go this weekend. Seafood City alone is a genuinely new experience in the Valley, not just another grocery run.
3. If you're headed to Round1 or the arcade, know that the upstairs neighbor is now a full grocery store with its own dining hall, not the empty floor it used to be.
4. Check the Boulevard Shops if it's been a while. Three businesses have opened there in the past few months with almost none of the attention the mall's main building has gotten.

The 180-plus retailers already inside Chandler Fashion Center make it easy to assume nothing changes fast in a space that size. This year says otherwise. The mall added three new tenants in a ten-day stretch this summer, on top of a J. Crew Factory that opened back in May with even less notice, while simultaneously tearing up an entire wing for a project that won't finish until 2027. Both things are true at once, and knowing which is which is the difference between planning a Saturday around what's actually there and planning one around what's still just a rendering on Macerich's website.

If you want the same kind of read on what's changing in your own part of Chandler, not just the mall but the block you live on, that's the sort of neighborhood-level detail Birk Realtors tracks across the East Valley. If a new anchor tenant or a construction timeline like this one has you curious what it might mean for your home's value, reach out any time for a free home valuation.