Citrus Heights Is Building Its New Food Scene Around the Empty Mall, Not Inside It

Drive Sunrise Boulevard past the old Macy's wing this month and you'll pass a fenced construction zone, a handful of shuttered anchor stores, and a parking lot that still fills up every Saturday morning for a farmers market. Keep driving another quarter mile and you'll hit Copperwood Square, where a Mongolian barbecue restaurant, a bakery, and a nail salon all opened within the same six-month window. Cross to Greenback Lane and you'll find the same pattern repeating at a different plaza. The mall at the center of Citrus Heights has been losing tenants for years. The restaurants filling in around it have not gotten the memo.

That's the part worth sitting with. Citrus Heights isn't waiting for Sunrise Mall to get fixed before it rebuilds its food scene. It's building that scene on the mall's edges, in strip centers the mall itself used to overshadow, while the 100-acre property at the middle of town remains, for now, mostly a rendering.

Copperwood Square Filled In First

The clearest evidence sits at 7056 Sunrise Blvd, in a retail building next to an existing Starbucks. Gateway Nails & Spa opened there in early February 2026 with a ribbon cutting hosted by the Citrus Heights Chamber of Commerce, complete with dragon dancers and firecrackers. Owner Christina Truong had previously run a location in Folsom. Weeks later, construction crews next door were finishing kitchen equipment for O Tasty Mongolian Barbecue, a 3,200-square-foot restaurant that opened in June 2026 offering a build-your-own barbecue bowl format. The operator had run a similar concept at Westfield Galleria in Roseville until it closed in spring 2024, and chose to relaunch under a new name in Citrus Heights instead. BAD Bakers took the remaining 1,100-square-foot suite between the restaurant and the nail salon, adding a fourth Sacramento-area location to a lineup that already includes Folsom, Elk Grove, and a spot near Cal Expo.

Three businesses, one small strip, filled inside of six months. None of it required the mall to reopen anything.

Across Greenback Lane, the Same Thing Is Happening

A mile or so away, Greenback Square tells a nearly identical story. The center already held Royal Indian Cuisine and a separate Mongolian BBQ restaurant when Wasabi House, a Japanese spot across from the mall, closed. Nobody seems to agree on exactly when. Its last Yelp review dates to July 2025, its last social media post to 2024, and local reporting on the closure has offered conflicting timelines. What's certain is that by June 2026, a "coming soon" banner had gone up in its place for Heights of Brazil, a Brazilian restaurant expected to bring the plaza's mix of cuisines to four. Leasing materials from JLL of Sacramento show the shopping center still has nine other vacancies to fill, which suggests this particular reshuffling isn't finished.

A few blocks down Greenback Lane, Valencia's Mexican Market and Taqueria, a family-owned business that has served the area for more than two decades after its founders immigrated from Michoacán, announced plans to expand its existing space. Next door, the owners' daughter Evelyn Valencia recently opened Sweet Music Studio Cafe, pairing live music with coffee, wine, and beer in the same strip mall.

Here's the quick map of what's changed across both plazas in the last year:

The Mall Itself Is Still Just a Plan

None of this activity has much to do with what's actually happening inside Sunrise Mall, and that gap is the point. The property spans nearly 100 acres split across seven parcels owned by five different entities, a structure that has slowed redevelopment for years. In March 2026, the City Council approved a partnership framework with Sacramento-based developer The Mettle Shop to build a sports center on the former Macy's Men's building, and Tallen Capital Partners is separately in escrow to acquire roughly 50 of the mall's 100 acres from majority owner Namdar Realty Group. Mayor MariJane Lopez-Taff called the vote "pretty close to a magic-wand moment for our community," but the agreement itself doesn't approve a single building. What it does is authorize technical studies: traffic, noise, utility demand, and a parking analysis that hadn't even started as of the March council meeting. City officials have said they're aiming for public hearings by the end of 2026, which means the sports center is still, at minimum, a year or more from breaking ground.

One tenant has already committed regardless of that timeline. Slick City Action Park, an indoor entertainment company with 35 locations open nationwide and more than 150 in development, signed a lease in April 2026 for the former Sears building at 6041 Sunrise Blvd, a 31,160-square-foot space the company says will become its flagship location. The deal became public in May through a CoStar report. It's the largest single commitment to the property so far, and it's for a building that's been sitting empty since Sears left.

So the mall's future is real, but it's still mostly paperwork. The restaurants and small businesses filling Copperwood Square and Greenback Square aren't waiting on any of it.

A Third Node, on the Opposite Side of Town

The clearest sign that this rebuilding isn't just chasing the mall's future foot traffic sits nowhere near Sunrise Boulevard. At the corner of Twin Oaks Avenue and Auburn Boulevard, a lot that sat vacant for roughly a decade reopened in July 2026 as the Citrus Heights Food Truck Plaza, then celebrated a full grand opening on August 8 after growing from a two-truck soft launch to ten vendors:

• Monarcas Birrieria y Botanas
• Bingsu Bliss
• Bacon Mania
• 5River Pizza & Tandoori Grill
• Sweets Drinks & Treats
• Tipsy Cheese
• Hefty Gyros
• Kado's Asian Grill
• Bubble Hive
• Luna Cafe

The plaza's marketing manager told local reporters that families from nearby apartment complexes started showing up during the first week just from driving past. That's a corner with no connection to the mall's redevelopment story at all, filling with the same kind of energy on its own timeline.

What's Still Free, for Now

If you want the closest thing to a preview of what the mall parking lot could look like under new ownership, it already exists. The Sunrise Mall Farmers Market runs every Saturday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Macy's parking lot at 6041 Sunrise Blvd, drawing more than 80 vendors selling produce, baked goods, and crafts, with free parking and WIC and EBT accepted. It's been certified and running there for years, largely independent of whatever the mall's owners decide next. Whether that market keeps its spot once Tallen Capital Partners finalizes its purchase and construction schedules take shape is an open question nobody has answered publicly yet.

The city is also retiring one long-running gathering in favor of something new. Sunday Funday, the community event that's run for years, is being sunset in 2026 in favor of two larger evenings called Citrus Nights. The first already happened on August 21. The second lands September 18, with its own theme, live music, and local vendors still to be announced. It's a small signal, but it fits the pattern: even the city's own community programming is being rebuilt rather than simply maintained.

The Take for Anyone Keeping Track

If you're weighing where to grab dinner this month, the honest answer is that Citrus Heights' best new food isn't clustered at the mall everyone's watching. It's split across two plazas on either side of that mall and a reclaimed corner lot on Auburn Boulevard, three separate bets that didn't wait for a sports center or a hotel or a finalized ownership transfer to pay off. The mall's transformation might still be a year or more away. The neighborhood's food scene already looks different than it did in January.

If you're curious how a corner of Sacramento with this much visible momentum tends to hold its value or where the next wave of small business activity might land, that's the kind of question Sac Platinum Realty fields regularly from Citrus Heights neighbors. Let's talk.