Century City Restaurants 2026: Who’s Actually Opening?

Walk the second floor of Westfield Century City on any weekday afternoon and you'll pass a run of construction fencing between Din Tai Fung and the escalators, right where Pink Taco used to be. The signage behind it has promised Rumi's Kitchen for so long that regulars have started treating the space the way you'd treat a road crew that never shows up. A few doors down, Katsuya's redesigned dining room and Very Thai's dining room, barely eight months old, are both fully open and taking reservations.

That gap is not random. If you live in or around Century City and have been tracking which restaurants actually open when they say they will, the pattern holds up: the tenants backed by large, multi-location operators are hitting their dates. The one tenant without that infrastructure behind it is the one stuck behind plywood.

The chains that showed up on schedule

Katsuya's Century City location reopened in 2025 after a full redesign, its fourth Los Angeles address and eleventh location worldwide. The redesign kept the dishes regulars from the Brentwood location would recognize, the spicy tuna crispy rice and baked crab handrolls, and added new plates like toro tartare and A5 wagyu tataki, all served on a terrace that looks out toward Beverly Hills and the Hollywood Hills. Next door, Casa Dani opened the same season from three-Michelin-starred chef Dani García, bringing Iberico ham croquetas and seafood-forward paellas into a room built to complement Katsuya rather than compete with it. Both were finished when they said they'd be.

Very Thai moved even faster on a bigger promise. The restaurant is the U.S. flagship for TTFB Co. Ltd., one of Taiwan's largest chain restaurant operators, and it opened in January 2026 as the brand's first location anywhere outside Asia. For a company staking its first international address on this specific mall, that's not a small commitment, and Westfield delivered the space on schedule. Add Super Peach, the modern Asian fusion spot David Chang's Momofuku group opened on the mall's first level, and Café Knotted's Korean dessert counter, and the second floor has genuinely turned over in the past year. What connects all of these tenants is not the size of their menus or their marketing budgets. It's that each one is backed by a company whose entire job is hitting retail construction deadlines across multiple cities at once. A chain with eleven locations has done this build-out before. A company relaunching its first U.S. flagship for a Taiwanese restaurant conglomerate has project managers whose only task is making sure the drywall and permits land on the calendar date corporate promised.

The chef without the chain

Rumi's Kitchen doesn't have that. The Atlanta-based Persian restaurant operates five locations across Atlanta, Alpharetta, Houston, and Washington D.C., a real but modest footprint next to a company like TTFB. Chef Ali Mesghali, who grew up in Iran and in Los Angeles, is opening in the city where he was raised, taking over the old Pink Taco space with two private dining rooms and a patio planned to face Santa Monica Boulevard. The restaurant first told press it would open in the summer of 2025. That date passed. The brand's own website then updated its target to Spring 2026. As of late July 2026, according to a direct check of the restaurant's future openings page, that date has also passed with no revised timeline posted, and Westfield's own directory still lists the location as coming soon rather than open.

None of this means the project is dead. It means Rumi's Kitchen is running on a different clock than its neighbors, one without a real estate team whose sole function is protecting a construction schedule across a dozen open markets. Los Angeles already has an established Persian dining scene anchored in Westwood, Beverly Hills, Sherman Oaks, and Glendale, so the appetite for what Rumi's Kitchen is selling isn't in question. What's in question is whether a five-location chain has the leverage to hold a mall landlord to a date the way an eleven-location sushi brand or a Taiwanese restaurant conglomerate can.

A hotel deal that can't miss a deadline it never set

There's a second restaurant story unfolding in Century City that has nothing to do with the mall's second floor. Birdie G's, chef Jeremy Fox's comfort food restaurant, closed its Santa Monica location at the end of 2025. Rather than disappear, it's relocating into the Fairmont Century Plaza, taking over the space currently held by the hotel's restaurant, Lumière. The plan is for an all-day operation built around hotel guests and the CAA crowd the Fairmont already draws, pastries and coffee in the morning, lunch and brunch with patio seating, then steaks, fish, and pasta at dinner. Birdie G's signature dishes, including its matzo ball soup and rose petal pie, are expected to carry over to the new location.

No opening date has been reported yet, and that absence is worth sitting with. Rumi's Kitchen staked a specific season and is now visibly overdue. Birdie G's never made that promise publicly, so there's nothing yet to call late. The move also fits the same pattern from a different angle: Birdie G's isn't building a shell from scratch the way Rumi's Kitchen is. It's stepping into an existing hotel restaurant's infrastructure, kitchen, staff, and lease already in place, which is its own version of borrowing someone else's construction timeline rather than running its own.

What the rooftop courts add to the picture

One more addition on the property says something about who Westfield Century City is actually building for now. Padel Up runs two outdoor courts on the Westfield Skydeck, the mall's rooftop level between the AMC theater and Nordstrom, open from 7am to 11pm most days with a bar and lounge attached. A padel club isn't a special-occasion outing the way a Michelin-adjacent dinner reservation is. It's the kind of amenity that only makes financial sense if the operator expects the same people to show up two or three times a week, which assumes those people already live close enough to make it part of a routine rather than a destination they drive to once.

That's a different mall than the one built around a Saturday matinee and a trip to Bloomingdale's. The restaurant turnover happening one floor down is part of the same shift. When a mall is trying to become a daily extension of the neighborhood around it rather than a place people visit occasionally, the tenants that succeed fastest are the ones with the operational muscle to open exactly when they say they will, because residents are paying attention on a weekly basis, not a seasonal one.

What this means if you live here

If you've been planning a dinner around Rumi's Kitchen finally opening, the honest answer is that nobody, including the restaurant itself, has a firm date to give you right now. If you're waiting on Birdie G's, the Fairmont relocation is real and in progress, but there's no public timeline to hold anyone to yet. What you can count on is that Century City's larger, chain-backed restaurant openings have delivered on schedule all year, which tells you something useful about how to read future announcements here: the size and reach of the operator behind a new opening is a better predictor of its actual opening date than anything in the press release.

None of this changes what makes Century City worth paying attention to day to day, whether that's a padel reservation before dinner or a quick stop at Super Peach on the way home. It's a neighborhood where the businesses are increasingly built around people who are already there, and watching how those businesses actually deliver, not just what they promise, is one of the more reliable ways to read where a place is headed.

If you're weighing what a home in Century City actually costs against what daily life here looks like right now, Rick Ojeda can walk you through both sides of that picture. Let's Connect.