Walk the second floor of Westfield Century City on a weekday evening and you'll pass a construction wall where Pink Taco used to be. It's been there since spring. Nobody working retail on that floor seems to have a date for when it comes down.

A few hundred feet away, past the atrium with its wall of greenery, Katsuya's dining room is full. The terrace has a line for the beer garden. Casa Dani's shellfish display is under lights. Both restaurants finished a build-out on schedule, opened, and have already worked through a full menu cycle. One project cleared the mall's leasing machinery in time to matter this year. Another has been stuck behind it since before summer started.

That gap is the actual story for anyone living in Century City right now, not a list of new places to try. The mall is not one restaurant scene moving at one speed. It's two different systems, a retail leasing calendar and everything that happens outside it, and only one of them is currently keeping its promises.

What Finished on Time

Katsuya Century City relaunched last year with a $25 million redesign from Rockwell Group, the architecture firm behind the overhaul. The space runs 17,000 square feet, making it the brand's fourth Los Angeles location and, by the restaurant's own account, its most ambitious build yet. The terrace looks out toward Beverly Hills and the Hollywood Hills, and the redesign kept Katsuya's familiar menu anchors, the spicy tuna crispy rice and baked crab handrolls regulars from the Brentwood location will recognize, while adding new dishes like toro tartare and A5 wagyu tataki. Read more from OpenTable's writeup of the redesign.

Next door, Casa Dani opened last year from three-Michelin-starred chef Dani García, bringing Andalusian-leaning Spanish plates, Iberico ham croquetas and paellas built around fresh seafood, into a room designed to run alongside Katsuya rather than compete with it. The two share an address and an opening season, and 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 by market cap, and it opened in January 2026 as the brand's first location anywhere outside Asia. The Century City build covers 5,000 square feet with 131 seats, a full bar, and a private dining room, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal's coverage of the opening. For a company picking its first international address, Westfield Century City delivered.

Add Super Peach, the modern Asian fusion spot from David Chang's Momofuku group, and Cafe Knotted's Korean dessert counter, and the mall's dining floor has genuinely turned over in the past year. None of these are quiet additions. They're backed by chains and chefs with the leverage to hold Westfield to a timeline.

The One That Didn't

Rumi's Kitchen is a different case, and it's the one worth watching if you live nearby. The Atlanta-based Persian chain announced a Century City location, its first in California, set to take over the old Pink Taco space on the mall's second floor. The plan included two private dining rooms and a patio facing Santa Monica Boulevard. Chef Ali Mesghali, who grew up in Iran and in Los Angeles, would be opening in the city where he was raised.

The restaurant's own site listed the opening as Spring 2026. Spring came and went. As of late July 2026, neither Rumi's Kitchen nor Westfield had posted a revised date, and the space remains under construction, according to reporting on the delay. The project isn't dead. It's just not running on the same clock as its neighbors.

Here's the pattern worth noticing: Katsuya, Casa Dani, and Very Thai are all major-brand relaunches or debuts with corporate infrastructure behind them, teams whose entire job is hitting retail construction deadlines. Rumi's Kitchen is a five-location regional chain making its first cross-country jump into a market and a leasing process it hasn't navigated before. The delay isn't a signal that the restaurant is in trouble. It's a signal that mall build-outs move on a timeline set by permitting, contractor availability, and Westfield's own construction queue, not by press releases.

If you've been holding off on Rumi's Kitchen because you saw a spring opening announced, you're not missing anything. It genuinely isn't open yet.

The Move Nobody's Timing as Closely

While the mall's second floor sits behind plywood, the other significant restaurant change in Century City is happening somewhere residents don't usually think to check: the Fairmont Century Plaza.

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, taking over the space currently held by the hotel's restaurant Lumière. The plan calls for an all-day operation, pastries and coffee in the morning, lunch and brunch with patio seating, then steaks, fish, and pasta at dinner, built around hotel guests and the CAA crowd the Fairmont already draws. The move is set to keep Birdie G's signature dishes, including its matzo ball soup and rose petal pie, according to reporting on the relocation. No opening date has been reported yet.

That absence of a date is worth noticing on its own. Rumi's Kitchen staked a specific season, Spring 2026, and is now visibly overdue. Birdie G's never made that promise publicly, so there's nothing yet to call late. One project is stuck explaining a missed deadline. The other is simply in progress, without a date hanging over it that it could blow past.

After Dinner: A Rooftop With a Different View

Not everything new here is about a plate. Padel Up runs outdoor courts on the roof of Westfield Century City, with turf surfaces, LED lighting for night play, and the kind of skyline view you don't get from the parking structure below. Courts are open daily from early morning into the evening, and the club offers coaching and rentals for people who've never picked up a paddle. It's a small addition, but it says something about what Century City is becoming. This was, for a long time, a place people drove to for a matinee at the AMC or a Saturday at Bloomingdale's and then left. A rooftop sports club that expects repeat visits assumes people are already here, living close enough to make it part of a weekly routine rather than a special trip.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

The mall's marquee dining additions, the ones with celebrity chefs and national press, have mostly delivered on schedule. Katsuya and Casa Dani finished their redesign and opening last year, and Very Thai hit its own January 2026 target for a first-ever location outside Asia. But the leasing pipeline behind Westfield's second floor is clearly capable of stalling out even a well-capitalized, chef-driven concept like Rumi's Kitchen for months past its own announced date, with no public explanation and no new timeline. If you're planning a dinner around something you saw announced for spring, check first before you drive over.

Compare that to Birdie G's, which is working through the same kind of transition at the Fairmont without ever putting a date on the calendar for the public to hold it to. That's not a guarantee it opens sooner. It just means nobody's counting the weeks the way they are with the old Pink Taco space.

That's the actual shape of the neighborhood at the moment: a retail center whose big-name openings mostly hit their dates, except for the one everyone's still asking about, and a hotel dining room quietly working through its own timeline without ever setting an expectation it could miss.

If you're a longtime Century City resident who's ever wondered what your address is worth against a corridor that keeps reinventing its ground floor, John Giddins at Los Angeles Luxury Estates can walk you through it. What's My Home Worth?