For as long as most residents can remember, a Saturday in Holladay started in the same place. You picked up bread at Caputo's, wandered the plaza where Murray-Holladay Boulevard meets 2300 East, maybe finished at Franck's for something French or Sicilia Mia for tableside pasta. That routine hasn't disappeared. But this year, for the first time, it stopped being the only routine. A mile east, on the old Cottonwood Mall footprint, a second pull has switched on, and it runs on an entirely different schedule than the one Holladay has known for decades.
That's the actual story here. Not that Holladay got a burger chain or a bakery. It's that the neighborhood's map of where people spend a Saturday just split into two, and the two halves don't compete so much as run in parallel.
The center that isn't moving
Start with what hasn't changed, because it matters as much as what has.
Franck's still holds its quiet niche in the Knudsen Corners area, where chef Franck Peissel has built a 50-seat room around French cooking that's earned him recognition as a Salt Lake Magazine and Best of State honoree. Caputo's Market & Deli is still where you go for a sandwich built like a small engineering project. Sicilia Mia still runs its tableside pasta service for the birthdays and anniversaries that call for it, and Taqueria 27 still has a spot in the neighborhood's regular rotation of taco-of-the-day specials.
None of this is new, and that's the point. It's the layer of Holladay that doesn't announce itself with a press release.
The clearest proof that the old center is holding is the thing that happens every Saturday night through the middle of August: free concerts at Holladay City Hall Park, running since July 4 with a different act each week. Last night's slot went to the Will Baxter Band playing a set of Neil Diamond. Two Saturdays remain before the season wraps: Strawberry Fields on August 15 covering the Beatles, and Ronstadt Live closing things out on August 22 with the music of Linda Ronstadt. In between, this summer's lineup ran through country, Latin fusion, a Simon & Garfunkel tribute, bluegrass, and a David Bowie night, all free, all starting at 8 p.m., all at the same park the city has used for this for years.
That's a civic rhythm, not a commercial one. It doesn't care what opens a mile away.
A mile east, something turned on
The Cottonwood Mall site sat mostly quiet for years after the mall closed, tied up in entitlements that trace back to a 2007 master plan and a 2019 purchase agreement between Millrock Capital, Woodbury Corporation, and the Howard Hughes Corporation. The first visible sign of life was residential: The Grandeur at Holladay Hills opened in October 2024, a building of studios, one and two-bedroom units, and 17 fifth-floor penthouse condos, with amenities that include a year-round pool and hot tub, a golf simulator room, a sauna, and a dog wash. At the opening, Holladay Mayor Robert Dahle called the project the hottest topic of his tenure, which is a notable thing for a mayor to say about a shopping mall redevelopment.
What's changed in 2026 is that the commercial layer of the plan finally started filling in, and it filled in with names that carry weight beyond Holladay.
The names arriving this year
The tenant list confirmed in a May 2026 announcement is worth reading closely, because a few of these are firsts, not just additions:
- Bobby's Burgers by Bobby Flay opened March 27, 2026, in the Holladay Hill shopping center at 1895 E Rodeo Walk Dr, next to Trader Joe's and up the street from the Megaplex Luxury Theaters. It's the brand's second Utah location, following an Orem restaurant that franchisee Joe Sample opened in 2024 through Crave Management Group.
- Magnolia Bakery is opening its first franchise location in the United States here. Franchise owner Kirk Schneider has said the ownership team visited the site and agreed Holladay Hills was the right place to open the brand's first franchise store in the country, which reads less like a test market and more like a flagship.
- The Sicilian Butcher, a meatball-and-charcuterie concept from the same investment group behind Swig and Mo' Bettahs, is opening its first Utah location in the development.
- Sploot Veterinary Care is debuting its first Utah clinic here, open 365 days a year and combining primary and urgent care under one roof.
- Kiln, a 52,000-square-foot flex office and coworking space, opened earlier this year and has already signed Mastercard, T-Mobile, Intuit, Penn Mutual, and Assos as members.
That last one is easy to skip past, but it's arguably the most consequential addition for daily life in Holladay. A coworking hub that's already attracted companies of that size means there's now a professional daytime population moving through Holladay Hills on weekdays, not just a weekend shopping crowd. That's a different kind of foot traffic than a bakery or a burger counter brings.
Kiln's community director framed the opening simply, telling Utah Business the space has become part of the momentum building at the site and that the team is proud to support the businesses and teams choosing to grow in the area.
What two centers actually means
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only skim the tenant list. Holladay Hills and the Village Center core aren't competing for the same visit. They're built for different hours of the day.
The Village Center runs on evenings and weekend mornings. That's when Caputo's fills up, when the concert crowd shows up at City Hall Park with folding chairs, when a family books a table at Sicilia Mia. Holladay Hills, at least in its current phase, is filling in around a workday and an early evening built around Kiln's coworking hours, a burger run between meetings, a bakery stop on the way home. The full build-out plan calls for more than 600 living units and up to 750,000 square feet of dining, office, and entertainment space, plus walking trails and a central plaza, a build-out the developer has said could take another five to ten years depending on market conditions.
So the honest read isn't that Holladay traded its old center for a shinier one a mile away. It's that the neighborhood now has two working rhythms running at the same time, one built around a park bandshell and a strip of longtime family-owned spots, the other built around a coworking floor and a set of first-in-Utah retail names. Residents who've watched the cranes go up for a while now have two different reasons to leave the house on a given evening, and neither one has made the other obsolete.
That's worth knowing whether you've lived here for twenty years or you're still learning which end of Highland Drive has the shorter parking line.
If you're weighing what a home in Holladay means for your day to day, or you're curious how a two-center neighborhood like this one is shaping resale interest on specific streets, Whitney Foley Real Estate knows this stretch of the east bench block by block. Let's find your perfect property.
