Bal Harbour Shops Is Getting Much Bigger. The Restaurant Count Isn't.
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
If you've circled through the valet line at Bal Harbour Shops since late February, you've felt it: a longer drive, a different garage, a construction fence where the Collins Avenue entrance used to be. What you might not have clocked is the shape of what's actually happening behind that fence. The property is adding somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000 square feet to a mall that has covered about 450,000 square feet for most of its life, pushing the total toward roughly 700,000 once the work closes out. That's the property growing by close to half its current size.
Count the places to eat, though, and the growth story falls apart. Bal Harbour Shops lists seven restaurants today: Slim's, China Grill, Makoto, Carpaccio, Avenue 31 Café, Café en 3, and Carrie's at Neiman Marcus. Two of those seven, Slim's and China Grill, only exist because Aba's kitchen went dark and Le Zoo closed its doors at the end of April 2025 after a decade-long run. They didn't add capacity. They replaced it, in the same footprints the departed tenants left behind. The square footage is exploding. The dining roster is being rotated in place.
That distinction matters if you live here, because it tells you what to actually expect from the next twelve months. The mall isn't becoming a bigger version of itself with more of everything. It's staying the same size in the ways that determine your Tuesday night, while getting considerably bigger in the ways that determine the boutique floor.
If your standing Sunday reservation quietly disappeared sometime last year, that's why. Aba closed. Then Le Zoo, the French bistro that had anchored a corner of the Shops since 2015, served its last brunch at the end of April 2025. Neither exit was framed as a retreat. Both were cleared footprints, held open for operators already under contract.
That's a very Whitman Family Development way of doing things. The family has owned and run Bal Harbour Shops since Stanley Whitman opened it in 1965 with thirty tenants, and the instinct to hold space rather than fill it quickly has defined the property for six decades. Matthew Whitman Lazenby, Stanley's grandson, took over as president in 2003 and has described the philosophy in plain terms.
"We have always believed that what's good for the Shops is good for the Village, too."
It's the same instinct that convinced Neiman Marcus to break its Texas-only rule and open here in 1971, and that brought Saks Fifth Avenue in five years later. The mall doesn't chase volume. It waits for the right name, then gives that name the exact footprint someone else just vacated.
Slim's Steakhouse opened on March 17, 2026, in the space that originally housed Makoto, the sushi restaurant that first brought Stephen Starr to Bal Harbour in 2011 before it relocated within the property in 2022. Starr calls the move a kind of homecoming.
"Going back to the old space felt like coming home and redoing your bedroom."
The 183-seat room, designed by GACHOT with a 1930s-inspired mural by Christoph Niemann, runs a menu built around Wagyu, a raw bar, and a $100 cheesesteak that made the trip from Starr's Barclay Prime in Philadelphia.
China Grill reopened on June 9, 2026, taking over the Le Zoo footprint at the entrance to the Shops. Jeffrey Chodorow's original South Beach room, which opened on Collins Avenue on September 27, 1995, closed in 2012 after helping build the reputation of South of Fifth. The Bal Harbour version brought back Lobster Pancakes, Lamb Spare Ribs, and the Tempura Sashimi that built its reputation the first time around, and it runs noon to 11 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, noon to midnight Friday and Saturday. That's a later kitchen than most of the property keeps. Carpaccio and Makoto both lean toward lunch and early dinner, so China Grill now gives the ground floor something closer to a proper late-night option.
Chodorow has said the years away only deepened the pull to bring it back.
"China Grill was always about creating a shared experience, something people remembered long after the meal ended."
The five spots that never left are still exactly where you'd expect them. Carpaccio has been serving lunch under the palms since 1994, and getting a table there at midday still counts as a small seasonal sport among regulars.
Almost everyone arriving during this construction cycle is a name the property has already bet on. Toteme is the exception. The Swedish fashion house opened its first Miami store at Bal Harbour Shops on July 1, 2026, a 1,010-square-foot space on Level 2 designed with longtime collaborators Halleroed of Stockholm. Cofounder Karl Lindman described the brief as an attempt to let Swedish restraint sit next to Florida's materiality rather than compete with it.
It's a small store inside a very large construction project, and that's precisely the point. Of the headline additions moving into the new wing, Toteme is the only one without a prior history at the Shops. The rest of the list, including L'Agence and Peserico, are first-time arrivals too, but the marquee names, Starr and Chodorow, are operators the family already trusts. Meanwhile Prada, Balenciaga, Saint Laurent, and Brioni are simply enlarging the shops they already have. More square footage, not more brands.
The boutique count reflects the same pattern. Before construction began, the Shops were routinely described as home to more than 100 boutiques. Mid-expansion, that's still the figure most guides use. The number of tenants isn't scaling with the new square footage, and that gap is the whole story of this project.
The practical part matters more than the press releases if you're actually driving here. Since February 24, 2026, the vehicle entrance and exit at 9700 Collins Avenue has been closed for construction, according to a traffic advisory posted by Bal Harbour Village. Self-park, valet, and rideshare drop-off now route through the 96th Street Parking Garage instead.
Self-parking has also changed in a way that catches longtime visitors off guard. It's ticketless now: a camera reads your plate on entry, you scan a QR code inside the garage to pay by card, and the barrier lifts automatically once payment clears on the way out. Cash isn't accepted.
A few things worth knowing before you go:
None of this is permanent chaos. It's the visible edge of a $740 million construction loan doing its work, and the retail wing itself is expected to open by the end of this quarter, per WWD's reporting on the project's timeline. But if dinner at Slim's or China Grill is on the calendar this month, plan the drive around the garage, not the old entrance.
Walk the courtyards today and the constants are still doing the work they've always done. The koi ponds and the turtles sunning themselves beside them have been part of the property since long before any of this construction started. One longtime visitor, describing a childhood spent shopping there with her mother and sisters, put it simply.
"We always ended at the koi pond, watching the fish and turtles move in their calm, unhurried way."
That's the actual product here, more than any single boutique or reservation. The Shops you've walked through for years are not disappearing under the construction fencing. They're getting denser around the edges while the center holds.
The mall getting bigger doesn't mean your mall is getting less like itself. It means the family that has run it since 1965 found room to grow without changing what made you want to live two minutes from it in the first place.
If the arrival of Slim's and China Grill has you thinking less about dinner reservations and more about what's next for a waterfront address in this corridor, that's a conversation Golan Group has with clients regularly, always privately. Schedule a confidential consultation whenever the timing is right.
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