Drive Kendall Drive from Dadeland Mall out to the Kendall Village Shopping Center and you cross an invisible line. On one side, the street is called North Kendall Drive and it fronts a mall stacked with Gucci and Louis Vuitton. Keep going west and the same road becomes SW 88th Street, the address on a strip of shopping centers where a barbecue joint just spun off a burger stand and a Taiwanese fried chicken chain is about to open its fourth South Florida location. Same road. Same summer. Two completely different stories about what a "new opening" means in Kendall right now.
If you've been reading the food blogs, you've heard the mall is getting fancier and the restaurants are multiplying. Both are true, but they're happening on opposite ends of the same street, in different registers, for different reasons. That split is worth understanding if you actually live here, because it means whichever end of Kendall Drive you're closer to determines what your version of "new" looks like this year.
The West End Turned Into a Food Strip
The clearest evidence sits about a mile apart on SW 88th Street. At 13750 SW 88th St, in the former Fujiya Japanese Restaurant space, Lala's Burgers opened as a standalone spot after outgrowing its life as a Tuesday-only pop-up inside Apocalypse BBQ, the barbecue restaurant co-owners Jeff and Laura "Lala" Budnechky had already expanded into a 190-seat space at the Kendall Village Shopping Center back in March 2025. The new 70-seat location debuted a craft beer list built around South Florida names, Everhaze IPA from Tripping Animals, La Playita from The Tank Brewing Co., and La Rubia from Wynwood Brewing Company, plus plans for a vinyl listening section and board games as a nod to a fixture at the original Apocalypse BBQ.
A little over a mile away at 12536 SW 88th Street, Kung Fu Chicken is scheduled to open this fall, its fourth South Florida location after FIU, Little Havana, and Miami Beach. The fast-casual concept comes from Chef Yu Bi and her husband and business partner, Dr. Tingjun Lei, the same team behind 107 Taste and Cajun Boil, and it draws on the flavors of Yu Bi's upbringing in Sichuan. The couple met while studying hospitality at FIU, which makes the choice of Kendall a homecoming of sorts. According to Chef Yu Bi, the location "brings us back to where so much of our Miami story began." Planned hours are Wednesday through Monday, 11:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., closed Tuesdays.
That's two restaurants, roughly a mile apart, on the same street, both tracing back to owners with existing footprints in the area. Neither is an isolated opening. Both are expansions from people who already had customers in Kendall and decided the west end of Kendall Drive was worth a second bet.
Two Openings That Don't Fit the Pattern, and Prove It Anyway
Not every new spot landed on SW 88th Street, which is part of what makes the pattern real rather than a coincidence of one shopping center. The same week in late July, Pura Vida opened its second Kendall location at The Palms at Town & Country, drawing a line out the door on opening day for its avocado toasts, açaí bowls, and fresh juices. Around the same time, Night Owl Cookies opened its first shop in West Kendall, a location that reportedly pulled a line wrapped around the building. The late-night cookie brand started in 2012 when founder Andrew Gonzalez was 20 years old, delivering out of his mother's kitchen before it grew into a South Florida staple.
Neither of those openings is on SW 88th Street proper, but both are food-focused, both are expansions of brands that already had a following, and both landed within the same two-week window as the burger and chicken openings farther west. Put together, five different food and beverage brands expanded into Kendall in a matter of months, and four of the five are second, third, or fourth locations rather than a company's first try anywhere.
Here's how the summer's openings break down by corridor:
| Where | What opened | Timing |
|---|---|---|
| 13750 SW 88th St | Lala's Burgers, standalone spot spun off from Apocalypse BBQ | December 2025 |
| 12536 SW 88th St | Kung Fu Chicken, fourth South Florida location | Opening fall 2026 |
| The Palms at Town & Country | Pura Vida, second Kendall location | Late July 2026 |
| West Kendall | Night Owl Cookies, first Kendall shop | Late July 2026 |
| Dadeland Mall | Kurt Geiger, Garage, Windsor, Chilli Beans, Parfums de Marly | April through July 2026 |
Meanwhile, at the Other End of the Road
Dadeland Mall has been through this before. It opened in 1962 at 535,000 square feet and has roughly tripled in size since, now running about 1.5 million square feet with more than 150 stores. It has never really stopped adding tenants, but the tenants arriving this year tell you something specific about who the mall is chasing.
The mall already carries genuine luxury: Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Ferragamo, and Rolex all have a presence there. What opened this spring and summer sits a notch below that tier. Garage, a young women's clothing brand out of Montreal, opened near Macy's Fashion in April. Windsor, known for going-out dresses and everyday fashion aimed at a younger, social-media-fluent shopper, opened in May near Dick's House of Sport. Kurt Geiger, the British handbag and shoe brand, opened the same month as its third standalone Florida store, following locations at Aventura Mall and Orlando's Mall at Millenia. In July, Brazilian eyewear brand Chilli Beans opened a kiosk near Bath & Body Works and Lululemon, its first freestanding presence outside a flagship on Lincoln Road that opened in 2023. And Parfums de Marly opened its first Florida boutique across from Ferragamo, the one genuinely high-end addition in the group.
Read as a set, four of those five names are accessible-premium rather than true luxury. Dadeland isn't trading up. It's filling in the tier between its Gucci-level anchors and its Zara-level mainstays, and it's doing it with brands built for a younger customer who wants recognizable names without the luxury price tag. That's a different growth strategy than what's happening a few miles west, where the additions are all food and mostly homegrown.
The One Thing That Hasn't Changed
If both ends of Kendall Drive are in motion, Kendall Indian Hammocks Park is the counterweight. The 160-acre park sits off SW 79th Street with a tropical hardwood hammock and nature trails running through it, a 36-hole disc golf course, three lighted softball fields, and an action sports plaza built on 14,000 square feet of concrete, styled after skateboarding landmarks like Love Park in Philadelphia and the Embarcadero in San Francisco. None of that has changed this year and none of it needs to. It's the neighborhood's stable weekend option while the restaurant and retail corridors on either side of it keep shifting.
What This Means If You Live Here
If your daily radius runs closer to US-1 and Dadeland, your version of "what's new in Kendall" this year is Kurt Geiger and Parfums de Marly, brands aimed at filling a gap between the mall's existing luxury tier and its everyday one. If your radius runs closer to Kendall Village and the stretch of SW 88th Street further west, your version is a burger spot that grew out of a barbecue restaurant's Tuesday pop-up and a Sichuan-inspired chicken concept from a couple who met at FIU. Both are real. Neither is the whole picture on its own, which is exactly why the roundups that treat Kendall as one undifferentiated blob miss what's actually happening on the ground.
Understanding a neighborhood at this level of detail, street by street rather than zip code by zip code, is the same skill that matters when you're trying to figure out what a property is actually worth or what a specific block will look like in five years. That's the kind of granular, current knowledge Javier Portal and the team at Green Group Realty bring to every conversation about Kendall, whether you're weighing a move or just trying to keep up with your own neighborhood. If you ever want to talk through what's changing here and what it means for your property, Schedule a Personal Market Consultation.
