Green Acres Is About To Get Loud. Rockaway Avenue Isn't Going Anywhere.

"It's what they are calling the dining district of the South Shore."

That's how Richard Madramuthu, a Macerich vice president, described the wave of restaurants headed for Green Acres Mall when News 12 got a look at the construction site in the summer of 2025. He rattled off the names in the same breath: Cheesecake Factory, Shake Shack, Panda Express, and then, almost as an aside, Tony's Tacos, "a great local operator."

If you live in Valley Stream, you've probably driven past the fencing on Sunrise Highway enough times to have an opinion about it already. What's less obvious, unless you've been paying attention to both ends of town at once, is that this fall's opening wave doesn't touch the restaurants Valley Stream already has. The mall is building a chain-scale dining district from scratch. Elsewhere in town, Rockaway Avenue has had one, informally, for years. Understanding the difference between the two tells you more about where to actually eat this fall than any single grand opening does.

What's Actually Landing This Fall

Macerich's overhaul of Green Acres, estimated at between $130 million and $150 million, has been unfolding in stages since the Sears building came down in 2025, but the restaurant piece is the part residents will notice first. In an August 2026 update to Greater Long Island, the mall's leasing team confirmed that a cluster of national chains is "projected to open in the third or fourth quarter of this year," meaning some of these could already have their doors open by the time you read this, and others could still be weeks out.

Here's where things stood as of that August update:

Sephora and an 80,000-square-foot ShopRite are also part of the plan, but both are pointed at spring 2027, well past this fall's restaurant push. So is a 37,000-square-foot children's entertainment center with laser tag and climbing structures. Those are worth knowing about, but they're a different conversation from where you're getting dinner next month.

The One Name Macerich Said Out Loud

Look at that list again. Six of the seven names are chains you'd recognize from a highway exit anywhere in the country. One isn't. Tony's Tacos is a Long Island operator with an existing location in Huntington, and when Macerich's own leasing executive picked a single name to single out as "a great local operator" during a press tour, he picked that one. Nobody name-checked Panda Express that way.

That detail matters more than it looks like it should. A mall rebuilding its restaurant district from a mostly empty former Sears wing had every reason to lease exclusively to national brands with proven foot traffic. Instead, the leasing team built its "dining district" around four or five recognizable chains and then made a point of publicly flagging the one homegrown name in the mix. That's not an accident of quoting. It's a signal about what Green Acres wants this new wing to feel like: not just a food court upgrade, but something closer to what a downtown restaurant row is supposed to be, chains and independents sharing a sidewalk.

It still isn't Rockaway Avenue, though. It's a version of that idea built inside a shopping center, with sit-down chains anchoring the corners and a rotating cast of fast-casual names filling in between them.

Where Valley Stream Has Actually Been Eating

None of this is new information to anyone who already eats on Rockaway Avenue between Sunrise Highway and Merrick Road. Mia's of Valley Stream, an Italian-American restaurant and bar at 31 Rockaway Avenue, has been serving brick oven pizza and pre-fixe dinners on that stretch for years. A few doors down, Chicken Coop has built a following for Colombian and Latin American food, and Il Corso Pastry Shop has held down its corner as one of the neighborhood's longtime Italian bakeries. None of these places are part of the mall's redevelopment. None of them needed to be.

That corridor has had its own quiet momentum too. The Village of Valley Stream was named a winner of the state's ninth round Downtown Revitalization Initiative in May 2026, receiving $10 million earmarked for pedestrian and bicycle improvements, better lighting near the LIRR overpasses, and expanded public space around the Village Green. That money isn't going toward new restaurants. It's going toward making the street those restaurants already sit on easier to walk down. Two completely separate investors, one private and one public, are putting money into food and foot traffic in the same town at the same time, without either project touching the other.

Two Food Scenes, Two Different Nights Out

This is the part that actually changes how you plan a week. The new wing at Green Acres is built for the nights you want a reservation, a bigger table, and a name everyone in your group already trusts, out-of-town family, a birthday party, a first date where you don't want to gamble. That's what Cheesecake Factory and Fogo de Chão are built for. Shake Shack, Panda Express, and Dave's Hot Chicken cover the version of that same trip where you just want something fast and reliable between errands at the mall.

Rockaway Avenue solves a different problem. It's the weeknight stop where you don't want to drive across town, park, and walk past six stores to get to a restaurant. Mia's, Chicken Coop, and Il Corso are a few minutes from most of the Village on foot, and none of them require the kind of planning a mall trip does. If the state's downtown investment lands the way it's designed to, that stretch gets easier to walk and better lit at night, which mostly means it gets to keep doing what it already does, just with fewer excuses not to.

Macerich has also started addressing the distance between its own two properties. Green Acres Connect, a free shuttle linking the main mall to Green Acres Commons across the street, has been running as a pilot on Saturdays from 1 to 6 p.m. through the summer. It's a small fix for a real complaint, that the campus isn't especially walkable even within its own footprint, and it's worth knowing about if you're planning a day that touches both sides of Sunrise Highway.

None of this is really a story about a mall getting nicer. It's a story about two different parts of Valley Stream deciding, independently and for different reasons, that this was the year to invest in how people eat here. One side is doing it with national chains and a construction budget in the neighborhood of $130 million to $150 million. The other is doing it with sidewalks, streetlights, and restaurants that never left. Both are worth your time this fall, just not on the same night.

If you're weighing a move to a neighborhood where the food scene is actually still changing in real time, Singh's Team can walk you through what else is happening in Valley Stream and the surrounding towns. Get your free home valuation and let's talk about what's next.