If you've been bracing for the day the Shops at Sunset Place finally comes down, you can stop checking. As of this month, the mall is still standing. AMC Sunset Place 24 has a normal slate of showtimes posted for this week. LA Fitness, GameTime, Barnes & Noble, and Splitsville are all open, same as they've been for years.
That's not what you'd expect from a project the South Miami City Commission approved back in October 2024, with demolition penciled in for the first quarter of 2026. Seven towers between 12 and 33 stories, 1,513 residences, a 287-room hotel, a 1,300-seat theater, and nearly 150,000 square feet of new shops and restaurants are all still on paper. The Real Deal reported in July that the project was still waiting on permits and condo presales before the wrecking crews show up. The renderings from Heatherwick Studio are real. The construction fences are not, at least not yet.
Here's the part that actually matters if you live here: while the mall's timeline slipped, the block right next to it didn't wait around. The corner of Sunset Drive and US-1, at historic Dorn Avenue, has quietly turned over twice already this year, and a third fixture on that same stretch is packing up to move a few hundred feet rather than close for good. The neighborhood's real reset already happened. It just happened one block east of where everyone was watching.
Two new restaurants took over two long-running spots
Flight West opened its doors at 5894 Sunset Drive in mid-May, after the project had already slipped past an original August 2025 target. It took over the space that held Trattoria Sole for more than twenty years and, more recently, SIM Restaurant. The design leans Art Deco, with a backlit bar, red marble tabletops, and a whiskey program built around roughly 350 spirits. General manager Marwan Youbi spent years working at his parents' Café Bonjour. The menu direction came from chef Santiago Gomez, known locally for Cantina La Veinte, Tacology, and Palo Santo, with execution handed to chef Juan Suazo, who trained under Gomez and has kitchens like Kyu and Komodo on his résumé. Even the cocktail list plays local: The Larkin nods to the pioneering Larkins family, and The Crossroads is named for the very intersection the restaurant sits on.
A few doors down at 5812 Sunset Drive, Bored Cuban opened in February, its third Miami location after outposts near the airport and in Brickell. The space used to be Sushi Maki, which closed after more than two decades when owner Abe Ng decided he had two locations too close together. Founder Eric Castellanos, who also owns Latin Cafe 2000, called South Miami "a long term play," pointing to the multi-use development headed for the area. The South Miami location has its own menu quirks the other two don't: palomilla steak and lechon asado platters, alongside the pixas and bowls that built the brand.
Two closures on the same short stretch of Sunset Drive. Two new restaurants inside a year. That's the kind of turnover that would read as instability almost anywhere else. Here, it reads as a corner that got interesting fast, while the headline-grabbing project three blocks west is still a rendering.
The one that isn't closing, it's just moving across the driveway
The third piece of this corner's story belongs to Deli Lane Café & Sunset Tavern, a fixture since 1988. When the property changed hands to AvalonBay Communities and word got out that the building was slated for demolition, the reaction was the kind you'd expect for a place that's fed three generations of regulars. Owner Jahn Kirchoff has been clear that the restaurant itself isn't going anywhere. The plan is to relocate in the summer of 2026 across its own driveway, into the historic Dorn Building at the corner of Sunset Drive and US-1.
Kirchoff put it this way when the news broke:
"Deli Lane has always been more than a location, it is part of the community. A place to gather, to celebrate, to laugh over breakfast, lunch, dinner or wind down over happy hour."
He's also described the move itself as close to seamless: the goal is to close one day and reopen the next, without a gap for the regulars who show up for the same booth every week. Sunset Tavern, the pool-table-and-craft-beer side of the operation that's long served as the neighborhood's low-key nightlife option, is making the move alongside it.
Put the three storylines next to each other and a pattern shows up that the mall headlines miss entirely. Flight West and Bored Cuban filled two spaces left behind by businesses that closed for their own reasons, unrelated to the mall project. Deli Lane is relocating because of the mall project, but staying on the same corner rather than disappearing. None of the three establishments that anchor this stretch of Sunset Drive actually vanished. The corner reshuffled itself in place.
Your Saturday routine hasn't moved either
The geography of the mall project explains why the rest of downtown's calendar hasn't budged. The demolition site sits at the western edge of downtown, where US-1 meets Red Road. Nearly every recurring gathering South Miami residents already know sits east of Red Road or south of Sunset Drive, outside that footprint entirely.
That includes:
- The South Miami Farmers Market, held Saturdays year-round in front of the library on Sunset Drive, with produce from more than fifteen Florida farms and SNAP and EBT accepted at the register.
- SoMi Second Saturdays, held on the second Saturday of each month at SW 73rd Street and SW 58th Avenue.
- SOMI ArtFest, a free juried show that returned this year on February 21 and 22 with more than 100 artists from the US and Canada.
- Fourth of July at Palmer Park, 6100 SW 67th Avenue, which ran its usual 5 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. slot this year with fireworks at 9.
- The South Miami Art Festival, produced by Chamber South every year on the first weekend of November on Sunset Drive, a tradition dating back to 1971 that regularly draws more than 50,000 visitors.
None of these dates moved because a demolition permit is sitting on someone's desk. They were never going to. The event calendar was built around the part of downtown that isn't under discussion, and that's exactly why it's held steady through a year of headlines suggesting otherwise.
What actually changed
If your mental picture of downtown South Miami is still built around press coverage of the Heatherwick towers, it's a picture of something that hasn't happened yet. The parking garage from the original 1999 mall is the only structure on that ten-acre site confirmed to survive the eventual rebuild, whenever it starts. Everything else is still a plan with a 2029 target for its first phase and a full decade projected for buildout.
What's already true, right now, is smaller and more useful. The Dorn Avenue corner has two new restaurants with real local roots in their menus and their staff, a 38-year institution that's staying put in spirit even as it changes addresses, and a community calendar that never had a reason to move. If you're deciding where to grab dinner this week or planning around the neighborhood you already know, that's the version of South Miami worth paying attention to. The renderings can wait.
If you're curious how any of this shows up in what a South Miami home is actually worth to buyers who know the neighborhood this well, that's a conversation Elena Kemper Group has regularly with clients living through exactly this kind of change. Contact us anytime you want a local read on where things stand.
