"As the Palms at Town & Country continues to grow, we're focused on introducing brands that complement the existing mix," Katie Wycoff, director of real estate at Kimco Realty Corp, said earlier this year. It's a standard line from a standard press release, the kind of quote that runs under every shopping center announcement in the country. But read it again next to what's actually happened at the corner of Kendall Drive and 117th Avenue this year, and it stops sounding standard. The Palms at Town & Country hasn't grown. Not by a single square foot. The 80-acre footprint that's anchored this stretch of Kendall for decades is exactly the size it was last year. What's changed is who's standing inside it.
If you've driven past the center a handful of times since January, you've probably felt this without naming it. Something is different every time you pass, but the parking lot is the same size, the building outlines haven't shifted, and the anchors are still where they've always been. That's not an illusion. It's the actual mechanism of how a fully built-out suburb like Kendall grows now: not outward, but through replacement.
The Same Boxes, New Names Inside Them
Start with the easiest example to verify yourself. Bolay, the fast-casual bowl chain, closed its Mills Drive location sometime before this spring. In its place, Cava opened in mid-April, its first Kendall store and fifth in South Florida. The space is 2,720 square feet. It was 2,720 square feet under Bolay too. Nothing was knocked down or built out. A tenant left and a tenant with a longer line took its place, in the same shell, on the same lease footprint.
That's the pattern across the property, and it's worth laying out side by side because the individual swaps are easy to miss but the total adds up to something.
| Then | Now |
|---|---|
| Bolay, fast-casual bowls | Cava, opened mid-April 2026, same 2,720 sq ft |
| Burger King | Starbucks, 3,684 sq ft, opened October 2025 |
| Older, larger Barnes & Noble a mile away at Kendall Village | New Barnes & Noble on-site at the Palms, opened October 2025 |
| Publix (operating since 1985) | New Publix under construction since a January 17, 2026 closure |
Four tenant changes, zero acres added. That's the story the "continues to grow" quote is actually describing, and it's a more interesting one than a ribbon-cutting for a new outparcel would be.
What Actually Happened to Publix
The Publix closure is the one residents feel most directly, because it wasn't a swap of one chain for another. It was a demolition. The store at 8250 Mills Drive had been running since 1985, four decades of Pub Subs and the same pharmacy counter, and it closed for good on January 17, 2026, to make way for a rebuild on the same site.
Publix hasn't published a reopening date, and rebuilds of this kind typically run a year to 18 months from closure to reopening based on how the chain has handled comparable projects elsewhere in Miami-Dade. That puts a realistic return somewhere between early and mid-2027. As of this writing, roughly seven and a half months after the doors closed, the site is still mid-construction, which means anyone in the immediate area has been routing their grocery trips somewhere else for the better part of a year.
Publix pointed loyal shoppers toward four nearby alternatives while the rebuild is underway:
- Publix at Kendall Mall, 9041 SW 107th Avenue
- Publix at Market Square, 11750 SW 104th Street
- Publix at Higate Square, 13820 SW 88th Street
- Publix at the Crossings Shopping Village, 13001 SW 112th Street
None of those are far. That's the other underappreciated fact about Kendall's density: even a full grocery-anchor closure barely disrupts daily routines here, because the redundancy already exists a few minutes in any direction.
The Fitness Boxes Filling In Behind the Food
The next wave at the Palms isn't food at all. Yoga Joint, a Sunrise-based studio chain, is bringing a 5,360-square-foot location next to J.Crew Factory, and Pura Vida Miami is opening a 3,425-square-foot cafe built around bowls, smoothies and coffee. Both are slated for this summer, which by the calendar means they should be opening any week now if they haven't already.
It's a logical next step for a center that just spent a year swapping its food court and its grocery anchor. The wellness studio and the bowl cafe are the tenants that show up once the foot traffic pattern around them has already proven itself.
Down the Road, Independent Kitchens Are Moving Faster Than the Landlord
The Palms isn't the only place in Kendall where the map is being redrawn. A few minutes away, the story is happening at the scale of an individual restaurant group rather than a shopping center's leasing office.
Apocalypse BBQ opened its first brick-and-mortar in 2022 with 43 seats. By March 2025 it had grown into a 190-seat space at the Kendall Village Shopping Center. What started as a Tuesday-only pop-up out of that kitchen, a burger side project called Lala's Burgers, opened its own standalone location in December 2025 at 13750 SW 88th Street, in the space that used to be Fujiya Japanese Restaurant. It's a straight line from backyard barbecue to a 70-seat restaurant with a craft beer list built around local breweries like Tripping Animals and The Tank Brewing Co, and it happened entirely within Kendall.
Kung Fu Chicken is taking a similar bet on the neighborhood this fall. The Sichuan-inspired fast-casual concept, founded by Chef Yu Bi and her husband Dr. Tingjun Lei, is opening its fourth South Florida location at 12536 SW 88th Street, joining existing spots at FIU, Little Havana and Miami Beach.
"Opening in Kendall feels especially meaningful to us because this community brings us back to where so much of our Miami story began," Chef Yu Bi said of the choice.
That's not a landlord introducing brands to complement a mix. That's an operator picking Kendall on its own terms, which says something different about the neighborhood's pull than a mall's leasing strategy does.
Dadeland Runs the Same Playbook, Just Bigger
If the Palms feels like a small-scale version of this rotation, Dadeland Mall is the large-scale one. The mall has sat at 1.5 million square feet for years, more than triple its size when it opened in 1962, and it hasn't added acreage recently either. What it's added is smaller footprints inside that fixed shell: a Chilli Beans eyewear kiosk that opened July 9, a Parfums de Marly boutique in the Fashion Wing, Kurt Geiger's third Florida store, which landed near Macy's Fashion in May, and apparel shop Windsor, which opened in the East Mall that same month.
Same logic as the Palms, just executed at a scale most people don't stop to measure. The building isn't getting bigger. The names inside it keep turning over.
The Park Nobody's Renovating
Not everything in Kendall is in motion, and that's worth naming too. Kendall Indian Hammocks Park, tucked off SW 79th Street, runs on a schedule that hasn't needed updating in years. The Action Sports Plaza, a 14,000-square-foot concrete skate park modeled after Philadelphia's Love Park and San Francisco's Embarcadero, still draws the same regulars. The 36-hole disc golf course is still there. A local Amtgard group still plays every Sunday from noon to 5 p.m., and in February a birding group called Phoebes tallied warblers, hawks and a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker on a morning walk through the hammock. The park hosts the annual 4th of July 5K, gun time 7:04 a.m., and a Cub Scout Family Fun Day is scheduled there for October 3.
None of that has changed because none of it needed to. It's the fixed point the retail corridor keeps rotating around.
What "New" Actually Means Here
Put it together and the honest read on Kendall in 2026 isn't that the neighborhood is expanding. It's fully built, and has been for a long time. What's changing is the churn rate inside that fixed footprint, a grocery store rebuilt from the studs, a bowl chain replacing a bowl chain, an independent burger joint growing out of a barbecue pop-up, a Sichuan fast-casual concept picking Kendall over anywhere else in the county. The acreage is locked. The tenants are not.
If you live here, that's probably the more useful way to read every "coming soon" sign on Mills Drive from now on. It's not a sign the neighborhood is becoming something else. It's a sign the neighborhood already has enough demand that better operators keep lining up for the same real estate.
Team Citron spends as much time tracking these small shifts as we do tracking prices, because the two aren't as separate as they look. If you're ever curious what a corridor like this means for your own property, or just want to talk through what's changed on your block lately, Team Citron is a phone call away, and a free home valuation is always on the house.
