Why Rivertown Parkway Suddenly Has Five New Places to Eat
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Drive past RiverTown Crossings this summer and you will pass at least one crew still finishing something. A new patio going up where the Sears Auto Center used to sit. A remodeled lobby inside Celebration Cinema. A food court stall getting its signage hung. If you have lived near Grandville for more than a year, you have probably noticed the same thing without quite naming it: this stretch of town has turned into a construction zone for restaurants, one opening after another, all within a few miles of each other.
It is tempting to chalk this up to coincidence, the kind of clustering that happens when a few business owners all decide at once that Grandville is having a moment. But the timing lines up too neatly with something else that happened in 2024: RiverTown Crossings changed hands. Once you see that, the restaurant wave stops looking random and starts looking like the visible edge of a much bigger property reshuffle.
In August 2024, Memphis-based Poag Development Group bought RiverTown Crossings for $97.4 million, taking over a 1.3 million-square-foot mall that had been losing anchor tenants and dealing with an aging parking structure. New ownership meant a new appetite for change, and Poag moved fast.
By January 2025, the Grandville Planning Commission had approved Poag's plan to tear down the mall's two-story parking deck, a structure that had been sitting unused and deteriorating. The demolition was scheduled to begin that spring and wrap by summer, clearing more than 2.5 acres and creating two new parcels totaling 2.63 acres facing Rivertown Parkway itself, ground meant for future tenants who want their own standalone building rather than mall square footage. A commercial real estate adviser quoted in that same reporting put it plainly: restaurants and retailers had been wanting into this stretch of Grandville for a while, they just had nowhere to build.
That is the piece most residents never saw. The parking deck coming down was not really a parking story. It was Grandville quietly making room for exactly the kind of restaurant activity that has since shown up.
Here is what actually landed once that door opened, in the order it happened:
Line those up and the pattern is obvious. Every single one of them sits on the same short run of road, either inside the mall itself, on a rebuilt outparcel, or a few blocks over on 28th Street or Canal Avenue. None of this is Grandville broadly getting more restaurants. It is one corridor absorbing almost all of the new activity at once.
The other half of the story is what is disappearing from the same property. Macy's announced in January 2026 that it would close its RiverTown Crossings store as part of a national round of 14 closures, with a final day set for the end of March. That is a department store anchor that had been there for decades stepping away in the same season Oscar's was opening two doors down.
Grandville's interim city manager Ken Krombeen described the mall's importance to the city plainly, calling it the core of our retail corridor. That was true when it had five department store anchors. It is being tested now that it has fewer of them and more standalone restaurants filling the gaps instead. Eddie Bauer closed permanently in January 2026, and Inspire Marketplace, first announced as an incoming mall tenant back in October 2025, moved into that vacated space the following month.
Put together, you have a mall trading big anchor stores for a wider mix of standalone dining, and a development group actively choosing where the next generation of tenants goes. Poag Development Group CEO Josh Poag said the demolished deck "will be replaced with a safe and efficient parking field for our guests," though the real payoff was the buildable land it freed up alongside it.
For anyone who eats dinner in Grandville on a regular Tuesday, the practical upshot is straightforward: over the course of 2026, this one stretch went from a mall with a food court and a couple of chain options to a corridor that includes a Szechuan-style seafood boil concept, a barbecue smokehouse that spent years building a following as a truck before finally getting walls, a full bar attached to the movie theater, and a bakery-turned-cafe that started as someone's side hustle in 2021.
That is a genuinely different mix than what existed here in 2024, and it happened because the mall's ownership was actively clearing land and swapping tenants, not because five unrelated business owners all picked Grandville independently. If you want to understand why a particular block feels different than it did a year ago, the property records and planning commission minutes usually explain more than the grand opening banners do.
The two new parcels created when the parking deck came down still face Rivertown Parkway directly, and they were built specifically for tenants who want their own standalone building rather than mall space. Whether they end up as restaurants or something else has not been announced. Given that Raising Cane's took the model of demolish-and-rebuild on the old Sears Auto site and Oscar's took the renovate-in-place model inside the cinema, it would not be surprising to see one more sizeable food or retail concept land on those Rivertown Parkway parcels before this redevelopment cycle winds down.
If you are the kind of resident who likes knowing why your neighborhood looks different before the "opening soon" banner goes up, the planning commission agendas for Grandville are public record, and they are usually a year or more ahead of the grand opening.
Grandville keeps changing in ways that reward paying attention to the property, not just the menu. If you are curious how these shifts affect what it is actually like to own a home nearby, or you want a closer look at the neighborhoods around this corridor, Lindsey Eppink keeps a running eye on West Michigan's communities, including a closer look at Grandville's neighborhoods and amenities. Let's Connect if you ever want a local perspective on what is happening in your corner of town.
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