Drive the roundabout at Bosque and Great Park Boulevard on a Friday night right now and you will see cars stacked into the street, a lit-up sign, and a line of people who clearly do not care that construction fencing still wraps three sides of the building next door. In-N-Out opened at The Canopy on September 4, and if you did not know better, you would assume the whole retail center just switched on at once.
It didn't. One tenant is running. The other nineteen or so are still somewhere between a lease signature and a grand opening, and they are not all aiming for the same month.
If you live in Rise Park, Solis Park, or anywhere else in the Great Park Neighborhoods and you have been waiting for a place to do a normal week of errands without leaving the area, the difference between "open" and "announced" is the entire story right now.
The Corner Everyone Was Watching
For most of the time Great Park Neighborhoods has existed as a place people actually live, it has had parks, trail miles, and schools built in well ahead of anything resembling a corner store. Residents drove to surrounding retail centers for groceries and dinner because nothing had been built for them inside the neighborhood itself, a gap Voice of OC covered when the Irvine City Council voted unanimously on April 22, 2025 to move forward with a development agreement for the site.
That vote is what turned The Canopy from a concept into a construction project. Almquist, the San Juan Capistrano firm also behind River Street Marketplace and the Rodeo 39 and Rodeo 72 public markets, broke ground in April 2025 on a 12-acre, roughly 90,000-square-foot center at 7900 Great Park Boulevard. The plan called for a specialty grocer, a run of restaurants, and enough everyday retail to give this side of Irvine the daily infrastructure other villages got on day one.
What You Can Actually Walk Into Today
Right now, that infrastructure is one building. The new In-N-Out is 3,860 square feet, seats 84 people indoors and 34 more on the patio, and runs a dual-lane drive-thru built to hold up to 33 cars, a design choice that makes sense once you know Irvine's only other In-N-Out, the longtime Campus Drive location near UCI, has spent years dealing with lines that back up into the street. The Great Park store opened with about 70 employees at a starting wage of $22 an hour, two dollars above California's mandated fast-food minimum, and it is still hiring.
That is the entire list of what is open at The Canopy as of this month. Everything else on the site is still under construction, mid-buildout, or waiting on a permit.
The Two Clocks Running at Once
The easiest way to see the actual timeline is to stop thinking of The Canopy as one opening and start thinking of it as three separate ones, moving at three different speeds.
| Status | Tenants | Target Window |
|---|---|---|
| Open now | In-N-Out Burger | September 4, 2026 |
| Opening later this year | McConnell's Fine Ice Creams, Palmetto Superfoods, Brooks Running, Baba's Hot Chicken, La Jolla Cosmetic | Late 2026 |
| Anchor grocer | T&T Supermarket (34,000 sq ft) | Winter 2026 |
| Remaining wave | Philz Coffee, Chicha San Chen, H&H Bagels, Osen Urban Table, Shootz, The Taco Stand, Solestage, Sunfeel, Free People Movement, JJANG Yakiniku, Social House, Rylee + Cru, Sol Studio | Late 2026 through early 2027 |
Almquist CEO Dan Almquist put it plainly when the second round of tenants was announced alongside In-N-Out's opening:
"This is just the beginning, with many more openings ahead."
That is not a hedge. Nearly 20 tenants are confirmed for the site, and exactly one has opened its doors.
Why the Grocery Anchor Is Running Behind, Not Ahead
Here is the detail that catches people off guard: T&T Supermarket, the Canadian grocery chain taking the 34,000-square-foot anchor space, was actually the first tenant ever announced for The Canopy, back in an April 2025 press release, a full year before In-N-Out's building was announced publicly. T&T described a store with a self-serve hot food bar, an in-store bakery, and specialties like Peking duck and a sushi counter, plus 180 new jobs for the area. The company was targeting winter 2026 from the start.
Announced first does not mean opens first. A quick-service burger pad with a straightforward building footprint moves through permitting and construction faster than a 34,000-square-foot grocery buildout with a commercial kitchen, bakery equipment, and a full hot-food program. That is the mechanism worth knowing if you are trying to guess when your own weekly grocery trip gets shorter: the tenant that got the earliest press release is not the one you will see first. It is the one still finishing tenant improvements while a burger joint next door already has 70 people on staff.
The Next Wave, By Name
The five businesses named alongside In-N-Out's opening give a sense of what "later this year" actually looks like: McConnell's Fine Ice Creams, the Santa Barbara-founded scoop shop; Palmetto Superfoods; Baba's Hot Chicken; a medical spa called La Jolla Cosmetic; and Brooks Running, which would be making its California retail debut at this location.
Behind that group sits the longer list from the March tenant announcement, the one that generated most of the early buzz: Philz Coffee, the Taiwanese tea brand Chicha San Chen, H&H Bagels making its first Orange County appearance, Osen Urban Table (a spinoff of Irvine's own Izakaya Osen), Shootz Hawaiian-inspired street food, The Taco Stand, sneaker retailer Solestage, jeweler Sunfeel, and apparel brands Free People Movement and Rylee + Cru, along with JJANG Yakiniku, Social House, and Sol Studio. Almquist has said the remaining businesses will open in phases from late 2026 through early 2027, which is a wide enough window that no single date should be treated as a promise.
What This Means for Your Week, Right Now
If you live near Rise Park or Solis Park and you are trying to decide whether The Canopy is worth building into your routine yet, the honest answer is: partly, and slowly. September 2026 gets you a burger run. Late 2026 should add ice cream, a hot chicken spot, and a running store to that list. Winter 2026 is when the grocery anchor is supposed to land, which is the point at which this corner starts functioning as an actual weekly stop rather than an occasional one. Full buildout, with the tea shop, the bagels, the sneakers and the rest, stretches into early 2027.
None of that is a complaint about the project. A 90,000-square-foot center with nearly 20 tenants opening on a staggered schedule is normal for retail development, and the fact that Almquist is naming specific businesses and specific seasons, rather than staying vague, is more transparency than most projects offer at this stage. It just means the difference between what a construction sign promises and what you can actually order tonight is still a real gap, and right now that gap is nineteen storefronts wide.
If you are weighing what this corner of Irvine looks like a year from now, or you're comparing Great Park Neighborhoods to other parts of the city while you think through a move, Dina Gonzalez can walk you through what's actually built, what's still on paper, and what that timeline means for the street you're looking at.
