"This neighborhood has character," chef Christopher Collins says of the stretch of Central Avenue where he's opening his newest restaurant. He's not being polite about it. Collins picked Park Central for the most ambitious project of his career, a barbecue-and-seafood concept called Cowboy Seafood, and he didn't have to look past the corridor he already lives in to find the site.
That's worth sitting with, because Park Central has been "coming back" for a long time. Plaza Companies and Tucson's Holualoa Companies first teamed up to redevelop the aging mid-century mall years ago, and the leasing announcements that followed read like a lot of Phoenix commercial real estate copy: renewed square footage, phase language, promises of momentum. What's different about 2026 is the kind of tenant showing up now. A cardiology center. A newspaper's office. A nonprofit's headquarters. Those aren't spec leases chasing foot traffic. They're the kind of tenant that only signs once a place has stopped being a redevelopment story and started being somewhere people actually go.
What Was Already Working
Before any of this year's additions, Park Central at 3110 N. Central Avenue had already settled into a role as the southern anchor of the North Central corridor, the stretch of Central Avenue that runs from Camelback Road up to the Arizona Canal. The property was the city's first large-scale shopping mall once, and what's there now looks nothing like that history except for the bones of the buildings.
The current roster includes:
- Steak 44
- Joyride Taco House
- Uptown Pizza
- Fired Pie
- Thai Basil
- Starbucks
- Creighton University's Phoenix campus
That last one matters more than it looks. A university campus isn't a pop-up. It's a tenant that plans in decades, and its presence at Park Central has quietly reset what kind of commitment other institutions are willing to make on the same property.
The Additions That Aren't About Food
Two announcements from this year have nothing to do with restaurants, and they're the strongest evidence that the corridor's daily life has actually changed. Park Central confirmed a 25,330-square-foot outpatient cardiology center opening in the property's Burgbacher Building, a healthcare tenant of real size taking real space, not a satellite office testing the market.
Alongside it, Valley of the Sun United Way is relocating its headquarters into the 14,000-square-foot Graham Building. A headquarters move is a different kind of bet than a lease renewal. It means the organization decided this is where its people should be, permanently, not where it happened to find cheap square footage. The Arizona Republic has also taken space on the property. None of these tenants need proximity to Steak 44. They need proximity to each other, to transit, and to a part of Phoenix that functions during business hours the way a downtown does.
For someone who already lives along Central Avenue, this is the version of "revitalization" that actually changes a Tuesday. You can get bloodwork and a cardiology consult, drop by a pizza counter, and know that the office building across the parking lot houses people who work here every day rather than renters waiting for the next tenant to fail.
What's Actually New This Year
The restaurant everyone's been watching for is Cowboy Seafood, chef Christopher Collins's newest concept under his Common Ground Culinary label, the group behind The Collins Small Batch Kitchen and Grassroots Kitchen & Tap. It's slated for a nearly 5,000-square-foot space at 3112 N. Central Avenue, announced for a spring 2026 opening, and it's built around a combination nobody else in the Valley is doing at this scale: competition-style barbecue paired with an elevated seafood and raw bar program.
The specifics are the kind of detail that only matters if you're actually going to eat there. An eight-foot taxidermied swordfish wearing a cowboy hat faces Central Avenue through the window. Inside, there's a 12-seat community table, a 22-seat island bar, and enough room for 80 guests indoors and another 80 on the patio. The barbecue side runs on a custom dual-spit Santa Maria grill and a Texas-built J&R Manufacturing smoker, the same equipment used by competition pitmasters. The seafood side, branded Saltwater Saint Raw Bar, covers oysters, poke, sushi rolls, and eight fresh cuts of fish prepared grilled, pan-seared, broiled, or blackened.
Collins has said the neighborhood's mix of residents, students, and daily foot traffic is part of what drew him to the site rather than downtown or a suburban strip. That's a different sales pitch than "we renewed our Starbucks lease," and it tracks with everything else that's landed on the property this year.
Why It Took This Long
Redevelopment on this scale rarely runs on a straight timeline, and Park Central is a case study in why. The early leasing push years ago, when Fired Pie, Thai Basil, Gainshare Inc., and Starbucks all renewed more than 25,000 square feet combined, was necessary groundwork but not proof of anything beyond stability. Office tenants like WCUI's medical imaging and nursing school and a 278-unit apartment development from The Dinerstein Companies added density to the site over the years that followed, the kind of incremental progress that's easy to miss if you're not tracking the property closely.
What changed is that the tenants arriving now aren't testing the water. A cardiology center doesn't sign a lease it plans to walk away from in eighteen months. A nonprofit doesn't relocate its headquarters to a building it isn't confident will still be relevant in a decade. Those commitments are the actual signal that Park Central crossed from redevelopment project to functioning neighborhood hub, and it happened gradually enough that anyone who wasn't watching the property year over year would have missed the moment it happened.
What This Means for Central Avenue
The corridor's daily rhythm now includes a stretch of Central Avenue where you can see a specialist, pick up dinner, and walk past a university campus and a newsroom without leaving a few blocks. That's not the same neighborhood that spent years reading "coming soon" on a leasing office door. It's one where the coming soon finally has receipts attached to it, from a cardiology center's square footage to a swordfish mounted in a restaurant window that hasn't opened yet but already has a name, an address, and a chef with a personal stake in getting it right.
If you're already walking this stretch of Central Avenue on your way to dinner or a coffee run, none of this needs explaining. If you're trying to figure out what's actually finished versus what's still a rendering, Francine Dinh keeps track of it because she works this corridor too. Let's Connect.
