The Sunrise Mall Is Coming Down. The Restaurants Next Door Are Just Getting Started.

Drive south on Sunrise Boulevard past Greenback Lane this month and you will pass two different versions of the same street. On one side, wrecking crews are circling the old Macy's Men's building at Sunrise Mall, clearing ground for a $120 million sports complex that will not seat a single diner or ring up a single sale for at least another year. A few blocks down, in strip centers that have looked half-forgotten for a decade, new kitchens are opening one after another, filling suites that sat vacant through multiple ownership changes.

That is the part of the story most people miss when they talk about Citrus Heights right now. The headline is the mall coming down. The actual news, if you eat dinner in this city more than once a week, is what is going up in its shadow.

Two Different Kinds of New

Copperwood Square, the FoodMaxx-anchored strip center at the corner of Sunrise Boulevard and Woodmore Oaks Drive, has spent years as the kind of plaza where storefronts changed hands quietly and nobody noticed. In the past twelve months alone it has added three new tenants to the building next to its drive-thru Starbucks: O Tasty Mongolian BBQ, an all-you-can-build barbecue concept that opened in early June after months of construction, BAD Bakers, a locally grown bakery chain with existing locations in Folsom, Elk Grove and near Cal Expo, and Gateway Nails & Spa, a Folsom-based salon filling Suite C. Around the same stretch of the plaza, United Martial Arts Academy took over a building that had sat empty since it last housed a Hollywood Video.

None of this required new construction. It is backfill, plain and simple, existing square footage finding new operators willing to bet on a corner that traffic counts have always liked (Sunrise Boulevard carries somewhere north of 40,000 vehicles a day past this intersection) but that retail brokers have had a harder time filling with anything beyond a nail salon or a tax office.

An Old Address With a New Name

A mile or so away at 5511 Sunrise Boulevard, the pattern repeats with an even longer memory attached to it. That address has been a restaurant through four different identities: first the Peppermill Restaurant and Lounge, then a Logan's Roadhouse, then Boston's Pizza Sports Bar and Grill, which closed in 2023. Since November 2025 it has been Must Be Cow, a Korean barbecue and all-you-can-eat sushi buffet that has quickly built a following on Sunrise Boulevard.

The name earned its own write-up in the local press. General manager Andy Le has told the story of a late night after construction and permitting wrapped, when the owners were racing a paperwork deadline and still had no name for the restaurant. The owner insisted cow had to be in it somewhere. Must Be Cow is what they landed on.

City officials noticed the opening too. The Citrus Heights city manager told local news outlets in January that the community and city council had been looking for more sit-down restaurant options, and that Must Be Cow fits the bill. Given that this is a building that spent two years empty after a chain restaurant pulled out, that is not a small thing for the block.

The Family Business Making Room for More Seats

Not every addition to the corridor's food scene is a new arrival. Valencia's Carniceria and Taqueria, at 8040 Greenback Lane, has served Citrus Heights for more than two decades, tracing back to founders Don Gill and Maria Valencia, who opened their first location in Orangevale after immigrating from Michoacán. The family is now expanding the restaurant into the suite next door, previously a Subway, to add indoor seating for a business that has outgrown its current footprint during meal rushes.

The expansion has run behind its original spring target. As of an April update from the family, construction had been pushed back to a June completion. Whether that held exactly to schedule or slipped further, the intent is clear: a business that built its name on fresh-cut meats and a market atmosphere is investing in more room rather than a second location, which says something about how confident the Valencia family is in this particular stretch of Greenback Lane.

What's Actually Being Torn Down

None of this backfill is happening at Sunrise Mall itself, which is the part of the corridor still shrinking. At least a dozen stores closed there in 2025, including Macy's, Spencer's, Claire's and Hot Topic, and the food court has been shuttered for a while now. In March, the Citrus Heights City Council voted unanimously to approve a public-private partnership with The Mettle Shop, a sports and entertainment developer whose past work includes Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento and Golden 1 Center downtown, to build the Sunrise Sports Center on roughly 13 acres of the mall property, on the footprint of the old Macy's Men's building.

The plan calls for a 160,000-square-foot facility with a 4,000-seat arena, two NHL-sized ice rinks, and covered turf fields for soccer, baseball and other field sports, built at an estimated cost of $120 million, split between city revenue bonds and Mettle Shop financing. The city's economic development director has described the project as a way to eventually triple the retail density allowed on the 100-acre mall site and create what she called a new downtown for Citrus Heights. Mettle Shop executives have said they hope to break ground in early 2027, with construction taking another 12 to 18 months after that.

In other words, the project everyone is watching will not seat a single customer for at least two more years. The restaurants already doing that work are the ones on the strip centers nobody was watching.

The Nearest Thing to Do About It

If you want a reason to get out and see this stretch of the city for yourself, the timing lines up. The City of Citrus Heights has brought back its Citrus Nights series this year, expanding it to two evenings at Van Maren Park, the first on Friday, August 21, and the second on Friday, September 18. Both events run from 6 p.m. and feature live music, food trucks and family-friendly activities. The city is asking guests not to arrive before 5 p.m., dogs are welcome as long as they stay leashed, and free parking is available at City Hall, the Citrus Heights Police Department, and the Dignity Health lots nearby.

Citrus Nights is replacing the city's long-running Sunday Funday series, which the city says is being retired to make room for this new format based on resident feedback and attendance trends. Whatever ends up being different about the new event, the calendar itself confirms something that the restaurant openings already suggested. The people who run this city are actively trying to give Sunrise Boulevard more reasons for residents to show up on a random Friday night, not fewer.

The Actual Story

None of these openings are large enough to make a headline on their own. A Mongolian barbecue restaurant in a strip mall, a Korean buffet in a fourth-generation restaurant space, a family taqueria adding a dining room. But add them up against a mall that lost a dozen tenants in a single year and is now being partly demolished for an ice rink, and a pattern comes into focus that a single news story would miss: Citrus Heights's food scene is not waiting on the big anchor project to figure out its next move. It has already made it, one filled suite at a time, while the biggest building on the boulevard sits half empty and waiting for its own reinvention.

That is worth knowing if you live here, because it means the next year or two on Sunrise Boulevard will feel less like watching a mall close and more like watching a corridor quietly figure out what comes after the mall, one lease at a time.

We track these changes because we live and work in these neighborhoods too. If you are curious about what a specific stretch of Sunrise Boulevard or Greenback Lane means for a home you already own, or you just want to talk through what is opening next, the team at Best Sac Homes Group is always happy to talk shop about Citrus Heights.