Village at Pacific Highlands Ranch: Why Anchors Leave and Restaurants Thrive

Drive to the west end of the parking lot at 13490 Pacific Highlands Ranch Parkway and you will pass a dark storefront with a Rite Aid sign still bolted to the facade. A few doors down, the lot fills every evening for Amalfi Cucina Italiana and Death By Tequila. Same shopping center, same week, two completely different stories about what it takes to fill a space here.

That gap is worth understanding if you spend any time at the Village, because it tells you something the shopping center's tenant roster alone won't: this is a center where restaurants move fast and big boxes don't move at all.

What Actually Closed, and Why

Rite Aid filed for bankruptcy for the second time in May 2025, and the Pacific Highlands Ranch location was one of two San Diego County stores the company shuttered as a result, alongside its Del Mar Highlands Town Center location. This wasn't a minor tenant. When it opened in 2015, the Pacific Highlands Ranch Rite Aid was the first Rite Aid to open in San Diego in a decade, and it came with one of the area's only drive-through pharmacies. Customers with prescriptions on file were directed to transfer them to the CVS Pharmacy at Beachside Del Mar on Del Mar Heights Road.

Panera closed too. Local coverage bundled that closure with news that J.Crew Factory is moving into the center, though it's not clear the apparel retailer is taking over the exact Panera footprint rather than a separate vacancy. Either way, the center lost its coffee-and-bakery anchor around the same time it lost its drugstore.

Nearly a Year Later, the Box Was Still Dark

Here's the part that doesn't show up in a single news item but does show up if you drive past regularly: the old Rite Aid space sat empty for the better part of a year after the May 2025 closure. A resident video posted in the spring of 2026 still referred to it as the "abandoned Rite Aid" at the Village. As of that point, roughly eleven months out, nobody had announced a replacement.

Compare that to how fast the smaller bays turn over. Epic Wings, a fast-casual wing concept led by franchise owner Bianca Sacco, moved from a health department permit filing to a full opening celebration with a week of deals in a matter of months. Amalfi Cucina Italiana, Death By Tequila, and Everbowl have all opened in recent seasons, filling storefronts far faster than the drugstore box managed to attract a single taker.

The pattern isn't that leasing has stalled at the Village. It's that a 10,000-plus-square-foot anchor box with drive-through pharmacy infrastructure has a much smaller pool of tenants who can use it than a 1,500-to-3,000-square-foot restaurant bay does. National drugstore chains are closing stores, not opening them, across Southern California right now. Restaurant concepts, especially fast-casual ones, are doing the opposite. The size and plumbing of the space you're driving past determines how long it sits empty, more than anything about the shopping center itself.

The Smaller Bays Tell the Real Story

If you've eaten your way through the Village lately, you've probably noticed the shift without naming it. Amalfi Cucina Italiana brought a full bar and Italian menu built around wood-oven pizzas and made-to-order pasta. Death By Tequila leans into modern Baja cuisine with a tequila bar attached. Everbowl gives the health-conscious crowd a customizable açaí and pitaya bowl option with free samples if you can't decide on a base.

None of these needed the square footage or plumbing that a pharmacy anchor requires. They needed a kitchen line, a bar setup, and a patio. That's a much easier box to check, and it helps explain why the restaurant row at the Village has kept expanding even as larger spaces have taken longer to fill.

The Legacy Roster Holding the Center Together

Not everything has turned over. Trader Joe's remains the center's other original anchor from the 2015 opening and hasn't gone anywhere. Luna Grill, Bonchon, Ayu Sushi & Noodles, and Burger Lounge, which occupies suite 101 at 5950 Village Way, are all still running the same hours they've run for years. If you've built a weekly routine around any of these, that routine hasn't been interrupted by the vacancy next door.

That matters for how the center actually functions day to day. The empty Rite Aid box is visible from the parking lot, but it doesn't touch the restaurants you already rely on. The churn is happening at the edges of the center, not at its core.

The Calendar Didn't Notice the Vacancy

While the tenant mix has been in flux, the Village's civic and social calendar hasn't skipped a beat. Taste of the Village, the annual fundraiser benefiting the Canyon Crest Academy Foundation, returned on November 2, 2025, with the usual punch-card format at participating restaurants and live performances from Canyon Crest Academy's music programs. It's been a fixture of the Village Square for years, and the empty drugstore box a few hundred feet away didn't change the turnout or the format.

The neighborhood also picked up new civic infrastructure independent of the retail center entirely. The Pacific Highlands Ranch Library opened to the community in November 2024, giving residents a public space that has nothing to do with which national chain is leasing which storefront. And the Village's Summer & Songs series, a free live music series that draws regular coverage from local outlets, has kept running on its own seasonal schedule.

None of this depends on Rite Aid's replacement being announced. The library, the fundraiser, and the concert series all run on their own calendars, separate from the leasing office's timeline.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

If you're wondering when something will finally move into the old drugstore space, the honest answer based on the pattern so far is that it will take longer than you'd expect from watching the restaurant turnover next door. Anchor boxes at this scale don't fill on the same timeline as a wing shop or an Italian kitchen, and as of this past spring no tenant had been announced for either the former Rite Aid or the former Panera space.

What you can count on is that the parts of the Village that define most people's actual routine, the restaurant row, Trader Joe's, the fundraiser in November, the library down the street, have kept running through all of it. The vacancy is real, but it's isolated to two boxes at the edges of a center that's otherwise busier than it's been in years.

Next time you park at the west end of the lot, don't expect the pharmacy sign to come back on. Expect another restaurant to move in before that empty box gets a new tenant.

If you're curious how shifts like this one at the Village show up in what a Pacific Highlands Ranch home is actually worth to buyers who value walkability to it, James Mobbley is happy to talk through it. Let's Connect.