Texas Roadhouse beat every other sit-down restaurant in Citrus Heights by an estimated 163,700 visits last year, according to foot traffic data the city presented during a February Economic Development Work Plan update. That is the kind of number that sounds like it should be the whole story. It isn't. The restaurant Citrus Heights residents actually voted best in 2025, R Vita Cantina, doesn't even appear on that top-10 list. Neither does El Tapatio, a two-time Best of Citrus Heights winner. The city's own economic development director, Meghan Huber, said as much when she presented the numbers: the data reflects visits, not who received the most business or the top reviews.
That gap between what gets counted and what gets loved is the real story of Citrus Heights food right now. While Sunrise Boulevard's chain restaurants rack up traffic, the openings that are actually changing how this town eats are happening a few blocks over, in strip centers that spent years sitting half empty. And the anchor that used to organize all of it, Sunrise Mall, is heading toward demolition for something that has nothing to do with restaurants at all.
Copperwood Square Filled Up Fast
The strip building at 7056 Sunrise Blvd. had one live tenant, a drive-thru Starbucks, for a long stretch. In the past year it picked up three more:
- O Tasty Mongolian BBQ, a 3,200-square-foot build-your-own bowl concept that opened in June after months of construction, according to the Citrus Heights Sentinel. The operator previously ran a similar spot at Westfield Galleria in Roseville before that location closed in spring 2024.
- BAD Bakers, moving into the 1,100-square-foot suite next door, joining the bakery's existing shops in Folsom, Elk Grove, and near Cal Expo.
- Gateway Nails & Spa, a Folsom-based salon expanding into Citrus Heights in the same building.
A few doors down in the same plaza, United Martial Arts Academy took over a building that had sat vacant since Hollywood Video closed. That's four new operators claiming space that, for years, mostly held one drive-thru coffee window. Copperwood Square isn't a destination shopping center. It's a strip mall on a busy boulevard. What changed is that operators who once needed a mall address now see a Starbucks parking lot as good enough.
Greenback Square Is Building A Different Kind Of Cluster
A mile or so away, Greenback Lane is running its own version of the same story, but with more history behind it. Valencia's Carniceria y Taqueria, at 8040 Greenback Ln., has served the community for more than two decades, tracing back to founders Don Gill and Maria Valencia after they immigrated from Michoacán in the 1980s. The family announced plans this spring to expand into the neighboring suite once occupied by a Subway, adding indoor seating and easing the crunch during meal rushes, according to reporting from the Sentinel. The completion date slipped from spring to June, which is a fairly normal timeline for a small-business buildout, not a red flag.
What's more interesting is what the same family did next door. Evelyn Valencia, daughter of the founders, opened Sweet Music Studio Cafe a few doors down, pairing coffee, wine, and beer with live music programming in the same strip mall. That's a first-generation food business spinning off a second concept in-house, in the same small plaza where it started.
Around the corner, at 8031 Greenback Ln., a "Coming Soon" banner has been up since June for Heights of Brazil, taking over the space left behind when Wasabi House closed sometime in the past year (the exact date is unclear, though the last Yelp review dates to July 2025). As of a late-July check-in with the Messenger, the restaurant still hadn't opened and still hadn't returned calls, but the address puts it inside Greenback Square, a 46,164-square-foot center that already holds Royal Indian Cuisine and its own separate Mongolian BBQ restaurant, according to leasing materials from JLL of Sacramento. Worth noting: Roseville already has two Brazilian restaurants, Fogo de Chao and Galpão Gaucho, both full-scale steakhouse concepts. Heights of Brazil is filling a 2,400-square-foot storefront in a strip center, a much smaller bet than either of those.
"I have said I would like to see something so unique that people are drawn to Citrus Heights, because Citrus Heights is pretty special," Mayor MariJane Lopez-Taff said in March, describing the moment as "pretty close to a magic-wand moment for our community."
She wasn't talking about the restaurants. She was talking about what's happening to the mall those restaurants used to orbit.
The Mall Is Emptying Out While Everyone Around It Gets Busier
Sunrise Mall is not in good shape. Vacant storefronts outnumber open ones, the food court has shut down, and sections of the building are blocked off to the public. In March, the Citrus Heights City Council voted unanimously to move forward with a public-private partnership that could transform the 100-acre site within one to two years. The plan: a $120 million Sunrise Sports Center from developer The Mettle Shop, featuring a 4,000-seat arena, two NHL-sized ice sheets, and multi-use turf fields, built on roughly 13.75 acres of the mall property. The city has committed up to $60 million in municipal bonds toward the project, to be repaid from the venue's own revenue rather than tax dollars.
The deal cleared another hurdle recently. On July 29, The Mettle Shop signed an agreement to purchase about 13 acres from Tallen Capital Partners, the investor group under contract to become majority owner of the mall property, locking in the sports center's actual footprint, per the Sentinel's coverage. Tallen is separately in escrow on roughly 50 acres of the broader site, positioning it for a longer-term mixed-use overhaul under the city's Sunrise Tomorrow Specific Plan, adopted in 2022. None of this is finished. Entitlement applications, traffic and noise studies, and public hearings before the Planning Commission are all still ahead, with the development team hoping to have pieces in place to break ground early next year.
For a mall that once anchored Sunrise Boulevard's identity, the plan for its future has stopped being about retail at all. It's an arena.
The One Thing That Hasn't Moved
Here's the part that ties the whole picture together. Every Saturday, rain or shine, the Sunrise Mall parking lot in front of the old Macy's fills up with more than 80 vendors for the Sunrise Mall Farmers Market, running 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., year-round, with live music and cooking demos built into the weekly routine. It's one of the most consistent gathering points in the city, and it happens on pavement that sits inside the footprint the city and its development partners are actively planning to remake. Nobody has said the market is going anywhere. But the ground under it is, quite literally, part of a $120 million conversation right now.
If you want a snapshot of Citrus Heights food and community life this month, it looks something like this:
- Saturday morning at the farmers market in the Macy's lot, before the sports center conversation moves any further along.
- A bowl at O Tasty, now open and running daily from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. at 7056 Sunrise Blvd.
- A stop at Valencia's on Greenback, where the taqueria the family built two decades ago now shares a strip with the music cafe their daughter opened.
- Keeping an eye on Greenback Square for whenever Heights of Brazil actually opens its doors.
- Thursday, August 20, at the Citrus Heights Chamber's 20th Annual Best of Citrus Heights event at the Citrus Heights Event Center, where the city's independent favorites get their own night, separate from any traffic counter.
The chains on Sunrise Boulevard will keep pulling the biggest numbers. That was true before O Tasty opened and it'll be true after Heights of Brazil does too. But the businesses actually reshaping how this city eats, the ones a foot-traffic algorithm can't see yet because they're too new or too small, are clustering in the plazas the mall used to overshadow. The mall itself is becoming something else entirely.
If you're watching Citrus Heights for reasons beyond dinner plans, that shift from a single retail anchor to a scattered, family-driven food scene is worth paying attention to. Terri Cicchetti Realty Group works this corridor and the neighborhoods around it every day, and we're always glad to talk through what a changing commercial landscape means for the neighborhoods nearby. Contact us anytime.
