You tell out-of-town friends there's a decent pizza bar upstairs at the Promenade, the one with the curved counter and the stainless steel oven, and you drive up Silver Spur Road only to find the space dark. Daisy Buchanan's Pizza Bar, which opened in the old Red Brick Pizza spot on the second floor in mid-2024, has since closed. If your mental map of the mall is more than a year old, it's wrong in at least one specific way.
That's the real story at Promenade PV right now, and it's more useful than the "the mall is back" version you'll find elsewhere. The Promenade isn't simply reviving. It's sorting itself into places that are sticking and places that are still auditioning, and the difference matters if you're planning an actual Friday night rather than just nodding along to a trend piece.
The pizza corner has changed hands twice
Start with the space that keeps testing tenants. Red Brick Pizza held the second-floor spot for years before Daisy Buchanan's took it over, bringing a Boston-dive-bar name attached to ten-inch bar pizzas, vodka rigatoni, and a board game selection for the tables. The restaurant leaned into a specific bit, an homage to a real Boston pizza joint that closed in 2014. It lasted roughly two years before its own doors closed, based on current listings for the address.
That's not a knock on the food. It's a pattern worth knowing before you build a plan around any one storefront in that corner of the mall. Turnover there has been the rule, not the exception, for most of the past decade.
The old Ruby's spot did the opposite
Compare that to the space above the ice rink. Ruby's Diner held that corner for years, serving the milkshakes-and-patty-melts crowd, before closing in 2024. What replaced it wasn't another comfort-food chain. It's Pho Redbo, a Wagyu-focused Vietnamese noodle house that simmers its beef bone broth for 24 hours and sources Australian Wagyu raised without growth hormones or antibiotics. The restaurant's own listing leans into that positioning directly, describing itself as built for a customer who "reads labels, researches sourcing, and chooses restaurants the way they choose everything else."
That's a specific enough concept that it either finds its audience or it doesn't. So far, it has. As of this writing, Pho Redbo is still operating in that spot, still listed with the Palos Verdes Peninsula Chamber of Commerce, and still describing itself with the same detail. Two years is a meaningful test for a single-concept restaurant inside a mall that has burned through tenants before.
Sugo Social bet on a mall nobody else wanted
The most interesting name in this story isn't a restaurant, though. It's an owner.
Sugo Social opened on the Promenade's second level in November 2024, up the stairs across from Fuego Cravings. Co-owner Gloria Lee signed that lease at a moment when, by her own account, the mall's reputation made the decision look questionable. She'd lived in the South Bay for two decades and had watched how few sit-down options existed on the Hill.
"Why here? Why PV and why this mall? Because it's not a very popular mall."
The menu backs up the bet with specificity rather than trend-chasing: bone-in ribeye, stone pot Korean bibimbap, pork belly baos braised in Korean seasoning, Brazilian cheese popovers. Nearly two years later, the restaurant is still seating parties for milestone birthdays and family gatherings, still running the same address at 550 Deep Valley Drive, and still pulling reviews well into 2026. In a mall where the pizza corner turned over twice in the same window, that's not nothing.
The same person is betting again
Here's the detail that actually changes how you should read this whole story. Gloria Lee isn't just the person behind Sugo Social. She also runs Looma Space, an indoor children's playground in Lomita, and she's now bringing that concept to the Promenade at a much larger scale. Mega Looma Epic Adventure Park is set to take over a 35,000-square-foot space between Level Up Bowl & Bistro and The Sports Complex, with arcade games, bumper cars, trampolines, karaoke, and private party rooms, and it's expected to open later this year.
That's an operator who already succeeded once in a mall that has a documented habit of losing tenants, choosing to put a second, much larger bet on the same property. That tells you more about the Promenade's actual trajectory than any press release about "revitalization" could. People who already have skin in the game are adding to their position.
Level Up filled a gap that had nothing in it before
The other anchor worth knowing about opened underneath Regal Cinemas in December 2025. Level Up Bowl & Bistro brought fourteen bowling lanes, an arcade, a full-service restaurant, and a bar into a lower-level space that had sat unused. Unlike the pizza corner, this wasn't a replacement for something that failed. It filled a category the mall didn't previously offer at all, which tends to be a better bet than competing for the same audience an earlier tenant already lost.
Between Sugo Social, Pho Redbo, and Level Up, an evening on the Hill can now run longer than it used to. Dinner at one of the first two, then a game at Level Up or a movie at Regal Promenade Stadium 13, without leaving Rolling Hills Estates.
What to trust and what to double-check
If you're deciding where to actually go this week, treat the Promenade's tenants in two tiers.
Reasonably safe bets, past their first year and still trading:
- Sugo Social (opened November 2024)
- Pho Redbo (took over the Ruby's Diner space in 2024)
- Level Up Bowl & Bistro (opened December 2025)
Worth a quick check before you drive over:
- Mega Looma Epic Adventure Park, still pending its 2026 opening
- Newer food and drink additions like Fika Fika Creamery and Dilly D's, which haven't had the same runway to prove staying power
- Anything occupying the second-floor pizza corner, given its track record
None of this means the Promenade has become unreliable. It means the mall is behaving like most retail centers mid-turnaround: some bets pay off and stay, others don't make it past eighteen months, and the honest way to use the place is to check current status rather than rely on what a friend told you last spring.
If you've written the Promenade off from a few bad years, or you're new enough to the Hill that you've never given it a real look, the version worth seeing now is the one with Wagyu pho by the ice rink and a restaurant that survived on a bet nobody else wanted to make.
If you're weighing a move within the Peninsula, or wondering what a home near this corner of Rolling Hills Estates is actually worth in the current market, Patrice Meepos has spent years reading these neighborhoods block by block. Work With Patrice when you're ready to talk specifics.
