When was the last time you actually walked past the old Ruby's booth by the ice rink instead of just skating past it? If it's been more than two years, you're picturing a restaurant that closed in 2024. The space now belongs to Pho Redbo, a wagyu beef pho restaurant that has been serving bowls above the rink since June 2024.

That's the pattern at Promenade PV right now: small, steady replacements, one storefront at a time, easy to miss if you only go for the movie or the ice rink and back to the car. But there's one arrival on the way that breaks that pattern entirely, and it's set to land the same season the mall's oldest tradition returns for another year.

The Food Changed First, and It Changed in Pieces

Pho Redbo opened in June 2024 in the first-floor space overlooking the rink, filling what the restaurant's own materials describe as a genuine gap on the Peninsula: no premium Vietnamese option existed here before it. It runs a wagyu-first menu, slow-simmered bone broth, and a halal-certified kitchen, and it's built a loyal enough following to earn a spot among the highest-rated locations in its small chain.

SUGO Social, a new American restaurant, took another spot at 550 Deep Valley Drive that November. Nara Boba arrived around the same stretch of late 2024. Since then the smaller-format openings have kept coming: Fika Fika Creamery for ice cream, Misc. Coffee along the main boardwalk, Dilly D's for smash burgers, Terra Mia Woodfire Kitchen, and Fuego Cravings. None of these took over more than a single existing storefront. Each one replaced something that was already there, at the scale of what was already there.

Entertainment Filled In Around the Ice Rink

The rink itself has been part of this property since it opened as the enclosed Courtyard Mall in 1981, and it's now operating as LA Kings Ice PV after being reintroduced under new management. Around it, the entertainment side of the mall has grown the same incremental way the restaurants did.

ZenesisX, a 9,000-square-foot VR and e-sports lounge built around Meta Quest technology, opened as one storefront. LAB Basketball Academy took another. A claw machine arcade called Kiddleton Claw Machine Zone and a photo studio called Sky Photo filled in smaller gaps. Level Up Bowl & Bistro, which opened in the winter of 2025 on the lower level beneath Regal Cinemas, is the biggest of this group at 14 bowling lanes with immersive LED screens, VIP lounges, and a full-service restaurant and bar, and it's still a single leased footprint, not a redrawing of the property.

The One Arrival That Breaks the Pattern

Mega Looma Epic Adventure Park is different. According to reporting on the project from earlier this year, the concept from local entrepreneur Gloria Lee, who also runs Looma Space in nearby Lomita, will take over roughly 35,000 square feet in Suite 116, positioned between Level Up Bowl & Bistro and The Sports Complex. It's built around arcade games, bumper cars, trampolines, karaoke, and a photo booth, with private rooms for parties.

Set that number against the mall's total leasable area of about 374,186 square feet, and Mega Looma alone will occupy close to a tenth of the entire property. No restaurant or entertainment concept that opened here since 2024 comes close to that footprint on its own. Every other addition to this mall in the past two years has been a swap: one tenant out, one tenant in, same four walls. Mega Looma is a single business claiming enough contiguous space to have qualified as its own small mall a generation ago.

As of this writing, it hasn't opened yet. Reporting from August put the target at later this year, which means the space is still being built out heading into fall.

The Halloween Carnival Predates All of It

Here's the part of Promenade PV that hasn't changed at all. The mall's annual Halloween trick-or-treat event traces back to the 1980s, when the enclosed Courtyard Mall first drew families in for storefront-to-storefront candy runs. It's still running every year, and it still uses the same format: kids working their way through the mall's stores rather than a single roped-off carnival zone.

Last year's version ran October 24 through 26, with trick-or-treating starting at 4 p.m., a haunted house built by PenHi Drama, PV Net Academy for STEM, and a local haunted house designer, and a costume contest with a grand prize that included a Disneyland ticket. It's the one fixture on this property that has outlasted every tenant list this piece just walked through. Ruby's is gone. Borders is gone. Saks is gone. The Halloween carnival is still here.

This year, trick-or-treaters walking the mall in late October will do it while Mega Looma's 35,000-square-foot buildout is still finishing behind construction walls, which makes this particular Halloween a strange in-between moment: the last one before the biggest single change to hit this property in years actually opens its doors.

What's Confirmed for This Fall

A few things are locked in enough to plan around. The mall's Spring Carnival came back for its third consecutive year in March 2026, running Friday through Sunday with rides, food, and a Saturday egg hunt, which tells you the carnival format itself has become a twice-a-year fixture here, not a one-off. The PV Street Fair, staged on Norris Center Drive and Deep Valley Drive between the neighboring Peninsula Center and Promenade PV, added new elements for 2026 including a wine lounge with Palos Verdes Wine Club pours and a community performance stage hosted by PV Music House, open to local performers.

Exact hours for this year's Halloween weekend hadn't posted as of this writing. If you're planning around it, the mall's own site is the place to confirm before you show up expecting last year's schedule.

What's actually worth remembering is simpler than any single date. This property replaced its restaurants one lease at a time for two years, and none of those changes asked you to reconsider how you use the place. Mega Looma will. A 35,000-square-foot arrival changes the walk from the parking garage to the ice rink, changes what's next to Level Up, changes what a Saturday afternoon here looks like for a family that used to come just for skating. The carnival will still happen the same way it always has. Everything around it won't.

If you've lived on the Peninsula long enough to remember what used to be in that space by the rink, you already understand how this town works: slowly, until it doesn't. Suzanne Dyer has spent more than three decades watching Rolling Hills Estates change one storefront and one street at a time, and that's the same close attention she brings to every home she represents here.