Burnsville Center Already Reopened. Just Not the Part Everyone's Been Waiting On.
If you drive past Burnsville Center on I-35W or County Road 42 with any regularity, you already know the question. When is that finally opening?
"That" is Ate Ate Ate, the nine-vendor Asian food hall and its companion grocery, Enson Market, going into the old Gordmans space on the mall's north side. It has been "almost open" since before most of us started paying attention to it, and it is still not open. But here is the part that gets missed every time someone writes about the mall's slow-motion makeover: Burnsville Center already came back to life. It just didn't happen where the renderings pointed.
The food hall's first public target date was January 22, 2023, timed to Lunar New Year. That date passed while the project was still working through the city's formal planning process. By December 2023, the developer told the Burnsville City Council the food hall was on track for the end of the first quarter of 2024. A March 2024 press release said it would open "very soon, before summer." Summer came and went. In May 2024, a representative for the developer, Pacifica Square Burnsville, told the council to expect an opening in August or September of that year.
None of those dates held either. By June 2025, interior work was described as set to wrap up "this month," with a grand opening expected before the end of the year and the exterior renovation deadline pushed out to January 31, 2026. As of January 2026, there was still no announced opening date even though equipment for the vendors was already sitting on site. A Star Tribune restaurant roundup from earlier this month still lists Ate Ate Ate as merely "slated to open."
Here's the full run of missed dates, laid out together:
| Target announced | When it was said | What actually happened |
|---|---|---|
| Grand opening for Lunar New Year | January 2023 | Date passed while the project was still in city planning |
| On track for end of Q1 | December 2023 | Construction had not wrapped by spring |
| Opening "before summer" | March 2024 | Summer passed with no opening |
| Opening expected August or September | May 2024 | Still under construction through the rest of 2024 |
| Grand opening "before end of the year" | June 2025 | Exterior deadline pushed to January 31, 2026 |
| No date announced, equipment on site | January 2026 | Still incomplete |
| Listed as "slated to open" | September 2026 | Still incomplete |
Mayor Elizabeth Kautz has been the most consistent voice pressing the developer on the pace of the work. At one council meeting she put it plainly: "the community needs to see some movement." The developer's representative, Christina Le, has framed the delays as a matter of not cutting corners, telling the council last year "we did not take any shortcuts."
While that anchor project stalled through five separate target dates, other tenants moved into the mall, opened their doors, and have been running the whole time.
None of this required a ribbon cutting or a press release. It happened quietly, tenant by tenant, in the food court and the smaller storefronts around the mall's perimeter. If you've eaten Filipino food at Burnsville Center or booked a birthday party at SkaterApolis in the last couple of years, you've already experienced the mall's actual comeback. The part everyone keeps writing "coming soon" articles about is the one piece that still hasn't shown up.
The delays aren't mysterious once you look at what changed mid-project. Windfall Group, the Chicago-based developer behind the food hall, didn't stop at the north extension. The company went on to buy most of the rest of Burnsville Center's non-anchor space, and integrating that larger ownership picture with the food hall build added time. Equipment delivery for Enson Market caused separate holdups. An earlier plan for a two-story addition with patio dining and a landscaped plaza in front of the food hall was eventually dropped, which meant redesigning that piece of the project rather than just finishing what was originally drawn.
The city has real money riding on the outcome. Burnsville committed its entire $1.1 million allocation from a Dakota County grant fund to help the project along, and the council has amended that grant agreement more than once to give the developer more time.
The food hall's location, the old Gordmans space, is itself a symptom of a mall that has been losing and replacing anchor stores for years. Sears closed in 2017. Gordmans closed in 2020 after its parent company filed for bankruptcy, which is what left that particular box empty and waiting for a new use. Macy's closed its Burnsville location in 2025. What's left standing as full-size anchors at this point is JCPenney and Dick's Sporting Goods, with the mall's owners betting that a food hall, a grocery store, and a mix of smaller entertainment tenants can do the work three department stores used to do.
The food hall is really just the visible edge of a much larger plan. Burnsville's own Burnsville Center Village Redevelopment Vision covers 426 acres and 77 parcels around the mall, with room in the concept for up to 1,600 apartments, 200 hotel rooms, roughly 1.1 million square feet of commercial space, and about 705,000 square feet for other uses. The city has set aside up to $31 million in future tax revenue for the public side of that work, including extending Aldrich Avenue, a crossing over County Road 42 for people on foot, and a new southbound exit off I-35W. None of that infrastructure depends on when Ate Ate Ate finally opens. If anything, the food hall's slow arrival is a preview of how long a project this size takes to move from vision to something you can walk into.
If you've been holding off on checking out Burnsville Center until the headline project opens, you've been missing the parts that already did. The mall's actual reinvention has been happening in the food court and the smaller storefronts for a couple of years now, one lease at a time, while the anchor everyone's watching keeps sliding past its own deadlines. Worth remembering next time a "coming soon" sign catches your eye on the north side of the building: the interesting story at Burnsville Center isn't the thing that hasn't opened. It's everything that already has.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own address in Burnsville, Savage, Lakeville, or elsewhere in the South Metro, Trenary Realty Group keeps a close eye on this corner of the market because it shapes daily life here as much as any listing sheet does. When you're ready to talk through what your home is worth in today's South Metro market, Get Your Home Valuation.
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