Drive down Santan Village Parkway on a Tuesday night this August and you'll notice something that wasn't true in June: there's nowhere to park near the new steakhouse, and the churrasco place two blocks over has a line out the door before 6 p.m. That's not a coincidence of timing. It's the tail end of a stretch that started June 8 and ended August 3, and if you live anywhere near Williams Field Road and the 202, it's worth understanding what actually happened in those eight weeks, because the corridor you drive through for groceries just turned into somewhere people drive to on purpose.
The 56 days that changed the parkway
On June 8, Perry's Steakhouse & Grille opened its first Arizona location at 1865 S. Santan Village Parkway, an 11,000-square-foot anchor with room for 350 guests and four private dining rooms built to serve parties of eight to eighty. Fifty-six days later, on August 3, Fogo de Chão opened its first Gilbert restaurant at 2134 S. SanTan Village Parkway, its second Arizona location after a newly remodeled Scottsdale spot. Two national-caliber restaurant brands, two grand openings, less than two months apart, on the same stretch of road.
That's a tighter window than it looks on paper. Northside at SanTan Village broke ground in July 2024 with completion originally targeted for the first quarter of 2026, but Perry's did not sign on as the project's anchor tenant until May 2025, meaning the restaurant took about thirteen months to go from lease to open doors once the deal was actually signed. Fogo's arrival landed right as the summer heat should have been keeping East Valley diners home. Instead, both openings hit during the slowest months of the local restaurant calendar and both are drawing crowds anyway, which tells you something about pent-up demand along this specific parkway rather than just good timing from two corporate real estate teams.
The two restaurants aren't even part of the same property. Perry's anchors Northside at SanTan Village, a six-building, 37,289-square-foot development on the east side of the parkway between Williams Field and Ray roads. Fogo opened near the original SanTan Village shopping center, a few blocks away on the same parkway. Two different properties, two unrelated leasing timelines, landing within 56 days of each other on the same road. If you've felt like this corner of Gilbert suddenly has options it didn't have a year ago, that overlap is why.
Who else showed up first
Perry's and Fogo are the headline openings, but they weren't the only new names on the parkway this year. Earlier in the spring, Luna Grill brought a Mediterranean menu built around scratch-made chicken kabobs and fluffy pita to the SanTan Village lineup, and Elle & Benn opened a boutique in the courtyard near Harkins Theatre carrying DL1961 denim and Thomas Blonde fragrances. Neither made national restaurant trade press the way Perry's and Fogo did, but both landed months before the two bigger names, which means the corridor was already building momentum before anyone outside Gilbert noticed.
Northside's other tenants tell a similar story about who's betting on this stretch of road. Alongside Perry's, the development signed The Workshop Pilates for its fourth Arizona studio, The NOW Massage for its fourth Arizona location, The Milkshake Factory for its second, and Face Foundrie for its fourth. Every one of those brands already had a foothold in the Valley and chose to expand here specifically. As of last August, those leases brought Northside to roughly 60 percent occupied with five suites still open, ranging from 1,490 to 4,336 square feet. At full build-out, the broader Northside master plan calls for 20 acres including a 134-key hotel fronting the 202.
Fogo's opening had a local wrinkle worth knowing about too. The restaurant is donating 10 percent of its first week of sales to St. Anne Friends of the Needy, a local organization that distributes emergency food boxes four days a week using rescued grocery items and community donations. The Gilbert location is led by general manager Merhawit Keleta, who started her career with Fogo in 2004 and most recently ran the Scottsdale restaurant before taking this job.
Merhawit and her team look forward to becoming part of the Gilbert community.
The same announcement puts a number behind that sentiment: the Gilbert opening is expected to add more than 100 local jobs, on top of whatever staffing Perry's, Luna Grill, and the Northside retail tenants already brought on earlier in the year.
The construction that timed itself right alongside it
Here's the part that doesn't show up in any restaurant press release. The same months that delivered these openings also delivered three separate rounds of roadwork on the exact streets you'd use to reach them.
Lane closures began June 10 on Williams Field Road near the Market Street intersection, running 24 hours a day for about two weeks, just two days after Perry's had opened its doors. Then, starting in late July, Gilbert posted new turn restrictions affecting the SanTan Village shopping areas, with the town's own notice saying the work is expected to wrap by the end of August. That means as of this writing, turn lane access into parts of the shopping center is still restricted, with full access not returning until later this month.
Layer onto that the ongoing ADOT project widening the Loop 202 Santan Freeway between Val Vista Drive and the Loop 101, an eight-mile, $200 million effort that has touched the SanTan Village Parkway on-ramp repeatedly since 2025. Sometimes that ramp is the one getting closed, like the weekend of May 1, 2026, when ADOT shut the westbound on-ramps at SanTan Village Parkway, Val Vista Drive, and Lindsay Road all at once and routed drivers through the Gilbert Road interchange instead. Other times it works the opposite way, with ADOT pointing drivers toward the SanTan Village Parkway on-ramp as the recommended alternate while a different stretch closes. Either way, the parkway hosting all these new restaurants has spent much of the past year doing double duty as a pressure valve for freeway construction happening around it.
None of this is a reason to skip the corridor. It's a reason to build in ten extra minutes if you're heading there on a weekend evening, and to check the town's traffic advisories before committing to a reservation window, at least until the current turn restriction work clears by the end of the month.
What's still filling in
The corridor isn't finished changing. In May 2026, plans surfaced for SanTan Crossing, a proposed 20-acre retail center at the southeast corner of Williams Field Road and San Tan Village Parkway. The land was acquired in 2025 for $24.5 million by a company connected to Arte Moreno, owner of the Los Angeles Angels, and the filed proposal outlines 12 buildings, several of them standalone full-service restaurants, plus a bank and additional retail. Part of the site has no assigned use yet, reserved for what the filing calls future retail development.
Northside also had a handful of suites still unleased as of last summer, so the tenant list that already includes Perry's, Workshop Pilates, The NOW Massage, Milkshake Factory, and Face Foundrie may not be final. Whatever fills those last spaces will land on a parkway that's already proven it can support high-volume openings back to back.
For anyone who's lived near this stretch for a while, the last two months are a reminder that Gilbert's growth doesn't always show up as a headline. Sometimes it shows up as a 56-day gap between two grand openings and a town notice about turn restrictions that quietly explains why your usual left turn isn't working right now.
If you're the kind of person who tracks changes like this because you're weighing what your own next move in the East Valley looks like, that's exactly the read on a neighborhood that Role Model Realty built its Gilbert practice around. Book a complimentary staging consultation and market plan when you're ready to talk specifics, and bring your questions about what a corner like this one means for a home nearby.
