Across From Waldorf Astoria, BLVD Opened The Stores Before It Opened The Kitchens

Walk out of the residential lobby at Waldorf Astoria and look across Las Vegas Boulevard. For most of the past year, that view has been two different projects wearing one address. On one side, a fully stocked shopping floor with Puma, Lululemon, and Pandora running normal retail hours. On the other side, kitchen hoods still going in, health permits still pending, and a rooftop with more square footage than most restaurants have customers.

That split is BLVD Las Vegas, the three-level complex sitting directly across the street from Waldorf Astoria at the corner of Harmon Avenue. It has 700 feet of Strip frontage and roughly 400,000 square feet of retail and dining space, and if you already live within a few minutes of that corner, the useful thing to know isn't that BLVD exists. It's that the two halves of the building are opening on completely different timelines, and the gap between them tells you something about how a project like this actually gets built.

What You Can Already Walk To

As of mid-May 2026, BLVD reported that 75 percent of its retail space had already opened, filled largely with flagship-style stores: Puma, Adidas, Lululemon, Pandora, H&M, JD Sports, ABC Stores, and Abercrombie & Fitch. Puma's location includes racing simulators built around an F1 tie-in. Pandora runs a charms bar where you build your own bracelet from hundreds of options. None of that required a kitchen, a hood system, or a health inspection, and it shows in how fast it filled in.

Food moved slower, at least at first. How Ya Dough'n, a South Florida pizzeria known for sourdough pies built on an eight to twelve day wild yeast fermentation, became the first restaurant to open at BLVD in December 2025. For months it was the only sit-down food option in a building otherwise full of apparel.

That changed in June 2026, when In-N-Out Burger opened its BLVD location. Local coverage described the debut as drawing social media pandemonium and called it more than 200 seats with a terrace, one report referring to it as the brand's largest location and another calling it the second-largest In-N-Out in the country. The two descriptions don't fully agree on the ranking, but they agree on the scale: this is not a standard drive-through footprint dropped into a mall.

So if you're walking that corner today, the honest inventory is: full retail, one pizza spot, and one very large burger location. Everything else announced for BLVD is still ahead of you.

The Free Perk Nobody Advertises

Before the rest of the food lineup arrives, there's already a reason to check the building even if you're not buying anything. BLVD's third floor, called The Overlook, is more than 110,000 square feet reserved for food, beverage, and event space, and while most of that space is still filling in with tenants, it's currently hosting free wellness programming, including yoga and Pilates sessions with Strip views. If you live close enough to walk to Waldorf Astoria's valet, you're close enough to walk to a free yoga class on a rooftop that will eventually be worth a lot more per square foot than it is right now.

The Kitchens Are Running On Their Own Clock

Here's where the timeline gets interesting instead of just informative. When BLVD first floated an opening window for In-N-Out in a March 2026 report, the target was the fourth quarter of 2026. By the time BLVD issued its own official announcement on April 16, 2026, that window had moved up to the second quarter. The location then opened in June, which lands right at the edge of that revised Q2 target. In other words, the earlier public estimate was too conservative, and the later official one held.

That's not the pattern you'd guess if you assumed every construction timeline slips later the closer it gets. Here's where the rest of the lineup stands as of the most recent reporting:

Miniso, Boot Barn, and Sunglass Hut were on a spring target, which means they were likely already stocked and open well before this post went up. Tenshou, Silverlake Ramen, and Netflix House are the pieces still ahead of you, and they're the ones worth tracking.

Why The Food Side Lags

Nothing in BLVD's own announcements explains the retail-versus-restaurant gap directly, but the pattern lines up with how these projects typically get built. Hanging shelving and running point-of-sale systems for a shoe store is a fast, standardized fit-out. Building six separate kitchens under one roof, each with its own ventilation and health permitting, for a concept like Tenshou is a different order of construction entirely. Tenshou isn't a single restaurant. It's six omakase restaurants sharing a footprint, with a Tokyo-imported bar inside it fronted by mixologist Yuzo Komai, known for cutting ice with a sword. That kind of build takes longer than a Sunglass Hut, and the calendar reflects it.

What To Watch For The Rest Of This Year

If Tenshou holds to its own stated window, it opens sometime in the next several weeks, since "end of summer" was the language used in reporting from March through May of this year. Silverlake Ramen, which currently sits at No. 21 on Yelp's 2025 list of the top 100 U.S. ramen shops, is a later bet, landing anywhere from later this year into early 2027. Netflix House is the longest runway of the group, still under construction as of this spring's reporting and not expected until 2027, when it will offer story-driven spaces themed around some of the platform's biggest shows.

None of these are locked dates. If the In-N-Out timeline is any guide, they can move in either direction, and the only way to know for certain is to walk the corner yourself or watch BLVD's own updates as they come.

Who This Corner Is Actually For

Waldorf Astoria itself sits directly across the street, with roughly 225 private residences on the upper floors of the tower, a separate lobby from the hotel, and a non-gaming, non-smoking environment that's genuinely rare for a Strip address. A few minutes north at CityCenter, Veer Towers and The Martin add more full-time residents to the same stretch of the Boulevard. That's the population BLVD is actually opening for day to day, even if most of its marketing is aimed at visitors walking in off the Strip.

If you're one of those residents, the practical read is this: the building across the street is real and mostly open, but it's not finished, and the parts still missing are the ones that take the longest to build for good reason. Check back at the end of summer for Tenshou, keep Silverlake Ramen on your radar for later this year or early next, and don't expect Netflix House until 2027.

If you live along this stretch of the Boulevard, or you're thinking about what daily life actually looks like on a block that's still filling in one kitchen at a time, Lilia Kazakevitch works this part of the Strip regularly and is happy to talk through what it's really like day to day. Schedule a free consultation anytime you want a local read on the corner before you make a decision about it.