If you have driven up Collins in the last five months, you already know the tell. The 9700 Collins entrance has been closed since February 24, and rideshares now discharge you into the 96th Street garage instead of the palm-lined arrival most residents have used for a decade. That closure is not a nuisance. It is the clearest signal yet that the Shops are being rebuilt around the people who live here, not the people flying in for a long weekend.
The March opening of Slim's, the July arrival of Toteme, the pending return of China Grill, and a quiet migration of Prada, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta and others into the new wing are not separate news items. They are one story, and it is worth understanding before your next Saturday errand loop.
Slim's Sits Where Makoto Used To. That Matters.
The ground-floor room on the north side of the property has been Stephen Starr territory since 2011. Makoto opened there, moved to a larger third-floor space in 2022, and left the original room to Le Zoo, which closed in 2025. On March 17 of this year, Starr reopened the same address as Slim's, a 183-seat steakhouse designed by GACHOT and named after Lauren Bacall's nickname in the 1944 Bogart film To Have and Have Not.
The room reads differently than anything the Shops have hosted before. Checkerboard floors in nero marquina and calacatta viola monet marble, pale yellow leather banquettes, Art Deco murals by New Yorker illustrator Christoph Niemann. Chef Anthony Micari's menu leans on a 36-ounce bone-end Delmonico that Starr has called the best steak he has eaten, a Wagyu cheesesteak layered with black truffle and foie gras, wild Dover sole, twin lobster tails, and a pink champagne cake that has already become the room's photograph. Service runs 5 to 11 p.m. daily.
For a resident, the more useful observation is what Slim's is not. It is not brunch. It is not a shopping-day lunch. It is an evening-only room, seven days a week, in a mall that has historically gone dark at nine. That single programming choice, more than any of the retail news, tells you where the property is heading.
The Level 2 Migration
Toteme opened its first Miami store on July 1 on Level 2, a 1,010-square-foot room designed by Stockholm's Halleroed with Josef Frank Liljevalchs sofas, woven-rattan shelving, and archival botanical engravings framed in banana leaf. Founders Elin Kling and Karl Lindman brought the full collection: ready-to-wear, bags, shoes, jewelry, and swim. It is a small store doing a considered thing in a corner of the property most residents have not had reason to walk in months.
That is going to change. Level 2 is where the expansion is landing. The brands relocating into or entering the new wing include:
- Prada, Balenciaga, Saint Laurent, Brioni relocating within the center
- Dior, Cartier, Gabriela Hearst, Eden Gallery Art entering the property
- Graff, Alexander McQueen, Bottega Veneta, Burberry moving into larger spaces
For someone who lives in one of the oceanfront condominiums a few blocks north, the practical implication is that the walking route between Neiman Marcus and Saks is being redrawn. Boutiques you used to find on the ground floor will not be where you left them. The property's own guidance, if you want to check before you go, is on the store directory at balharbourshops.com.
The Restaurant Count Is Doubling. That Is the Real Story.
Bal Harbour Shops currently generates roughly $70 million in annual restaurant sales from six rooms. Matthew Whitman Lazenby, the fourth-generation family member running the property, has said the plan is to double that count to at least a dozen. Slim's is the first of the new set. China Grill, the Jeffrey Chodorow room that closed on South Beach, is returning as the second. More will follow as the expansion completes.
Six restaurants is a lunch program. Twelve restaurants, half of which serve dinner, is a neighborhood. It is the difference between a mall that closes at nine and a village center that stays lit. Lazenby himself has framed the ambition in exactly those terms, and the recently approved residential component of the property, which would add hundreds of housing units on site, is the endgame. What you are watching in 2026 is the retail-and-dining half of that transition. The residential half is years out, but the dining pivot is already on the plate.
The reason a Bal Harbour or Bay Harbor resident should care is timing. Reservations at Slim's have been the hardest table in the neighborhood since March. When China Grill opens and Makoto absorbs displaced Le Zoo regulars, the pressure on the 6 to 8 p.m. window will get worse before it gets better. Booking two weeks out for a Friday is now the baseline, not the exception.
Getting In When the Main Entrance Is Closed
The 9700 Collins entrance closure is scheduled to remain in place through the expansion buildout. If you are used to pulling into the front valet, the routing is now:
- Enter the 96th Street Parking Garage from 96th Street.
- Take the elevator to the 2nd level, marked GREEN.
- Turn left off the elevator and follow the signage into the Shops.
Valet, self-park, and rideshare drop-off all funnel through the same garage. For a resident on a short errand, the practical time cost is about four to six minutes on top of the old routine. For a dinner reservation, budget accordingly.
One small compensation: the 100-foot gallery of archival Bal Harbour magazine covers along the new garage's white walls is worth the walk on its own. It runs from the 1960s forward. Most people speed past it. If you have a few minutes before a table, it is the most interesting thing on the property that costs nothing.
What This Says About the Neighborhood
Bal Harbour has always had an unusual relationship with its shopping center. In most towns, the mall is the thing you drive to. Here, it is the thing you walk to. The Shops sit inside a village of roughly one square mile, and the residents of the oceanfront towers on Collins have historically used the property the way a Manhattan resident uses a good block: for a morning coffee at Carpaccio, an afternoon errand, a Tuesday dinner that does not require crossing a causeway.
The 2026 changes reinforce that pattern rather than break it. A dinner-only steakhouse open seven nights, a Scandinavian ready-to-wear brand on Level 2, a returning Asian-fusion room, and a doubled restaurant count all read as programming for people who are already here, not people arriving from Brickell for the afternoon. The property is not chasing tourism harder. It is chasing the residents it already has, harder.
For anyone who owns in the village and has been treating the Shops as background scenery for the last two years of construction, this is the moment to walk through again. The tenant mix on Level 2 alone is a different property than the one you last surveyed. The dining calendar is a different calendar. Even the way you arrive is different.
If you are weighing what any of this means for the value of a specific building, or for a purchase or sale you have been considering in Bal Harbour, Surfside, or Bay Harbor Islands, the team at Allen Davoudpour tracks these shifts building by building and week by week. Schedule a Consultation when you are ready to talk through the picture in detail.
