A month ago, workers finished painting a black and white mural across the back wall of the old Sunrise Rollerland building on Sunrise Boulevard. It sat there for weeks before the city even reviewed it, and on September 17 officials signed off, ruling that the "Arcade Monsters" lettering counts toward the building's signage allotment but doesn't need to be repainted. It's a small bureaucratic footnote, but it's also the most visible proof yet that something is actually happening behind Sunrise Mall, after a roller rink that ran for more than fifty years skated its last session back in March.
Walk two minutes in almost any other direction from that mural and you'll find something further along: a gated food truck plaza on Auburn Boulevard that didn't exist a year ago, already busy enough that families were showing up from nearby apartments before the ribbon was even cut. A new Mongolian barbecue spot in Copperwood Square. A Brazilian restaurant moving into a space that sat empty since 2024. A taqueria that's fed this neighborhood for two decades expanding into the unit next door.
Here's the pattern once you line these stories up side by side. Everything happening to Sunrise Mall itself, from the arcade to the proposed sports arena, is entertainment and recreation, not food and retail. Everything that's actually changed what residents can eat this year happened on the ordinary commercial strips around the mall, without waiting for a master plan. If you've been watching the mall headlines and assuming the neighborhood's next restaurant wave will show up inside those walls, it's worth knowing that's not really what's being built there.
The Mall Is Becoming an Arena, Not a Food Court
Sunrise Mall opened in 1972 with four anchors: Weinstock's, JCPenney, Sears, and Liberty House. Today JCPenney is the only one of the original four still operating on site. Both Macy's stores, which had replaced Liberty House and expanded into the property over the decades, closed in March 2025. What's filling those empty anchor spaces isn't retail.
The former Sears building, a two-story anchor Ethan Conrad Properties bought in 2022, is now leased to Slick City Action Park, an indoor entertainment chain with 35 operating parks and more than 150 more signed or in development nationwide. The company is calling its roughly 31,000-square-foot Citrus Heights location its flagship, and the plan includes tearing out the second floor to create one open space.
Behind the mall, Arcade Monsters closed escrow on the old Rollerland site for $3.5 million in June, after the Neutz family, who'd owned the rink since the early 1970s, retired and put it up for sale. That's the building with the newly approved mural.
The biggest piece is still just a proposal. In March, the Citrus Heights City Council approved a partnership agreement with a Sacramento firm called The Mettle Shop to explore a $120 million Sunrise Sports Center in the old Macy's Men's building, on the opposite end of the property from Sears. The pitch is a 4,000-seat arena, two NHL-sized ice sheets, indoor and outdoor turf fields, and sports medicine facilities, with restaurants and gathering space built in as amenities rather than as the draw. Mettle Shop CEO Joe Wagoner has said he'd like the facility running by mid-2028, in time for hockey season training, but construction alone is expected to take 12 to 18 months once approvals clear, and the project still needs environmental review and public hearings. In July, Mettle Shop signed an agreement to buy about 13 acres of the site from Tallen Capital Partners, the investor group currently under contract to become majority owner of the mall itself.
None of this is settled. During the March council meeting, more than 50 written comments were read aloud, and the overwhelming majority supported the sports center on one condition: that Royal Stage theater, which still operates inside the mall, be allowed to stay or get help relocating. That single caveat says something about how much is still being negotiated even as construction plans move forward on other corners of the property. Read the city's own framing of the vision on its Sunrise Tomorrow Specific Plan page, and the language is squarely about recreation, entertainment, and eventually housing. Nowhere in that vision is a new restaurant row meant to compete with what's already open a few blocks away.
Three Corridors Away, the Food Scene Didn't Wait for a Master Plan
While the mall's redevelopment inches through entitlements and technical studies, the corridors around it have been filling in fast, one lease at a time.
In Copperwood Square at 7056 Sunrise Blvd, O Tasty Mongolian Barbeque opened in June after a few months of construction, taking over a 3,200-square-foot space next to the existing Starbucks. The operator previously ran a Mongolian barbecue concept at Westfield Galleria in Roseville before that location closed in 2024, and is now running under a new name here instead. Next door, BAD Bakers opened its third area location, joining sister shops in Folsom, Elk Grove, and near Cal Expo.
Across Greenback Lane, right in view of the mall, Heights of Brazil is moving into the space that closed as Wasabi House back in 2024. A few blocks over on Sunrise Boulevard, Must Be Cow held its official ribbon cutting in January after a soft opening the previous fall, a Korean barbecue and all-you-can-eat sushi spot with 40 individual grilling tables, owned by Jason Duan, who's also a partner in the Bay Area's Sizzling Lunch chain.
Greenback Lane has its own small cluster forming around one family. Valencia's Carniceria Taqueria, a Mexican market and taqueria that traces back to founders Don Gill and Maria Valencia after they immigrated from Michoacán in the 1980s, is expanding into the unit next door that a Subway vacated. A couple of doors down, their daughter Evelyn Valencia opened Sweet Music Studio Cafe, pairing coffee, wine, and beer with live music programming.
And on Auburn Boulevard, at the corner of Twin Oaks Avenue, a lot that sat vacant for more than a decade is now the Citrus Heights Food Truck Plaza, which grew from two trucks at a limited opening in late June to ten vendors by its official grand opening on August 8:
- Monarcas Birrieria y Botanas
- Bingsu Bliss
- Bacon Mania
- 5 River Pizza & Tandoori Grill
- Sweets Drinks & Treats
- Tipsy Cheese
- Hefty Gyros
- Kado's Asian Grill
- Bubble Hive
- Luna Cafe
Owner Jagtar Singh built the site with room for up to 16 trucks, gated access, ADA-compliant restrooms, 32 parking spots including four EV chargers, and misters to take the edge off summer heat. Hours flex with vendor availability rather than running on a fixed schedule, which is its own small sign of how new this all still is.
Two Different Timelines, Two Different Kinds of Investment
Line these two stories up and the pace difference is the real story. O Tasty went from active construction to open doors in about three months. The food truck plaza faced its own delays, mostly waiting on SMUD's electrical connection timeline, but it still moved from a building permit to a full ten-vendor grand opening within a year. These are independent operators leasing existing commercial space and opening on a retail clock.
The mall runs on an institutional clock instead. Part of the reason redevelopment stalled there for years, according to both a former mall manager and the Sunrise Marketplace business district's executive director, is structural: the property is split across seven parcels owned by five different entities, and past redevelopment attempts died because not every owner would agree to the same plan. Even the current, most advanced proposal still has to clear environmental review, a parking study, and public hearings before anyone breaks ground, with a realistic opening more than a year and a half away in the best case.
That gap matters for anyone trying to picture what's next for this stretch of Sunrise Boulevard. The mall's next chapter is being built as a regional draw, something that pulls in visitors from outside Citrus Heights for hockey tournaments and turf leagues. The neighborhood's next chapter for actual dinner plans already happened, on Auburn Boulevard, in Copperwood Square, and along Greenback Lane, without waiting on a single one of those approvals.
What This Looks Like This Fall
For anyone mapping out a weekend right now, the working list is already useful. Auburn Boulevard has ten food trucks running most days at the plaza. Copperwood Square is a two-stop trip for barbecue and pastries. Greenback Lane has Valencia's mid-expansion, Sweet Music Studio Cafe for coffee with live music, and Heights of Brazil finishing its buildout across from the mall. JCPenney and Royal Stage theater are both still open inside Sunrise Mall today, and that mural on the old Rollerland building is worth a look even before Arcade Monsters opens its doors, since it's the clearest outward sign that construction is finally moving past paperwork.
None of this requires waiting for a sports arena that's still two years out at best. The neighborhood didn't wait, and neither does anyone eating there this week.
Watching a place change is part of what it means to live somewhere long enough to notice. If any of this, the mall's next act, the shifting corridors around it, has you thinking about what it might mean for your own home's place in the neighborhood, Olani Properties knows this stretch of Placer and Sacramento County block by block and is always glad to talk through what you're seeing.
