Holladay Now Has Two Main Streets, and They're a Mile Apart

Ask a longtime Holladay resident where they're grabbing dinner Friday night and you used to get one answer without hesitation: somewhere near the plaza at Murray-Holladay Road and 2300 East. Caputo's for the cheese, Franck's if it's a birthday, maybe a walk over to SoHo Food Park if the kids want something they can eat with their hands at a picnic table. That answer isn't wrong anymore. It's just incomplete.

A mile east on Highland Drive, on ground that sat empty for two decades, a different kind of Friday night has started to compete for the same people.

The lot that sat empty since 2005

Cottonwood Mall closed in 2005 and stayed a hole in the map for most of the years since. What's replacing it, Holladay Hills, is a 58-acre mixed-use project, and 2025 was the year it stopped being a construction sign and started being a place people actually walk into. The city's own year-end recap called it out plainly: residential and commercial tenants moved onto that site for the first time since 2005.

The tenant list reads differently than a typical Utah strip development. Bobby's Burgers, the fast-casual concept from chef Bobby Flay, picked Holladay Hills for a location. Magnolia Bakery, the New York cupcake shop with a following well beyond the five boroughs, opened its first franchise location in the entire country here, and a second Salt Lake location is already planned for fall 2026, which tells you Holladay isn't being treated as a test run. The Sicilian Butcher and Sploot Veterinary Care each opened their first Utah locations on the same 58 acres. Kiln rounds out the early lineup.

That's a meaningful break from how national brands have historically treated this suburb. Holladay has usually been someone's second or third Salt Lake location, the safe expansion after downtown proved a concept could work. This time the neighborhood is the debut address.

What the old center still does that the new one can't

None of this displaces the plaza. It complicates it.

Caputo's Market & Deli still runs its supper club series out of the Holladay Village Plaza location, the kind of shared-table dinner where strangers end up passing bread to each other. Franck's, tucked into the Knudsen's Corner pocket of Holladay in a converted home, still does the small-room casual fine dining it's built a following on. Sicilia Mia keeps its tableside pasta service going for the anniversaries and graduations that need a little theater.

And then there's SoHo Food Park at 4747 South Holladay Boulevard, which has quietly become one of the more interesting food operations in the valley. It's not one restaurant. It's a rotating cast: roughly 65 different trucks pass through over a season, most evenings each week, with the popular ones like Freshies Lobster Company booked back multiple times a month and slower ones getting a single Saturday to prove themselves. Freshies alone reportedly moves around 80 lobster rolls a night. That's not a food court. That's a small business incubator that happens to serve dinner.

The plaza's other advantage is that it still hosts the calendar. The Holladay Summer Concert Series ran every Saturday at 8 p.m. from July 4 through August 22 this year at Holladay City Hall Park, and it closed out the season with Ronstadt Live, a tribute act built around the music of Linda Ronstadt. Next up, on September 19, the Holladay Arts Council runs the Blue Moon Festival on the Village Plaza, an evening market and concert that the city expects to pull in around 4,000 people, stretching from the plaza itself down to the SoHo Food Truck Park. Holladay Hills doesn't have an equivalent yet. It has retail. The plaza has a season.

The new corridor's own draw

What Holladay Hills does have is convenience nobody had to plan for. A grocery run now sits across a drive aisle from a made-to-order burger. A movie at the Megaplex is a two-minute walk from a Magnolia banana pudding. And a few blocks up Highland Drive, in the former Wendy's building at 6135 Highland, a new health-forward cafe called Monti opened this year, serving scratch breakfast, fresh-pressed juice, and coffee to a stretch of road that used to be mostly drive-through lanes.

None of that competes directly with what the plaza offers. It solves a different problem. If your Saturday used to require choosing between a grocery errand and a lunch out, it doesn't anymore, because both now exist within the same few blocks on the east side of the neighborhood.

The practical effect is that Holladay residents are starting to build two separate loops instead of one. Coffee at Monti, then east into Holladay Hills for whatever the day calls for. Or bread at Caputo's, then a slow circuit of the plaza, then dinner at whichever truck is parked at SoHo that night. Both loops are legitimately Holladay. Neither one covers the whole town anymore.

Even City Hall left, temporarily

Here's the detail that makes the shift feel almost literal instead of just commercial: Holladay's own city hall isn't in Holladay right now.

The building at 4580 South 2300 East, originally built as Holladay Elementary before the school closed in 2002, is in the middle of a seismic retrofit the city has been planning for years. City offices moved into the old Millcreek City Hall building at 3330 South 1300 East starting April 1, 2026, while the retrofit is underway, with a return expected around September 2027. The city's own materials acknowledge the irony of a Holladay City Hall that, for the moment, isn't located in Holladay. The Justice Court moved with them. The police precinct stayed behind, since that part of the building had more recent updates. And Holladay City Park, the green space behind the old building where the summer concerts happen, stayed open through construction.

It's a temporary, almost bureaucratic footnote, but it lands on the same theme running through the rest of this: for a couple of years, Holladay's civic center of gravity and its commercial center of gravity are both a little unsettled, both pulled slightly away from where residents expect them to be.

What this actually means if you live here

The takeaway isn't that one center will win and the other will fade. Cottonwood Mall's old footprint had twenty years to prove it wasn't coming back on its own, and it took a coordinated 58-acre project to change that. The plaza, meanwhile, has a full events calendar, a food truck park with real turnover economics, and restaurants that have been fixtures for years. Neither side is going anywhere.

What's actually happening is that a neighborhood that used to have one obvious answer to "where do people go" now has two, and residents are the ones deciding, trip by trip, which one gets their Friday night. That's a genuinely different daily rhythm than the one Holladay had even eighteen months ago, before the first Holladay Hills tenants opened their doors.

If you're weighing what that shift means for property closer to one side of town versus the other, or you're simply curious how a new development a mile from the historic core tends to affect the streets around it over time, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground read Jennifer Jumbelic tracks across the Wasatch Front. Let's connect. Get your home valuation or start your search, and get a straight answer about what these two centers of Holladay actually mean for you.