Drive Williams Field Road past SanTan Village Parkway on a Thursday night this month and you will see valet lines outside two different steakhouses, both less than a quarter mile apart, both open fewer than three months. Turn the corner toward the site that was supposed to anchor the whole stretch and you will still find a fenced lot, graders, and a rendering on a construction sign. That is the actual state of Gilbert's busiest retail corridor as of late August 2026, and it runs backward from what most residents assumed would happen first.
Since the project broke ground, the story of this intersection was Whole Foods. The $145 million Signature at SanTan Village project broke ground in March 2025 with a 43,000-square-foot Whole Foods Market and a 119,397-square-foot Dick's House of Sport as its named anchors, the kind of grocery-and-sporting-goods pairing that gets circled on a family's mental map long before it opens. Seventeen months later, those two buildings are still under construction. What got built first, and opened first, on either side of that same corridor were two full-service steakhouses that nobody was treating as the headline.
Two Steakhouses, Eight Weeks Apart
Perry's Steakhouse & Grille opened its first Arizona location at Northside at SanTan Village on June 8, 2026, an 11,000-square-foot restaurant built to seat 350 guests with four private dining rooms and a 45-seat patio. Eight weeks later, on August 3, Fogo de Chão opened its second Arizona restaurant a few hundred feet away at 2134 S. SanTan Village Parkway, its first Gilbert location and only its second in the state after the original Scottsdale restaurant that opened back in 2008. The Gilbert opening created more than 100 local jobs, and the restaurant marked its first week by donating 10 percent of sales to St. Anne Friends of the Needy, a local nonprofit that distributes emergency food boxes.
Here is how the two compare for a resident deciding where to eat this week:
| Perry's Steakhouse & Grille | Fogo de Chão | |
|---|---|---|
| Opened | June 8, 2026 | August 3, 2026 |
| Development | Northside at SanTan Village | Signature at SanTan Village |
| Signature item | Seven-finger-high pork chop, pecan-wood roasted | Full Churrasco Experience, tableside-carved picanha |
| Weekday lunch | Fridays only, pork chop special | Every weekday, starting at $18 per person |
| Private dining | Four rooms, 8 to 80 guests | Available by reservation |
| For families | Formal dining room, no outside beverages | Kids 6 and under eat free, ages 7 to 12 half price |
Neither restaurant is what this corridor was built around. Both are what actually opened.
The Anchor That's Still Fenced Off
The strange part is that Fogo de Chão and Whole Foods are supposed to be neighbors in the same development. Fogo secured its 8,424-square-foot space inside Signature at SanTan Village alongside Whole Foods and Dick's House of Sport, and as recently as this June the developer's own project page still listed Fogo de Chão under construction in the same breath as those two anchors. It opened two months later while Whole Foods and Dick's House of Sport remained behind fencing. According to Gilbert's Office of Economic Development, the project's Phase 1 buildout was announced at 43,000 square feet for the Whole Foods and 119,397 square feet for the House of Sport, a scale that simply takes longer to permit, build out, and stock than an 8,424-square-foot restaurant pad on the same lot. The most recent developer timeline had Phase 1 stores targeting the back half of 2026, which means residents budgeting a Saturday grocery run around a new Whole Foods are working with a later date than the one they'd use to book a Friday dinner reservation two doors down.
That gap is the actual news here. It is easy to read a groundbreaking announcement and assume the whole project lands at once. In practice, restaurant pads on a big-format retail site almost always finish before the anchor boxes, because they are smaller, faster to permit, and often built by tenants who control their own construction schedule. Signature at SanTan Village is a clean, current example of that pattern playing out at full scale.
SanTan Development Group president Ty LeSueur, whose family has held this land for decades, put it simply when the project broke ground:
"This is the next exciting phase for land that has been in our family and business for decades."
The next exciting phase, so far, has been dinner. The groceries and the golf simulators are still coming.
The Mall Next Door Picked a Different Lane
While the two newer developments race each other on restaurants, the original SanTan Village mall on the east side of the parkway has been quietly filling in its fashion floor. Recent additions to the tenant lineup include:
- Fabletics
- Madewell
- Nick's Menswear
- Pacsun
- Portland Leather Goods
These followed the mall's earlier additions of Alo and Offline by Aerie. None of this is under construction. It is already open, already stocked, and already part of the walk between Nordstrom Rack and Dillard's that anchors the mall's two-department-store layout. If the steakhouse race is the corridor's headline, the mall's fashion refresh is the quieter half of the same story: one side of Williams Field Road is proving out through apparel, the other through white-tablecloth dining, and the grocery anchor that was supposed to tie them together is still the one thing not yet open on either side.
What Actually Changes for a Gilbert Week Right Now
None of this changes a daily errand run. Anyone driving to SanTan Village for groceries, a gym visit, or a Saturday at Dick's House of Sport is still working around a construction fence, and that will be true until Signature at SanTan Village's anchors deliver.
What has changed is the corridor's evening rhythm. Perry's has been open long enough to settle into a predictable reservation pattern, and its lunch service only runs on Fridays, which is worth knowing before you show up on a Tuesday expecting a pork chop special. Fogo de Chão is still in its first month, which typically means weekend waits and a fuller parking lot than it will have by winter, though its weekday lunch at $18 per person is a lower entry point than the dinner menu suggests, and families with children under 12 get a real price break that a Friday-night steakhouse crowd usually doesn't offer.
The practical read for a resident: if you want either restaurant without a wait, go on a weeknight rather than a Friday or Saturday, and if you're taking kids, Fogo's lunch or early dinner service is the better fit than a formal Perry's evening seating. If you're still waiting on the Whole Foods, plan on it landing later this year rather than assuming it opened alongside its restaurant neighbors, because on this project, the restaurant pad simply built faster than the grocery box next to it.
More is still coming to the same 30 acres. Crate and Barrel, Today's Patio, Mission BBQ, Ganem Jewelers, Fidelity, and J. Alexander's are all named tenants at Signature at SanTan Village, joining the site's existing restaurants, Cooper's Hawk, Flower Child, and Torchy's Tacos, all of which were already operating before the project's 2025 groundbreaking. Fogo de Chão's Gilbert opening was also framed by its own leadership as one stop in a broader Arizona expansion, with additional locations already announced for Goodyear Civic Square and Arrowhead Towne Center in Peoria, so the pattern of restaurants outrunning big-box anchors is likely to repeat elsewhere in the Valley before this year is out.
For now, the honest map of SanTan Village looks like this: dinner is settled, fashion is settled, and the grocery cart is still parked behind a fence. Anyone who tells you differently hasn't driven the corridor since August.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood's daily rhythm actually looks like against what the listing photos promise, that's the kind of on-the-ground read The Avenue Collective builds into every Gilbert conversation. Schedule a white-glove consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
