What's Actually Open at GSQ This Summer, and What Downtown Goodyear Feels Like Now

If you live in Goodyear, you have watched GSQ go from a rendering to a construction fence to a Trader Joe's parking lot that fills up by 10 a.m. on a Saturday. The stretch along Bullard Avenue and McDowell Road has been "coming soon" for so long that it is easy to miss the point when it stops being coming soon and starts being a place you actually go on a Tuesday night.

That point is this summer.

The tenant list at GSQ has always leaned on marquee announcements: Fogo de Chão at the southwest corner of Goodyear Way and Bullard Avenue, Nordstrom Rack, a big Brazilian steakhouse to draw people in from Litchfield Park and Verrado. Those are the headlines. The more useful story for people who already live within a ten-minute drive is the quieter shift underway right now, where the tenant mix is filling in around the anchors with the kind of small, repeat-visit businesses that turn a shopping center into a downtown.

What is open as of this summer

The functioning version of GSQ, as of July 2026, looks like this:

First Watch sits at 1670 N. Bullard Ave. in a 3,700 square foot space that seats more than 160 people with a covered patio and an interior bar, and it opens at 7 a.m. and closes at 2:30 p.m., which matters for anyone who has ever tried to find a real breakfast on the west side after 10 a.m. on a weekend.

Kura and Trader Joe's together are the reason parking near the north end of the development has changed character since spring. If you have not been in a few months, the traffic pattern by the McDowell Road entrance is different now.

The one worth walking over for

The Magdaleña opening in late May is the piece of this summer's lineup that deserves its own paragraph. The restaurant sits near McDowell Road and 150th Drive, and it comes from TPQ Foods, the Phoenix group behind Pa'La Wood-Fired Kitchen and Tortas Paquimé, with a Latin American inspired menu built around wood-fired cooking, premium meats, fresh seafood and vegetable-forward dishes designed for sharing. Founder Omar Alvarez has a specific track record in the Valley, and Pa'La has been a serious Phoenix restaurant for years. Getting a concept from that team in a West Valley opening, rather than the usual national chain rollout, is not the standard GSQ playbook. It is the reason a resident who has "tried the new stuff at GSQ" and moved on should try it again.

What the pipeline actually says

Here is the thesis, and it is worth stating plainly:

The tenants signing leases at GSQ right now are not destination tenants. They are weeknight tenants. That is what changes how the place functions.

Look at the lineup for the second half of 2026 and early 2027. Paris Baguette, Zara Nail Bar, Handel's Ice Cream, Reformed Pilates, Berry Divine Acai Bowls and Magdaleña is a very different list from the earlier wave of steakhouses and department stores. Paris Baguette and Zara Nail Bar will each occupy approximately 3,000 square feet and are expected to open by the end of 2026. Handel's Ice Cream will open an approximately 1,800 square foot location in early 2027 with a patio and outdoor seating designed as a neighborhood gathering space. Berry Divine Acai Bowls is planned for a fall 2026 opening on the Civic Square side of the development, marking its 11th location.

An acai bowl place and a Pilates studio do not draw traffic from Surprise. They draw traffic from people who live two miles away and would previously have driven to the Palm Valley Pavilions for the same errand. The signal in the tenant mix is that GSQ has stopped being a project marketed at the West Valley and started being a project marketed at Goodyear itself.

The bigger 2026 openings still fill in the food picture:

• Firebirds Wood Fired Grill in a 5,658 square foot standalone building with the chain's ski lodge inspired interior design and wood-fired grill
• California Fish Grill, CAVA and Kura Revolving Sushi Bar, with Kura already open and the other two still to come
• A 1,460 square foot Black Rock Coffee Bar store with drive-thru in 2026
• A 24-hour emergency animal hospital from VEG (Veterinary Emergency Group)

The VEG opening is the one that gets undersold. If you have ever had to drive to Phoenix at 11 p.m. because your dog ate something it should not have, a 24-hour emergency vet inside your zip code is the kind of neighborhood infrastructure that does not show up in a food and beverage roundup.

The Buc-ee's question, briefly

Separate from GSQ, but on every Goodyear resident's radar: Buc-ee's has officially broken ground on its first-ever Arizona location, and the Goodyear Travel Center is slated to open in June 2026. By the time you read this it may already be open. Expect the I-10 traffic pattern near the site to be genuinely different for the first month, and expect the novelty visits from East Valley friends to last about a summer. Long term it is a fuel stop, not a downtown. GSQ is the downtown.

A weeknight at GSQ, mapped

If you have not been in a while, here is what an actual Wednesday can look like right now, using only what is open today:

1. Drop a Trader Joe's order in the trunk before it warms up
2. Walk to Magdaleña for a wood-fired plate and something to share
3. Coffee or a walk through the two-acre Civic Square park while the sun drops
4. Kura or Dave's on the way out if the kids vetoed the wood-fired plan

By this fall you can add Berry Divine into that loop. By the end of the year, Paris Baguette and a manicure at Zara. By early 2027, Handel's on a patio designed to keep you there. That progression is the thing to watch. It is also the reason houses within a short drive of Bullard and McDowell are starting to be described by their proximity to GSQ rather than to the freeway.

What this means if you already live here

The practical takeaway for a Goodyear resident is not that a new steakhouse is coming. It is that the reasons to leave your side of the Valley on a weeknight are shrinking. Grocery, breakfast, sushi, wood-fired dinner, emergency vet, coffee drive-thru, ice cream patio, Pilates class, nail appointment — that is a full weekday, and by the end of 2026 most of it happens within one 150-acre footprint that RED Development and Globe Corporation are co-developing around Goodyear Civic Square with dining, retail, entertainment, residential, hotel and office uses.

The tenant list is doing something more interesting than growing. It is filling in.

If you are curious how this shift is showing up in what homes near GSQ are trading for, or you are weighing a move within Goodyear and want to talk through which pockets sit closest to the new downtown, Work With Us at The Reyes Team. We live and work in the West Valley, we speak English and Spanish, and we are happy to walk the neighborhood with you before we ever open a listing.