Why would a Japanese retailer with dozens of U.S. stores already open choose an aging enclosed mall in southwest Austin for its first Central Texas location, in the same year that mall's biggest, most-talked-about renovation still hasn't started construction?
That's the question sitting underneath Barton Creek Square right now. Everyone who shops there has been watching the old Sears box, empty since 2018, waiting to hear what finally fills it. The answer arrived this year: Dick's Sporting Goods is converting it into one of its large-format Dick's House of Sport concepts. But the opening date isn't until late 2027. While that box sits untouched, a different set of national retailers has quietly been making first-of-their-kind bets on this exact property, and that's the part of the story that's actually moving.
The Box That's Been Waiting Since 2018
Sears closed its Barton Creek Square location as part of a nationwide wave of 142 store closures the company announced in October 2018. The space has sat vacant for the better part of eight years, a long wait for a location at the center of the mall. Dick's Sporting Goods put an end to the uncertainty this year with plans to convert it into a Dick's House of Sport, the chain's big-box format built around in-store batting cages, golf simulators and turf fields rather than standard sporting goods racks.
The catch is the timeline. A late 2027 opening means the anchor box will have sat empty for the entire stretch of time covered by everything else in this piece, and then some. If you're using "what's happening at the old Sears" as your read on where the mall is headed, you're watching a clock that hasn't moved in years and won't move again for a while yet.
What Actually Opened While the Box Sat Empty
The small-format wing of the mall didn't wait around. Over roughly the past year, Barton Creek Square added a run of tenants that has nothing to do with backfilling a department store and everything to do with testing what an Austin mall can be:
- Pastissimo, a custom pasta bowl concept next to AMC Theatres, opened November 15, 2025
- Claw & Fun, an arcade of claw machines next to Old Navy, opened November 21, 2025
- Purificación García, a Spanish fashion retailer, opened next to Michael Kors
- A Care Bears playground, built with Cloudco Entertainment, opened as the first officially licensed Care Bears playground in the United States, designed for toddlers through age six with the Care-A-Lot logo worked into the flooring
None of these are department-store replacements. They're smaller bets, but they're still bets, made by brands that had other Austin real estate options and chose this mall specifically. A licensed children's playground built around a toy brand doesn't show up at a property that a national partner considers an afterthought.
Why Uniqlo Chose This Mall First
The clearest signal in that batch is Uniqlo. According to a filing with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, Uniqlo is building out roughly 17,953 square feet in Space LO1E at Barton Creek Square, a project valued at about $2.4 million that includes full demolition, new walls, finishes, fixtures and a new storefront. Construction started in February 2025 with a completion date logged as September 4, 2026. This is Uniqlo's first store anywhere in Central Texas.
A company choosing its beachhead for an entire metro doesn't pick a property at random. It picks the one with the traffic, the demographics and the anchor mix it believes will validate the bet, sight unseen, before a single customer walks through the door.
That anchor mix is worth sitting with. Barton Creek Square still operates with four traditional department store anchors: Dillard's, JCPenney, Macy's and Nordstrom, all open simultaneously. A full Nordstrom running alongside three other department stores puts this property in a narrow group of American malls that haven't lost that lineup to the wave of anchor closures that's hit enclosed malls nationally over the past decade. Uniqlo betting its first Austin flagship against that anchor lineup, with the old Sears box still sitting closed next door, is a different kind of vote of confidence than a chain simply adding one more location to a list it already has fifty of.
The Wagyu Restaurant on Its Own Clock
Not every tenant on the small-format wing has moved as fast as Uniqlo. Chubby Cattle, an all-you-can-eat Japanese-style Wagyu yakiniku concept, was first reported as coming to the mall back in 2024, with an expected opening sometime in 2025. By April 2026, Community Impact was still describing it as a restaurant "coming to" the mall rather than one that had already opened. A company spokesperson later told a reporter the restaurant was aiming for a mid-to-late August 2026 opening on the upper level near Nordstrom.
"We're excited to bring the Chubby Cattle BBQ experience to Austin." — David Zhao, Chubby Group co-founder
Somewhere in that gap, an opening date slipped by roughly a year. That kind of delay is normal for restaurant build-outs and isn't evidence anything about the property is stalling. It's evidence that the small-format wing is moving on a restaurant industry timeline rather than a department store industry timeline. A year of slippage on a single Wagyu concept is a rounding error next to an anchor box that will have sat empty from before Sears closed until sometime in 2027. When it does open, Chubby Cattle plans three pricing tiers, a $58 silver tier with American and Australian Wagyu, a $78 gold tier with Japanese cuts, and an $88 diamond tier built around A5 Wagyu, with an optional $28-a-year membership for discounted pricing on repeat visits.
What This Adds Up To
Taken individually, none of these are headline news. A pasta concept, an arcade, a licensed playground, a clothing retailer's first Austin store, a barbecue restaurant that's running a little behind schedule. Taken together, they describe a property that a half-dozen different national and international retailers each independently decided was worth a first-of-its-kind bet this year, while the space everyone actually talks about sat closed the entire time.
Barton Creek Square sits at the intersection of Loop 1 and Loop 360, named after and adjacent to the Barton Creek neighborhood it serves, and it remains Austin's largest enclosed mall. The next time the conversation turns to what's new there, the old Sears box is the least useful data point available for understanding what the property has actually become. The small-format wing already answered that question, one storefront at a time, while everyone else was watching the empty one.
If you're weighing what's happening around Barton Creek day to day against a longer-term view of the neighborhood, Greg Walling has spent years tracking exactly this kind of change across the corridor and is glad to talk through what it means for the area.
