If you have taken the complimentary Moke toward Collins Avenue this year expecting to swing into Bal Harbour Shops the way you always have, you have already found the gate closed. The entrance at 9700 Collins Avenue shut down on February 24, 2026, and it is not reopening as you remember it. Self-park, valet, and rideshare now route through the 96th Street Parking Garage, up an elevator to the second or green level, then left and back toward the Shops on foot.
That detour is the least interesting part of the story. The more useful thing to notice, if you already live at The Surf Club, is what the two properties on either end of your afternoon are doing with their own growth this year. Bal Harbour Shops is in the middle of a nine-figure expansion that will eventually push it from roughly 450,000 square feet toward something closer to 700,000. The Surf Club, over the same stretch of time, chose not to add a single new residence to its nine acres in Surfside. It opened an outpost on a private island in the Bahamas instead. Both moves protect the same thing: scarcity. They just get there by opposite routes.
The Detour Is Not Temporary
The closed entrance is not a construction inconvenience that clears up by winter. It is the visible edge of an expansion adding somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000 square feet of new retail space to a property that has spent six decades deliberately staying small. Whitman Family Development, which has controlled Bal Harbour Shops since Stanley Whitman opened it in 1965, secured a $740 million loan to fund the build-out, and the company's own construction updates page confirms the 9700 Collins entrance is closed for the duration.
The practical version for anyone riding the Moke or biking the Surfside trail over there for dinner: build in the extra five minutes through the garage walkway, and do not assume the storefront you remember is still where you left it. Several boutiques have shifted into temporary locations during construction, which means a familiar facade this spring may not be the same tenant by fall.
The Same Names, With One Exception
What is actually opening inside that construction zone tells you more about the mall's thinking than the square footage does. Two anchor restaurants left within about a year of each other: Aba closed, and Le Zoo departed at the end of April 2025 after a ten-year run. Neither exit was replaced with something untested.
| Space | Who left | Who moved in | Opened |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entrance frontage on Collins | Le Zoo (closed April 2025) | China Grill, Jeffrey Chodorow's Asian-fusion room | June 9, 2026 |
| Original Makoto footprint, Level 3 | Makoto (relocated within the property years earlier) | Slim's Steakhouse, from Stephen Starr's group | March 17, 2026 |
| New retail wing | — | Toteme, first Miami store | July 2, 2026 |
China Grill first defined a decade of Miami dining after opening on Collins Avenue in South Beach in 1995, and its return landed at the single most valuable piece of frontage the property owns: the front door of a mall in the middle of a $740 million expansion. That is not an accident. Handing entrance-level real estate to a name residents already recognize, rather than a concept nobody has tested, reads as a hedge while the rest of the construction finishes.
Slim's follows the same logic from a different angle. Stephen Starr runs a portfolio of more than 40 restaurants across six cities, so Bal Harbour is betting on an operator with a long track record rather than a single high-profile name. Toteme is the one real outlier in this cycle, a Swedish minimalist label opening its first Miami store here rather than in the Design District or on Lincoln Road. Everything else on the list is someone the property has already trusted for years.
For timing a reservation: China Grill ran full through its first months back, and the bar between 5 and 6 p.m. remained the best shot at a walk-in seat. Slim's opened on a Tuesday in March, and the pattern from other Starr openings held true here too: the first six weeks skewed toward out-of-town press, with a weeknight table becoming easier for a resident to book by that May.
The Club Chose a Different Kind of Growth
While the mall next door was adding square footage in place, The Surf Club expanded by staying just as small in Surfside and going elsewhere instead. On March 27, 2026, Four Seasons introduced The Beach Villa, described as Miami Beach's only fully serviced beachfront villa: a four-bedroom property with its own pool, oceanfront garden, and gated beach access. It is a single addition, not a new tower, and it keeps the same nine-acre footprint the property has held since Richard Meier's residential towers rose above the historic 1930 clubhouse.
The bigger swing happened somewhere else entirely. Norman's Cay in the Exumas, Bahamas, marks The Surf Club's first outpost beyond Surfside, built around villas, bungalows, cabanas, a Yacht Club, and a Beach Club on an island that previously held just a dozen private homes. Fort Partners founder Nadim Ashi has described the business as being about experience and memory rather than square footage, and Norman's Cay is the clearest proof of that instinct in practice: rather than adding density to the Surfside address, the brand exported its philosophy to a place two hours from New York and an hour from Miami by air, leaving the original nine acres untouched.
Read next to Bal Harbour's construction, the contrast is precise. One property is growing by adding physical space while keeping its tenant roster short and familiar. The other is growing by leaving its physical footprint alone and opening a second, geographically distant version of itself. Different owners, different playbooks, same underlying math: neither wants the version you already know to feel more crowded.
What This Actually Changes for Your Season
None of this requires a decision from you. It changes three small things about how you move through the next few months. First, budget the extra time for the garage reroute if a Bal Harbour dinner is on the calendar; the entrance you remember is closed for the length of the construction, not a weekend. Second, if China Grill or Slim's is the plan, treat the first months as crowded by design and plan around the bar seating or an early-week reservation rather than a Friday table. Third, if Norman's Cay or the Beach Villa comes up in conversation with other residents this fall, know that both represent the same instinct playing out in opposite directions: one keeps growth close and quiet, the other sends it somewhere else entirely so Surfside itself stays exactly the size it has always been.
The mall will keep adding square footage through the rest of this year. The club will likely keep doing the opposite, protecting its nine acres by expanding everywhere except here. Both are, in their own way, protecting the same thing you bought into when you moved onto this stretch of Collins Avenue: a place that does not feel like it is getting bigger just because everything around it is.
If you are weighing what any of this means for a property you already own here, or simply want a second opinion grounded in the neighborhood rather than a portal listing, Bryan Halda and The Halda Group are glad to talk it through. Let's connect.
