Walk the length of the promenade at Las Vegas South Premium Outlets on any weekday morning and you will pass a storefront still wrapped in construction paper where the old North Food Court used to be. A short drive away, M Resort still has scaffolding tags stapled to a building that finished its second tower months ago. Neither project has anything to do with the other. Both are happening in the same year, within a few miles of anyone who calls ONE Las Vegas home.
That overlap is the actual story here. Simon Property Group and Penn Entertainment did not coordinate a joint renovation schedule. One is finishing an expansion plan announced back in 2023. The other is backfilling a food court space with a brand new tenant. They just happen to be landing in the same calendar window, which means this particular corner of south Las Vegas Boulevard is absorbing more visible change in 2026 than it has since M Resort first opened its doors in March 2009 as the valley's southernmost casino resort at the time.
The Food Court Finally Gets Reused
The old North Food Court at South Premium Outlets is the kind of space every regular shopper walked past without registering, until this spring. Construction is officially underway on a new American Eagle store in that exact footprint, a build-out that Nevada Business Magazine reported in April will take up more than 10,000 square feet once finished. The retailer is targeting a late 2026 opening.
The same reporting noted that MINISO, the design-forward variety retailer known for affordable cosmetics, stationery and kitchenware, was on track to join the center's lineup later this summer. Summer has come and gone by the time you are reading this, so there is a decent chance that storefront is already stocked. Either way, the pattern is the same: retail space that sat unused is finally getting filled, not with more of the same outlet apparel, but with concepts that pull foot traffic for reasons beyond a factory discount.
The Arcade That Already Proved It Could Work
If American Eagle and MINISO feel like the mall testing a new identity, Round1 already ran that experiment two years ago. In April 2024, the outlet center opened what its operator described at the time as the first arcade-only Round1 location anywhere in the world, tucked into the mall's south end near Polo Ralph Lauren. It runs more than 200 arcade games, claw machines and VR setups, open every day of the week from 10 a.m. until 2 a.m.
That is not a typical outlet mall tenant. It is the kind of anchor that turns a shopping trip into an evening plan, and it is the reason the American Eagle and MINISO additions read less like isolated leasing news and more like a mall that has been quietly repositioning itself since 2024. For anyone at ONE Las Vegas weighing a Tuesday night with the kids or a weekend stop before dinner, that arcade has already been sitting there the whole time, open later than almost anything else within a short drive.
The Casino Next Door Is Catching Up To Its Own Plans
M Resort's transformation started well before any of this. Penn Entertainment announced a $206 million property-wide expansion back in December 2023, and most of it has now actually shown up.
| What changed | Status as of September 2026 | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Second hotel tower | Open | Adds 375 rooms, bringing the resort to 765 total, roughly double its original room count |
| Casino floor | Renovated and open | 92,000 square feet of gaming, 39 reupholstered table games, a new direct connection to Raiders Tavern & Grill |
| Meril restaurant | Still pending | Chef Emeril Lagasse's second location of the concept, originally targeted for Q1 2026, still listed as upcoming on M Resort's own site |
The tower and casino floor pieces are done. The restaurant is the one still owed. Meril would be the second location of the concept, named for Lagasse's daughter, following the original that opened in New Orleans back in 2016. M Resort's own newsroom still describes it in future tense, so if you have been waiting to try it, that wait is not quite over.
What is finished changes the daily math for anyone nearby more than the restaurant will. A resort that used to have 390 rooms and a single aging casino floor now runs 765 rooms and a floor built around a direct walkway into its own sports bar. That is a meaningfully larger footprint of dining, gaming and event space sitting a short drive from your building, whether you use any of it or not.
Why It All Landed At Once
None of this was planned together. Simon's leasing decisions at the outlets follow retail demand and vacancy cycles that move on their own clock. Penn Entertainment's renovation has been in motion since a groundbreaking announcement almost three years ago, shaped by construction timelines that have nothing to do with what Simon does a few miles up the road. The fact that a food court backfill, an arcade that already reshaped the mall's identity, and a casino's tower and floor renovation are all becoming visible in the same year is coincidence, not coordination.
But coincidence still changes what your corner of south Las Vegas Boulevard looks like day to day. Two years ago this stretch was an outlet mall with a stale food court and a casino that still felt frozen at its 2009 opening. Right now it is a mall mid-transition into an entertainment destination and a resort operating at nearly double its original size. That is a lot of change to land on one intersection in a short window, and most of it happened without a single press release aimed at the people who actually live closest to it.
What This Means If You're Already Here
If you live at ONE Las Vegas, none of this requires you to do anything. The construction fencing around the old food court will come down before the end of 2026. The arcade has been open and running since 2024, so if you have not tried it yet, it is not new, just underused by the neighbors closest to it. The casino next door already has more rooms, more gaming floor and a direct line to its own sports bar than it did a year ago, and the one thing still missing is a restaurant that has been promised since 2023.
Watch for two things over the next few months: whether MINISO's storefront actually fills in by the time you next walk the promenade, and whether Meril finally opens after nearly three years of being the last piece of a much larger renovation. Both will tell you whether this corner's busiest year in over a decade is actually finishing on schedule.
I track this stretch of the South Strip corridor closely because it is where a meaningful share of my clients already live, and small shifts like these change how a building feels to own, not just how it looks on a map. If you are curious what any of this means for your own plans at ONE Las Vegas or a nearby tower, reach out to Steve Gonzalez and schedule a private high-rise consultation.
