The biggest shopping center in Suffolk County is a few months from finishing the most visible overhaul it has had in years, and the list of what the makeover is bringing to Lake Grove keeps getting longer. Zara, the Spanish fashion giant with a cult following and until now no store this deep into Long Island, is preparing its eastern Long Island debut at Smith Haven Mall. A high-end cookware shop, a golf lounge with a full bar and an outdoor plaza are all part of the same project, and two of the headline arrivals are already open.

A first for this half of Long Island

The centerpiece of the new lineup is Zara, which the mall says will open its first store in eastern Long Island, with a debut expected before the year is out. For anyone who has made the trek to Roosevelt Field or into Manhattan for the brand's fast-moving racks, that drive is about to get much shorter. Zara stores tend to be large, heavily trafficked and constantly restocked, and landing one is the kind of get that shifts where people choose to spend a Saturday.

It is not arriving alone. Primark, the Irish fashion retailer known for prices that seem left over from another decade, is already open at the mall, and so is Mango, the Barcelona-based label that has been expanding across the American suburbs. Between the three of them, Smith Haven is assembling a European fast-fashion bench that no other shopping center in Suffolk County can match.

Burgers, cookware and a golf lounge

The dining and entertainment side of the project is further along than the retail side. Ford's Garage, a burger restaurant built around vintage Ford memorabilia and a 1920s service station look, is now open and serving its all-American menu of burgers and brews. It joins the mall's push to make the property somewhere people linger rather than simply shop.

Sur la Table, the cookware retailer beloved by serious home cooks for its knives, dinnerware and copper pans, opens its doors this fall. And a new tenant called Golf Lounge 18 is on the way, bringing simulator bays, multiple televisions and a full bar, the kind of indoor golf setup that has been filling weeknights across the country as the sport's boom continues off the course.

A new front porch in Lake Grove

The physical building is changing too. The project adds an outdoor plaza with landscaping and seating, designed as a spot to meet and gather rather than a shortcut between parking rows. Inside, the mall is getting new signage, refreshed entryways, modern flooring and updated fixtures throughout. Center Court, the mall's traditional gathering point for everything from Santa photos to car displays, is in line for a major makeover, and the food court is being refitted with all-new seating.

Simon, the mall's owner and the largest shopping center operator in the country, announced the multimillion-dollar redevelopment in February 2025 and said at the time that work would begin that summer, with completion expected in 2026. That timeline is holding: the construction phase is winding down, the first wave of new tenants is open, and the remaining names are set to arrive as the year closes out.

Why the mall is doubling down

Smith Haven has spent the past several years quietly repositioning itself while headlines elsewhere declared the American mall dead. The formula on display in Lake Grove is the one that has worked at the country's strongest centers: fewer interchangeable clothing stores, more first-to-market names, more food, more things to do that cannot be replicated on a phone. A golf lounge and a memorabilia-filled burger garage are not really retail at all. They are reasons to leave the house, and the retailers benefit from the traffic they pull.

The bet is bigger than one property. Suffolk County shoppers have historically watched marquee brands open in Nassau first and wondered if anything would ever come farther east. A Zara in Lake Grove, alongside Primark and Mango, is a signal that national and international retailers now see the middle of Suffolk as a market worth competing for.

What to expect on your next visit

If you have not been to the mall since spring, the changes are already visible: new storefronts along the corridors, Ford's Garage drawing dinner crowds, and construction giving way to finished space. The outdoor plaza and the refreshed Center Court will land alongside the remaining store openings, with Sur la Table arriving this fall and Zara and Golf Lounge 18 rounding out the lineup.

For readers in Smithtown, Lake Grove, Nesconset and the surrounding hamlets, the practical upshot is simple. The mall you grew up circling on weekends is about to have a stretch of genuinely new things in it at once, and for the first time in a long while, the newest names on Long Island are opening in Suffolk first.