Drive south on SanTan Village Parkway this month and you will pass two restaurants that did not exist a year ago, sitting close enough together that you could walk between them. One is Fogo de Chão, the Brazilian churrasco chain that opened its doors on August 3. The other is Perry's Steakhouse & Grille, which opened in June as Arizona's first location for a Texas brand that traces back to a Houston meat market in 1979 and opened its first steakhouse in 1993. Keep driving another few minutes and you will pass the Heritage District, where the town is already gearing up for the fourth year of Harvest in the Heritage District, Gilbert's downtown fall celebration.
None of that is a coincidence, and none of it is really about the restaurants themselves. What changed in Gilbert this year is not that a few new places opened. It is that the town now has two genuinely different versions of "going out to eat," built on purpose to not compete with each other, plus a third option downtown that was never trying to compete with either. If you have lived here for a while, you already sense that your Friday night options split three ways depending on mood. This is why.
Two openings, eight weeks apart, for two different reasons
Fogo de Chão landed at 2134 S. SanTan Village Parkway as the chain's second Arizona location, joining its recently remodeled Scottsdale restaurant. It is a known quantity: an open-flame churrasco grill, gauchos carving tableside, a menu built around cuts like picanha and bone-in ribeye. Fogo has operated more than a hundred restaurants worldwide since its founding in southern Brazil in 1979, and its Gilbert debut is best read as an established brand filling in a gap in its own Arizona map.
Perry's, opening eight weeks earlier at 1865 S. SanTan Village Parkway, is a different kind of bet. This is not Perry's second Arizona location or its tenth. It is the first Perry's Steakhouse & Grille in the entire state, chosen to anchor Northside at SanTan Village, a brand new 20-acre mixed-use development that broke ground specifically because Gilbert's existing retail corridor had run out of room for the kind of tenant Okland Capital wanted to bring in.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Blake Bunker, the managing partner at Okland Capital, explained the thinking behind Northside directly: the older SanTan Village had already gone through three decades of building out a foundation of national retailers, so Northside was deliberately positioned around boutique concepts that were not already represented in the area. Perry's anchoring that vision as a first-in-state location, while Fogo expanded a chain that already exists forty minutes away in Scottsdale, tells you which corridor is playing which role. SanTan Village proper is the mature, dependable version. Northside is the one still introducing itself.
Northside is still filling in
If you have driven past the construction fencing along Santan Village Parkway between Williams Field and Ray roads over the last year, you have watched Northside assemble itself piece by piece. The first phase is six buildings totaling just over 37,000 square feet, built around shared outdoor space rather than a parking-lot-first layout. When Western Retail Advisors announced the project's first wave of signed tenants a year ago, Perry's anchored the list alongside four names that will be new to most Gilbert residents: The Workshop Pilates taking its fourth Arizona studio, The NOW Massage opening its fourth Arizona location, The Milkshake Factory bringing handspun shakes and small-batch chocolates to its second Arizona spot, and Face Foundrie opening its fourth Arizona facial spa. At the time, that batch of leases brought Northside to roughly 60 percent occupied, with a handful of suites still open.
A 134-key Marriott SpringHill Suites is also part of the build-out, which tells you Okland is not just planning for locals grabbing dinner. They are planning for out-of-town visitors who will need somewhere to stay while they are here, which is its own quiet signal about how much foot traffic this corner of Gilbert is expected to pull once it is finished.
The practical version of all this: if you have not been back to that stretch since last winter, it looks different now, and it is going to keep looking different through the rest of the year as the remaining suites fill in.
Three miles away, downtown is doing the opposite
While SanTan Village Parkway adds national brands and hotel rooms, the Heritage District is doubling down on being small, seasonal, and homegrown. Harvest in the Heritage District has run every fall since 2023, and the pattern has held steady for three years running: a monthlong stretch that opens in late September and closes in early November. The town has not yet published exact 2026 dates as of this writing, but it has already confirmed the headline act returning: the 2026 Gourd Hunt will again feature new pumpkin work from Ray Villafane, the sculptural pumpkin artist whose carving work shows up well beyond Arizona.
In past years, the Gourd Hunt has worked as a downtown-wide scavenger trail. Participants sign up for a digital passport delivered by text and email that leads them to pumpkin vignettes scattered around downtown, checking in at each stop, with a physical postcard version available at Gilbert Town Hall and the Discovery Centers for anyone who would rather skip the app. The celebration has also included an origami installation called Fall Festivals in Folding Art, built by artists Chuck Via and Jacob Hedgepeth with the Arizona Origami Society, featuring suspended chandeliers inspired by harvest celebrations from different cultures, plus free Thursday night concerts at Water Tower Plaza from Gilbert Parks and Recreation. If this year follows the same shape, expect all of it back on the calendar sometime between late September and early November.
None of this competes with what is happening on SanTan Village Parkway, and it is not supposed to. The Heritage District's version of a good fall is walkable, free, and built around art installations that only exist in Gilbert. Northside's version is anchored by a first-in-state steakhouse and a hotel. Both are legitimate answers to the same question: what does a Friday night in Gilbert look like this fall?
What's actually opening when
For anyone trying to plan around all of this, here is the season in order:
- June 8, 2026: Perry's Steakhouse & Grille opened at Northside, Arizona's first location for the brand.
- August 3, 2026: Fogo de Chão opened along SanTan Village Parkway, its second Arizona restaurant.
- Late September through early November 2026 (exact dates pending): Harvest in the Heritage District returns downtown for its fourth year, with the 2026 Gourd Hunt again featuring new Ray Villafane pumpkin art.
- Ongoing through the rest of 2026: The remaining suites at Northside continue to fill in, alongside The Mission, the modern Latin restaurant from Chef Matt Carter, which had targeted a January debut at Agritopia's Epicenter and extends this same wave of new dining out toward the west side of town.
The part worth remembering
Gilbert did not just get a few new restaurants this year. It got a second dining district built on the explicit premise of not duplicating the first one, opening in the same calendar year that its oldest, smallest fall festival heads into its fourth year and keeps growing anyway. That is not a story about restaurant count. It is a story about a town that is large enough now to support two completely different versions of going out, plus a downtown that never needed either one to succeed. Whichever version fits your Friday, it is worth knowing why it exists where it does, because none of these developers built anything by accident.
If watching Gilbert grow this fast has you thinking about what it means for your own home, whether that is timing a move, sizing up a neighborhood, or just understanding what a new development down the road does to daily life nearby, The Gillette Group knows this stretch of the East Valley block by block. Contact us anytime you want a local read on what is actually happening here.
