If you pulled up Shea Homes' own page for The Dunes this week to see what's new at the Promenade, you'd find Crust Sourdough Deli listed as "Opening 2026." Drive Sand Dune Avenue instead and you'll find it already slicing sandwiches, tucked into suite 20 at 2754 Sand Dune Ave, staffing up and taking orders. Monterey County Now's food desk confirmed the opening earlier this month.
That gap between the marketing copy and the storefront isn't a one-off typo. It's been the pattern at the Promenade since the first crane went up. If you live in The Dunes and you're planning your week around what the developer's site says is available, you're working from a map that's chronically a season or two behind the ground truth. The businesses open faster than anyone updates the page that describes them.
What The Homepage Says vs. What's On The Shelf
| Business | What the developer's materials say | What's actually true this fall |
|---|---|---|
| Crust Sourdough Deli | "Opening 2026" | Open now at 2754 Sand Dune Ave |
| El Charrito / Lalla Grill | Projected for "late summer or early fall" | Opened February 19, 2026, at 98 General Stillwell Dr. |
| Trader Joe's | Announced as a "well-known national specialty grocer" signing a lease | Open long enough that nobody calls it "the new one" anymore |
| Bay Federal Credit Union | "Opening planned for summer" | Still pending, per the same batch of materials, with no public update since |
The lag isn't random. Every one of these listings comes from the same source, the Promenade's own progress updates, and every one of them undersold how fast the row would actually fill in once construction cleared. If you want to know whether a storefront is real, the sign in the window is a better source than the blog post about the lease.
Third Storefront, Same Family
The most reliable tenant at the Promenade isn't a national chain. It's a family that's been making the same tortillas for 44 years. El Charrito started as a market with a hot bar in Salinas under Teresa Moncada's recipes, and three generations later the family runs a flagship in Salinas, an Express counter on Monterey's Alvarado Street, a second full location in Monterey, and the higher-end Alejandro's, which opened in 2022. The Marina spot at 98 General Stillwell Drive, open daily from 7:30am to 6pm, is their third full outpost, which opened February 19, 2026, sharing the same building as the third installment of their Lalla Grill concept.
That detail matters more than it looks. A business doesn't put its third location inside a still-forming retail row on a bet. The Moncadas had already proven the format three times over before they signed here, which tells you more about the Promenade's actual customer base, the thousands of new rooftops going up around it, than any leasing press release does.
An Art Walk Most People Drive Past
Somewhere between the movie theater and the grocery store, the Promenade built the piece nobody talks about: an Art Walk running through the Village Square. Portland artist Ivan McLean contributed seven stainless steel sculptures shaped by the curl of the coastline. There's a boardwalk mural aimed squarely at anyone who wants a sunset photo backdrop, and a glass mosaic that picked up a Silver ADDY in the Environmental Graphics category and an American Graphic Design Award. None of it requires a purchase. It's the kind of plaza a 1,237-home master-planned community builds when it wants a literal center, a fireplace and a lawn and a stage for informal music, not just a parking lot between stores.
Worth the walk on an evening when you're not buying anything, mostly because most people who live nearby haven't noticed it's finished.
What's Still Empty
Not everything on 10th Street is running yet, and the developer's own site is still the best place to see how old some of these promises are. One still-live page lists Bay Federal Credit Union signed for 140 10th Street with an opening "planned for summer," the same page that projected El Charrito for "late summer or early fall," a date that El Charrito blew past by opening in February instead. There's no telling from that page alone which summer it means or whether the credit union has opened since. A separate, older leasing update on the same site, posted while the Brass Tap taproom was still just "scheduled to open late this month," already put total commitments at more than 70 percent of the Promenade's 55,300 square feet, with 12 smaller retail units spread across five buildings still unclaimed at the time. Read together, the pages tell you less about what's open today than about how far behind a static website falls once a retail row starts filling in for real.
Two Different Marinas On A Sunday
If you're hunting for the Marina Certified Farmers Market and you go looking for it at the Promenade, you'll come up empty. It's not there. The market runs Sundays from 10am to 2pm at the corner of Vista Del Camino and Reservation Road, in the older Marina Village Shopping Center, a separate retail node from the Dunes entirely. Two distinct commercial centers exist in this city, one built around a movie theater and a grocery anchor off Imjin Parkway, the other older and built around produce stalls and a Sunday routine. Easy to conflate if your only frame of reference is the newest thing.
The Trails Bookend Both Of Them
Marina's outdoor routine sits on either side of its retail corridors, and the three options aren't interchangeable:
- Fort Ord National Monument covers roughly 7,200 acres of former Army land with 83 miles of trail, open dawn to dusk and shared by hikers, mountain bikers, and horseback riders.
- Marina Dunes Preserve is a short 2.3-mile out-and-back off Reservation Road on Dune Drive, dogs not permitted, with interpretive signage explaining the active dune restoration happening along the route.
- Marina State Beach isn't a trail so much as open sand, and it's the spot locals point paragliders and kite flyers toward, thanks to the bluff's wind angle.
Three different kinds of quiet, none of them requiring a car trip out of the city limits.
Put it together and this is what daily life in Marina actually looks like heading into fall 2026. A family with 44 years of tortilla-making behind them just opened their third location two minutes from a sourdough counter that's barely been open a week. A plaza with a Portland sculptor's work sits mostly empty on weekday afternoons. A farmers market that has nothing to do with either of them runs a mile away on a schedule nobody's changed in years. None of it waits for the website to catch up.
Homes by Henson keeps a close eye on the Peninsula because that's how the work actually gets done here, not from a press release calendar but from driving the block. If you're curious what any of this means for a property near the Promenade, or you just want a straight answer before you make the drive over, book a free home valuation with us anytime.
