Drive west on Virginia Beach Boulevard past the Pembroke Square sign and you'll see it in one frame: the lit sign outside a full Fogo de Chão, and just behind it, the steel frame of the future Tempo by Hilton hotel, topped out but still unfinished. Same property. Same $200 million redevelopment. Two completely different relationships with the calendar.
That gap is not an accident of construction scheduling. It's a pattern, and once you see it, you'll notice it every time you drive past the old Pembroke Mall site. The tenants who signed a lease and built out an interior space have opened close to when they said they would. The projects that required pouring new concrete from the ground up have not, and the slip keeps growing.
The lease-and-build-out tenants hit their dates
Fogo de Chão announced its Virginia Beach lease in October 2024 and told reporters the 6,590-square-foot restaurant would open by the end of May 2025. It opened on Memorial Day, May 26, 2025, the fourth Fogo de Chão location in Virginia and the chain's first in Hampton Roads. That's about as close to a promised date as a restaurant opening gets.
DraftCade followed a similar pattern with a longer runway. Developers had described a "fall" opening for the arcade bar back in April 2025. It actually opened on January 22, 2026, roughly one season later than advertised but still inside the same construction cycle, in one of the mall's old anchor spaces. Nearly 50 rotating craft beer taps and dozens of arcade games, connected on the inside to a relocated Funny Bone Comedy Club showroom built to hold 450 people, up from the club's old 300-seat room across the boulevard at Town Center.
Funny Bone's own timeline is the one loose thread here. The comedy club's vice president, Todd Leinenbach, said in 2025:
"The expanded Funny Bone and DraftCade will feature a larger, state-of-the-art showroom, 48 craft beers on tap, 28 big screens, and 100 classic arcade games, offering an unmatched mix of comedy, craft brews, and arcade nostalgia for all to enjoy."
The most recent public reporting on the club's opening, a Virginian-Pilot piece from December 30, 2025, cited in the property's Wikipedia entry, was still describing it as set to open "soon." That's the last confirmed word on the record. Whatever the current status, DraftCade got the doors open first.
The ground-up projects keep sliding
Compare that to Tempo by Hilton, the seven-story, 163-room hotel planned for the site. When Fogo de Chão was still just a lease announcement in October 2024, developers said hotel construction would start in early 2025. By April 2025, the groundbreaking had been pushed to May, and the projected completion date had moved to summer 2027, prompting Virginia Business to run the story under the headline that the hotel would open two years late. Pembroke Realty Group president Ramsay Smith attributed the delay in part to rising construction costs.
As of this writing, the developer's own site says construction is ahead of schedule against that revised timeline, with the building topped out and the roof installed, targeting an early 2027 opening. That's genuinely good news, but it's worth being precise about which schedule "ahead" refers to. Against the original plan, the hotel is still running about two years behind.
The Pembroke, the planned 273-unit apartment building at the center of the site, has slipped even further, and it's slipped twice. It was originally supposed to break ground in 2025 as a 12-story tower. According to Virginia Business, economic conditions forced a full redesign down to seven stories, which pushed the revised groundbreaking to early 2026. Even against that reset date, Smith now estimates the building won't be ready for use until sometime in 2028.
Here's the timeline side by side:
| Project | Originally Announced | Status as of August 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Fogo de Chão | End of May 2025 | Opened May 26, 2025, on schedule |
| DraftCade | Fall 2025 | Opened January 22, 2026, about one season late |
| Funny Bone Comedy Club | August 2025 | Last public update (Dec. 30, 2025) still said "opening soon" |
| Tempo by Hilton | Construction start early 2025, open summer 2025 | Topped out, targeting early 2027, about two years behind original plan |
| The Pembroke apartments | Groundbreaking 2025, 12 stories | Redesigned to 7 stories, groundbreak pushed to early 2026, developer estimate for ready-to-use is 2028 |
| Aviva Pembroke senior living | Phase 1, no fixed public date | Opened December 2024, the one project that's fully done |
The senior living facility, Aviva Pembroke, is the outlier that proves the rule. It broke ground in December 2022 and opened in December 2024, on a construction timeline the developer controlled directly rather than one dependent on a hotel brand's design standards or a redesigned apartment tower's financing.
What's actually usable right now
If you're deciding whether tonight is a Pembroke Square night, the honest answer is that most of what draws people there was never part of the construction story in the first place. A number of the mall's original retailers stayed open through the entire redevelopment, including Target, The Fresh Market, REI, Old Navy, Kohl's with an in-store Sephora, DSW, Nordstrom Rack, Bath & Body Works, Bahama Breeze, Smokey Bones, Latitude Climbing + Fitness, Truist, and Walgreens. Add Fogo de Chão and DraftCade to that list and you've already got a full evening without waiting on a single crane to finish its work.
What you can't do yet is book a room upstairs or watch an apartment tower fill the skyline where the old anchor stores used to sit. Those pieces are still years out, and the redesign of The Pembroke suggests the developer is still working out exactly what gets built there, not just when.
Why the split happens
The pattern makes more sense once you think about what each kind of project actually requires. A restaurant or an arcade bar leases finished or semi-finished square footage inside an existing shell. The build-out is interior work: kitchens, flooring, signage, a liquor license. It's expensive but predictable, and a company like Fogo de Chão has done it dozens of times.
A hotel or an apartment tower is a different animal. It means new structural steel, a design that meets a national brand's standards, financing that has to survive interest rate swings during construction, and in The Pembroke's case, an entire redesign that cut the building nearly in half. Every one of those steps adds a place where a schedule can slip, and at Pembroke Square, they have.
None of this means the redevelopment has stalled. In the two and a half years since demolition began on the old mall structure in March 2024, the site has gone from a half-empty 1966 mall to a working restaurant, a newly opened arcade bar, and a topped-out hotel. It just means the parts of Pembroke Square you can walk into today are further along than the parts you can see rising against the sky, and that gap is likely to persist for at least another year or two.
If you've been curious about what a corridor like this does to property values nearby, or you're weighing whether now's the time to make a move in Bayside, Pembroke, or the surrounding Virginia Beach neighborhoods, Alison McCarthy can walk you through what redevelopment like this typically means for a home's value over time. Start with a free home valuation and get a read on where your property stands today.
