Park anywhere near Ventura Boulevard on the fourth Friday of the month between spring and fall and you will find the block doing something a shopping center groundbreaking never quite manages: people just standing around talking, beer in hand, next to somebody's restored Bel Air. That is the Friday Night Car Cruise, and it runs from 4 to 7 p.m. right in front of Studio Channel Islands Art Center at 2222 Ventura Blvd. A mile away, on the other side of the 101, a different kind of Camarillo story has been playing out for two years running, and it has moved at the pace of a courtroom, not a car show.
Costco and Texas Roadhouse are the two names everyone in town has been repeating since they were first announced. Both have slipped their timelines more than once. Meanwhile, five new restaurants and bars opened in Old Town without anyone needing a court order, an environmental review, or a City Council vote. If you have been waiting for the big anchors to tell you Camarillo is changing, you have been watching the wrong end of the boulevard.
The Costco Timeline, With Actual Dates Attached
The Camarillo Costco at 431 W. Ventura Blvd. was first pitched for a mid-to-late 2024 opening. A group called Ventura County Citizens Against Mega Gas sued over the environmental review, and the project sat in litigation for roughly two years. A Ventura County Superior Court judge ruled for the city in January 2025, and the California Second District Court of Appeal affirmed that ruling on February 2, 2026, closing off the opposition's last realistic path to a state Supreme Court review.
That ruling is why the site at the west end of Camarillo Town Center, near the Springville Drive exit, has moved from legal limbo into actual construction. The 32-pump gas station was projected to open around April 2026, with the 160,000-square-foot warehouse, its 900 parking spaces, pharmacy, tire center, and food court trailing by the end of the year. City Manager Greg Ramirez called the ruling a tremendous win for Camarillo, and a Camarillo Acorn opinion piece made the local math explicit: residents had effectively been sending gas and grocery tax dollars to Costco locations in Oxnard and Westlake Village for years, and that spending is finally staying in city limits.
Two years from first announcement to groundbreaking. That is the actual pace of a big-box anchor once you account for environmental litigation, and it is worth holding onto as a baseline for the next story.
Texas Roadhouse Is Still Not Open, and the Timeline Keeps Moving
Texas Roadhouse announced its Camarillo location in 2024, aiming for a spot at the Promenade section of the Camarillo Premium Outlets, right next to Finney's Crafthouse. It would be the chain's first Ventura County location, with the nearest existing restaurants as far off as Rialto, Moreno Valley, and Hesperia. The original public target, per the company's own statement to Fox 11, was an opening sometime in 2025.
That date has come and gone. Commercial real estate marketing materials for the adjacent outparcel, circulated in 2026, now describe the Texas Roadhouse opening as a 2027 event, two years later than the company's own original public estimate and three years after the initial announcement. No groundbreaking date has been confirmed as of this writing. Compare that to Costco, which at least has a court ruling and a construction timeline attached to it now. Texas Roadhouse still has neither.
| Project | First announced | Original public target | Where it actually stands (August 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Costco, 431 W. Ventura Blvd. | Originally targeted mid-to-late 2024 | 2024 | Appellate ruling cleared it Feb. 2, 2026; gas station targeted April 2026, warehouse by year-end |
| Texas Roadhouse, Camarillo Outlets | 2024 | 2025 | No confirmed opening date; 2026 investment materials cite 2027 |
Anchors move slowly because they carry lawsuits, lease negotiations, and corporate real estate committees. That is not a knock on either project. It is just useful to know before you treat "coming to Camarillo" as a countdown you can circle on a calendar.
Old Town Already Turned Over the Menu
While those two timelines were sliding, Old Town Camarillo went ahead and changed its own restaurant lineup, mostly without a headline. Stephen's Grill, the Greek and Mediterranean operator that has run a market on East Main Street in Ventura for years, opened a second location at the former Souplantation site at 375 W. Ventura Blvd. in the Camarillo Town Center. House of Bamboo, a 21-and-over craft cocktail lounge at 2227 Ventura Blvd. across from Studio Channel Islands Art Center, opened this past February with hours running 3 to 9:30 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. The former Bandits BBQ site, which sat empty on Ventura Boulevard after closing in March 2023, has come back to life as 999 Pizza and Tiki 999, a couple of blocks from House of Bamboo, according to local reporting from Conejo Valley Guide.
Add in the newer ramen spot that opened without much fanfare, a coffee shop that sources local beans and rotates a small gallery of work by local artists and students, and the long-running happy hour crowd at Twisted Oak, and Old Town's dining lineup has turned over more in the last year than a five-year resident's mental map probably accounts for. None of that required a court case. It required a lease, a build-out, and a grand opening banner.
That contrast is the actual story here. A single-tenant chain restaurant on outparcel land next to a national outlet mall answers to a corporate real estate calendar. An independent restaurant on an existing Old Town storefront answers to a landlord and a permit counter. One of those processes takes years. The other takes months.
The Old Town Calendar Nobody Had to Announce
Old Town's rhythm is not just about restaurants opening. It runs on a set of recurring dates that give the boulevard a reason to fill up on a regular schedule instead of once a year. The Friday Night Car Cruise brings classic and collector cars to Studio Channel Islands Art Center one Friday a month from March through October in 2026, part of the same Old Town calendar that includes the Camarillo Old Town Association's Heritage Days, with the full schedule posted at camarilloheritagedays.org. If you have not made it out yet, the remaining 2026 dates are August 28, September 25, and October 23, all from 4 to 7 p.m.
That is not the only fixture. A Taste of Camarillo, the wine, beer, and food benefit that supports Ventura County charities through the Meadowlark Service League, ran its 39th annual edition on July 26, 2026 at the historic Camarillo Ranch. The Casa Pacifica Angels Wine, Food & Brew Festival is now in its 33rd year, and the Camarillo Marathon, a Boston-qualifying course along the Camarillo Bike Path, is in its 16th year as a Ventura County fixture. None of these events depend on a big-box tenant showing up. They depend on the same volunteer groups and the same handful of venues doing the same thing, reliably, year after year.
What "New in Camarillo" Actually Means Right Now
If someone asks what is new in Camarillo this year, the honest answer depends on which clock you are watching. The Costco clock finally has real dates on it after a two-year court fight. The Texas Roadhouse clock has slipped from 2025 to 2027 with no groundbreaking in sight. The Old Town clock, the one built around Friday night car cruises and a rotating cast of independent restaurants, has already delivered more visible change in the last twelve months than either of the two projects everyone keeps asking about.
I have spent my whole life in this city, and the pattern holds every time. The big stories take years to land. The block-level ones happen while you are not looking, and then one Friday night you notice the restaurant that used to be Bandits BBQ has a tiki bar sign on it now.
If you are watching Camarillo for reasons beyond a good dinner spot, whether that is a future move, a sale, or just keeping an eye on what a neighborhood's day-to-day energy says about its long-term value, I would be glad to talk through what I am seeing on the ground. Reach out to Rick Pena any time. Let's Connect.
