If a friend visiting for the weekend asked you where Buford has been changing lately, you'd probably walk them downtown. Main Street, the wine bars, maybe a stop by the new parking deck on Moreno Street that finally gave downtown visitors somewhere to leave the car. That's the version of "new Buford" everyone reaches for first.
It's also, this year, the wrong answer. Almost none of the businesses that actually opened their doors in Buford in 2026 are on Main Street. They're strung along Buford Highway and Buford Village Way, the stretch most residents drive through on the way to the Mall of Georgia without registering it as a destination at all. That's where an international grocery, a family-run Mexican restaurant, a 300-seat steakhouse, an outdoor gear store, and a furniture retailer making its first East Coast landing all showed up within a few months of each other. Downtown got one new tenant, and it took the better part of two years to get there.
Main Street's Lone Arrival Took Eighteen Months
Chicks N Boba is the exception that proves the point. The fried chicken and bubble tea concept had been running as a pop-up around Buford since fall 2024, building a following at local events before the owners started talking publicly about a permanent home at 1 West Main St, Suite 3, right in the heart of downtown. As of December 2025, they were still waiting on the buildout and hadn't nailed down an opening date, just a target of "sometime in spring." By spring, the pop-up favorite finally had a working kitchen and a lease behind a storefront, more than a year and a half after the idea first started drawing crowds at pop-up events.
That's not a knock on the business. It's a data point about downtown itself. Main Street's storefronts are small, historic, and limited in number, which is exactly what makes the district charming and exactly what makes turnover slow. A concept with an established local following and real demand still needed roughly eighteen months to go from pop-up tent to permanent address two blocks from where it started.
Across Town, Four Concepts Landed in a Few Months
Head the other direction, out along Buford Highway and into the shopping centers ringing the Mall of Georgia, and the pace looks completely different.
| Business | Address | What it is | Opened |
|---|---|---|---|
| Xochitl Mexican Restaurant | 33 Buford Village Way | Family-run Mexican restaurant and bar | Spring 2026 |
| Porterhouse Grill | 3217 Buford Dr | Steakhouse, seats about 300 | Spring 2026 |
| Bazaar International Market & Cafe | 1640 Buford Hwy NE | International grocery and cafe | Grand opening August 8, 2026 |
| Sierra | 1600 Mall of Georgia Blvd | Outdoor gear, part of the TJX family | April 25, 2026 |
| Living Spaces | 2630 Gravel Springs Rd | Furniture, first East Coast location | June 26, 2026 |
Xochitl is the most personal story on that list. Owner Susana Zarate runs the restaurant with her siblings, her children, and a family friend, Ramon Ortega, in a space that seats around 180 with a patio facing the city's event lawn. The tamales on the menu are made by Zarate's mother and listed under her name, Aurelia's Tamales, a small detail that tells you this isn't a chain trying out a new market. It's a family that moved into a space and made it theirs.
Porterhouse Grill took a different path into the same corridor. It leased the old O'Charley's building directly in front of Macy's at the Mall of Georgia, a roughly 7,500 square foot space that already had the bones of a full-service restaurant sitting inside it. That's its third location after Athens and Brookhaven, and at 300 seats it's the largest one the brand has opened.
Bazaar International Market and Cafe is the newest of the group and arguably the most useful addition for daily life. Owner Prabesh Pandey built an 8,000 square foot store carrying Indian, Nepali, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Middle Eastern, Hispanic, African, European, and Asian groceries alongside a cafe serving coffee, juice, and gyros, aiming to give north Gwinnett shoppers access to ingredients they'd otherwise have to drive well outside Buford to find. The grand opening celebration ran August 8, following a soft launch earlier in the year.
Sierra and Living Spaces round out the corridor without a plate of food between them, but they matter for the same reason. Living Spaces chose Buford for its first store anywhere on the East Coast, its 43rd location nationally, with model home displays and curated collections from designers Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent. That's not a market a national retailer picks by accident.
Why the Highway Moves Faster Than Main Street
The mechanism here isn't mysterious once you look at what these spaces actually were before they opened. Porterhouse Grill moved into a building that used to be a working restaurant, kitchen equipment and all. Bazaar International's owner described the buildout as already 95 to 96 percent complete before the store even cleared its final county review. Sierra and Living Spaces both leased into retail centers purpose-built for exactly this kind of turnover, Marketplace at Mill Creek and the Mall of Georgia corridor, where suite sizes run large and the plumbing and electrical are already sized for retail.
Downtown doesn't have that kind of inventory. A storefront suite on Main Street is often a converted space inside a building built decades before anyone was thinking about commercial kitchens or modern electrical loads. That's part of why downtown feels the way it does, and it's also why a concept with real demand behind it still needed a year and a half to get there.
The city's own investment tells the same story from the other direction. The new four-level, 256-space parking deck on Moreno Street didn't get built because downtown was struggling. It got built because downtown's existing footprint was already full enough that visitors needed somewhere new to park. Main Street isn't losing the growth race. It's just constrained by the buildings it's made of, which is a very different problem than the highway corridor has.
What This Means If You Live Here
If you've been keeping half an eye on downtown for what's new and coming up empty, that's not a sign nothing is happening in Buford. It's a sign you've been watching the slower half of the story. The corridor along Buford Highway and out toward the Mall of Georgia absorbed most of this year's actual change, and it did it in a fraction of the time downtown needed for a single new tenant.
Worth remembering too that Homesense has landed off I-85 and GA-20, one more sign of how much retail momentum is building along that stretch. None of this makes downtown less worth a Saturday afternoon. It just means the honest answer to "what's new in Buford" runs east along the highway before it circles back to Main Street.
If you're the kind of person who tracks these shifts because you love this place and want to understand how it's actually growing, that instinct is exactly what makes a good neighbor. And if watching Buford change ever gets you thinking about where you'd want to be for the next chapter, on the highway corridor, closer to downtown, or right on the water, the team at Living on Lake Lanier knows this area block by block, not just from a map. Let's Connect.
