Four independent foodservice operators have signed on to occupy kitchens at OCVIBE's Katella Commons, the 50,000-square-foot, two-story market hall set to open in early 2027 on the 100-acre mixed-use development surrounding Honda Center in Anaheim, California. The additions bring the confirmed tenant count closer to the hall's planned 21-kitchen capacity, a format that demands significant back-of-house infrastructure across a diverse mix of cooking styles and cuisines.
The Kitchen Lineup
The four incoming operators cover a wide range of cooking formats — each presenting distinct equipment and ventilation requirements for the kitchen design team. Don Churros Gomez, a third-generation family business rooted in Yahualica, Jalisco, and active in the Anaheim market, will focus on traditional thin-style churros and Mexican desserts, a high-throughput frying operation. MFK | Modern Filipino Kitchen, helmed by Chef Henry Pineda and his wife Panda, returns the couple's original Anaheim concept — first opened in 2017 and lost to a fire — with a menu designed specifically for the Katella Commons format. Chef Guoming "Sam" Xin brings Mojo and Pull & Roll, centered on hand-pulled noodles and dumplings; Xin carries a Senior Noodle Technician certification earned in Beijing and more than two decades of experience, a cooking discipline that typically requires specialized boiling and steaming stations alongside robust ventilation. Completing the group is Gelato Paradiso, a Newport Beach-founded artisan gelato operation established in 1999, producing fresh small-batch gelato daily with roughly 80% of ingredients imported from Italy — a cold-production workflow requiring dedicated refrigeration and display case infrastructure.
Market Hall Build-Out Context
For equipment consultants and kitchen designers, the Katella Commons model represents a complex multi-tenant commissioning challenge. Fitting 21 distinct kitchen operations into a two-story, 50,000-square-foot footprint means shared ventilation systems, coordinated utility rough-ins, and equipment packages tailored to cuisines as varied as deep-frying, live-fire noodle cookery, and cold gelato production. The hall also includes six bar and lounge concepts, adding warewashing and beverage equipment loads to the overall facility spec. Operators in ghost kitchen and commissary-style multi-tenant formats have increasingly driven demand for flexible, modular equipment packages that can be swapped or repositioned as tenant mixes evolve — a design discipline directly applicable here.
The OCVIBE development is privately funded at a stated $5 billion commitment by the Samueli Family. Katella Commons follows the planned early-March 2027 opening of OCVIBE's 5,000-person-capacity concert hall, and will open alongside The Weave, the district's commercial office building. The full district is slated for completion in 2033, at which point it will include 35 or more dining concepts total. Earlier tenant announcements included chefs from Amiga Amore, Burritos La Palma, Evil Cooks, Manaao Thai Comfort Food, DARKROOM Restaurant and Wine Bar (bringing two new concepts), and celebrated chef Roy Choi's Best Friend restaurant.
For foodservice equipment dealers and manufacturer reps tracking large-scale kitchen buildouts, the Katella Commons project illustrates the growing operator appetite for chef-driven, independent-tenant market halls — a format that aggregates significant equipment purchasing across cooking, refrigeration, ventilation, and warewashing categories under a single development owner. Anthony Olheiser, Senior Vice President of Hospitality at OCVIBE, has emphasized that dining and hospitality will be a defining element of the district's identity, signaling ongoing kitchen investment as the remaining tenant slots are filled ahead of the 2027 opening.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
