A 50,000-square-foot, two-story market hall built around chef-driven kitchen concepts is set to open in early 2027 as the food-and-beverage anchor of OCVIBE, the Samueli family's $5 billion, 100-acre mixed-use district surrounding Honda Center in Anaheim. Katella Commons will house 21 individually operated chef kitchens alongside six integrated bars and lounges — a buildout scale that puts it squarely in the conversation for one of the largest multi-tenant ghost-kitchen and market-hall developments in Southern California.
Kitchen Footprint and Scope
The market-hall format mirrors the commissary-kitchen and food-hall models that have driven significant commercial kitchen capital investment across the country over the past several years. Each of the 21 concepts will require its own dedicated back-of-house equipment suite — cooking, refrigeration, prep, and ventilation — while sharing infrastructure across a two-story structure. Operators specifying those kitchens, and the equipment dealers supplying them, face a compressed buildout timeline: the hall is slated to debut alongside a new 5,000-capacity Concert Hall and outdoor Urban Park when OCVIBE Phase 1 opens. For consultants working on multi-tenant kitchen design and buildouts, the Katella Commons model represents a high-density use case where ventilation load calculations, shared cold-chain logistics, and hood-to-cooking-suite ratios all demand careful coordination.
The broader Honda Center Encore arena transformation — a separately funded $1 billion project — is also adding new food and beverage infrastructure inside the venue itself. Executive Chef Cesar Regalado's in-house culinary team is rolling out an expanded concessions menu this season, and two new self-serve automated draft beer stations are being commissioned on the arena floor. Blue Moon Draft Picks at Section 424 and Modelo Puck Draft Picks at Section 210 — the latter opening later in the season — represent the kind of high-throughput, low-labor beverage dispensing technology that arena food-and-beverage operators are increasingly deploying to manage staffing costs at peak demand. Draft Picks was awarded the 2026 Excellence in Concessions Award for Best New Technology by Pollstar.
Arena F&B Upgrades
Inside Honda Center, the Encore renovation is delivering upgraded restroom amenities in partnership with Kimberly-Clark Professional, a new Splitero Club featuring private booths, loge seats, a full-service bar, buffet, and lounge on the Columbia Bank Club Level, and a relocated First Aid facility with UCI Health. New concourse bars include a Tito's Handmade Vodka cocktail space at Section 415, with additional outlets — Coors Light Cold Zone and Jack Daniel's Backstage Bar — scheduled to open later in the season. Beverage brand partners for the 2026-27 season include Molson Coors and Constellation Brands. The expanded bar footprint and new premium club spaces require parallel back-of-house upgrades: additional cold-storage capacity, updated draft-line infrastructure, and bar equipment capable of handling event-night volume spikes across a venue that has hosted more than 46 million guests over three decades.
Construction on a new five-story south entrance is advancing, with elevator towers at full height and steel framing progressing on the center tower and atrium — signaling that the most complex structural phases of the Encore project are well underway ahead of a 2027 completion target. Internationally acclaimed chef Roy Choi is also slated to open his Best Friend restaurant concept within the OCVIBE district later in 2027, joining Orange County concept Osen Urban Table as part of the district's broader chef-driven dining portfolio. Once OCVIBE reaches full buildout in 2033, the development is projected to include more than 35 dining experiences across the 100-acre site.
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.
