Stop at the light where Peyton Drive meets Grand Avenue and you're looking at two shopping centers that have faced each other for years without much reason to compare notes. Turn north into The Shoppes at Chino Hills and you're in an open-air main street with a Trader Joe's, a Barnes & Noble, a Sephora, and full-service dining that includes P.F. Chang's and Yard House. Turn south into Payne Ranch Center and you're in a 9.12-acre strip built around an Albertsons, a Wells Fargo branch, a Jack in the Box, and a Jiffy Lube. One side was designed for an evening. The other was designed for an errand.
This year, both sides added a restaurant. That's the part that looks like a coincidence until you look at what each opening actually replaced, or didn't.
What Filled the Gap on the Shoppes Side
RA Sushi closed its space at 13925 City Center Drive, inside The Shoppes at Chino Hills, and for months the address sat as a gap in a lineup that had never really had one. Benihana is taking over that footprint. A What Now Los Angeles report in mid-May 2026 said a full renovation was underway with a completion target of that summer, and Benihana's own site now lists an active Chino Hills location with a working phone line, which means the build-out that started in spring has run its course.
The company behind the move, The ONE Group, also operated RA Sushi, so this isn't a new operator discovering the corridor. It's the same landlord relationship swapping one full-service concept for another inside a center that has carried Yard House and P.F. Chang's for years. Benihana's teppanyaki format is a different cuisine than what closed, but it's the same category of restaurant: a sit-down dinner with a wait list, not a counter order. The Shoppes side didn't gain a new kind of evening. It got its old kind of evening back.
What Filled a Gap That Payne Ranch Center Never Knew It Had
Across the street, the story runs the other direction. Boban, the Vietnamese baguette and boba chain, held its grand opening on Saturday, August 22, 2026, at 3277 Grand Avenue, Unit L, inside Payne Ranch Center. The company's own announcement described the location as sitting at "one of the busiest intersections in Chino Hills," which is a fair description of Peyton and Grand, and put the Chino Hills store under the management of Juliwati Juliwati, who also owns Boban Indonesia and Nobibi Indonesia and has a Nobibi location coming to Rowland Heights.
What makes this opening different from Benihana's isn't the food. It's what it's replacing, which is nothing. Payne Ranch Center's public tenant list, kept by the city, still reads as Albertsons, Wells Fargo, Jack in the Box, and Jiffy Lube: a bank, a gas-and-go, an oil change, a grocery run. None of those are places you plan an evening around. Boban is the first tenant in that lineup built for someone to sit down, order something specific, and stay.
The Same Summer, Two Different Kinds of Opening
Line the two up and the pattern gets clearer. The Shoppes side lost a full-service restaurant and got a full-service restaurant back in the same footprint, under a lease held by the same operating company. That's restoration. Payne Ranch Center added a sit-down food concept to a tenant list that has been defined by errands since Albertsons anchored it. That's addition.
| The Shoppes at Chino Hills | Payne Ranch Center | |
|---|---|---|
| Established anchors | Trader Joe's, Barnes & Noble, Sephora, P.F. Chang's, Yard House | Albertsons, Wells Fargo, Jack in the Box, Jiffy Lube |
| What left | RA Sushi (13925 City Center Dr.) | Nothing comparable ever operated here |
| What arrived in 2026 | Benihana, same footprint, same operating company | Boban, grand opening August 22, 2026 |
| Type of trip served | Evening dining, already established | Errand-driven, until this year |
The distinction matters if you already live near that intersection, because it changes what each side of the street is now capable of doing for you on a given night. The Shoppes side was never the question. It already had the Wednesday-night Heritage Farmers Market and Friday live bands filling its courtyard, plus a splash pad and a small train that keep families in the center after dinner. Benihana slides into a rhythm that already runs on its own.
Payne Ranch Center didn't have that rhythm. It had opening hours tied to banking and grocery runs. A boba and baguette counter doesn't turn a strip mall into a destination overnight, but it does introduce the first reason to park there for something other than a task on a list. That's a structural change in what the center offers, whether or not the crowd shows up for it right away.
Why the Corner, Specifically
Payne Ranch Center's location wasn't an accident, according to Boban Franchising's own announcement, which described the site as chosen for its position at the Peyton and Grand intersection. That's the same intersection The Shoppes has anchored since the center opened in 2008 as a roughly 375,000-square-foot lifestyle format. Two centers built at different times, for different purposes, sitting at the same light, have spent most of their history complementing rather than competing: one for the sit-down evening, one for the supply run.
What changed this year is that the errand side picked up its first sit-down tenant, at the same moment the destination side restored a sit-down tenant it had briefly lost. If you're the kind of household that treats Albertsons and Jiffy Lube as a stop on the way somewhere else, Payne Ranch Center now gives you a reason to make that the somewhere else, at least for a baguette sandwich or a cup of boba, without crossing Grand Avenue to do it.
What This Looks Like on an Actual Weeknight
Picture a Tuesday. The Shoppes side is already doing what it's done for years: outdoor seating filled around the fountain, the train circling the quad for kids, maybe a band setting up if it's a Friday, a wait at Yard House or the newly reopened Benihana if you didn't book ahead. That side has never needed convincing.
Payne Ranch Center on the same Tuesday used to mean pulling in for milk, an oil change at the Jiffy Lube, and leaving. Now it means those same stops, plus the option to grab a Boban order before you pull back onto Grand. Nobody rebuilt that center. One tenant changed what a five-minute errand run can turn into.
That's the actual claim buried under two restaurant openings that look, from a distance, like they're both just "new food in Chino Hills." They're not the same kind of new. One side of Peyton and Grand restored what it already had a habit of offering. The other side, for the first time in its tenant history, has a reason to make you stay.
If you're weighing what a specific pocket of Chino Hills offers day to day, from The Shoppes corridor to the neighborhoods feeding into Payne Ranch Center, Country Queen Real Estate can walk you through what daily life actually looks like on each side of that intersection before you decide where to put down roots.
