Aventura Mall’s new Esplanade wing, which is basically a modernist outdoor village of shopping, is almost done, and the first section, a big two-level restaurant named Joey Aventura, opened about a month ago, along with a bit of the pedestrian promenade, but sadly no shops as of yet. The whole place is designed in that style that’s very popular these days consisting of boxes of various sizes and materials sort of thrown together at odd angles to each other (think of the new Cocowalk, a few new things in South Beach, and anything outdoors in Brickell). Joey, a restaurant from Canada, is not a poutine joint, but instead has a menu designed by one of the winners of Top Chef Canada. It being the Canadian version of the show, no you haven’t heard of him. The rest, filling up the piece land of where Aventura Mall’s Sears used to be, back when Sears was a thing, is still finishing up construction. Meanwhile, the mall itself, which unlike most malls these days makes insane amounts of money, just added its last huge wing a mere five years ago.

UPDATE: Aventura Mall’s publicists want you to know that the mall has nothing to do with the Esplanade, as they are owned by a completely different developer, and are in no way linked. They are merely “near” each other. Of course, the Esplanade is on the former site of the mall’s old Sears department store, and there is still a dead end inside the mall where the entrance to Sears used to be, but back in the day Sears owned its own land, and when they closed, other developers bought it, the mall didn’t, and it became a whole thing. The Big Bubble has another post on this very topic in the works, which will be going live soon.