If you live off Pump Road or somewhere along Nuckols, you already know the reflex. Someone asks what's new out here and you point west, toward the mall. Perry's Steakhouse. The 11,000-square-foot dining room at 11788 W. Broad. The usual answer.
The usual answer is stale this summer. The turnover that's actually going to change your Tuesday errand loop and your Friday pizza night is happening a few miles east, on the mid-Broad corridor between Willow Lawn and Innsbrook. Two openings in particular deserve your attention, and neither of them is at Short Pump Town Center.
Billy Fallen comes back to a strip center
Billy Pie is returning to brick-and-mortar. Richmond baker Billy Fallen is opening a compact new shop in the Ridge Road Shopping Center this month, co-owned with his friend James Schroeder, according to reporting in the Henrico Citizen's July 6 business roundup. The footprint is small on purpose. Seven hundred square feet, takeout-focused, with dine-in available for anyone who wants to sit down. The menu keeps it disciplined: pizza, a couple of salads, some antipasti, three beers on tap, wine service.
For anyone who followed the first act of this story, the return matters. Fallen built the original Billy Pie through brewery kitchens in the 2010s and opened a standalone at Patterson and Three Chopt in 2019, then closed it during the pandemic. The new location is not that shop reborn at the same intersection. It is a smaller, leaner version parked in a workhorse strip center about a mile east, which tells you something about where the operator thinks the market is right now.
The choice of Ridge Road over a splashier Short Pump address is the interesting part. Rent is lower. Foot traffic is neighbors and errand-runners, not tourists and mall walkers. A takeout-first pizza shop lives or dies on the density of people within a five-minute drive who are willing to reorder without ceremony. Ridge Road delivers that in a way an outparcel at a regional mall does not.
The JoAnn box finally has a tenant
Two miles further east, at the corner of West Broad and Wistar, the long-vacant JoAnn Fabrics box at Merchants Walk has been leased. Western wear chain La Herradura signed for the full 18,400 square feet at 7504 W. Broad and is planning a fall 2026 opening, according to Richmond BizSense's July 1 report. It will be the chain's first Richmond-area location. Existing stores are in the Carolinas and Texas. The name means "horseshoe" in Spanish.
Two things about this deal are worth sitting with.
First, an 18,400-square-foot lease is not small. That is a full-line apparel store, not a boutique. Boots, hats, clothing, and accessories for men, women, and children is a real inventory footprint, and it is landing in a Henrico shopping center that also holds Food Lion, AutoZone, and Dollar Tree.
Second, with the La Herradura deal, Merchants Walk is now fully leased. That is the line from Divaris broker John Madures, who represented the landlord. A Food Lion-anchored center at a mid-Broad intersection reaching full occupancy in the summer of 2026, absorbing a large legacy vacancy in the process, is a quieter kind of neighborhood indicator than a mall groundbreaking. It is also more useful. Anchor grocery centers that stay full tend to keep the surrounding restaurants and services healthy.
The center of gravity in the Far West End's retail conversation has been Short Pump Town Center for so long that we sometimes forget the corridor east of it is where most residents actually live and shop.
The corridor already had a spine
None of this is happening in a vacuum. The stretch of the West End roughly bounded by Willow Lawn on the east and Innsbrook on the west already has a set of anchors that residents use every week. The two new openings are landing on top of that spine, not creating it from scratch.
A few of the pieces worth naming, because they are the reason a Billy Pie takeout window at Ridge Road can pencil out in the first place:
- Twin Hickory Park & Recreation Center at 5011 Twin Hickory Road, with a splash pad, a large playground, sand volleyball, picnic areas, and dog-friendly trails. This is the after-camp and Saturday-morning default for a lot of families in Glen Allen.
- Shady Grove Family YMCA on Twin Hickory Drive near Nuckols Road, close to Innsbrook. The facility has been serving Glen Allen since 1998 and grew to roughly 70,000 square feet after a 2015 expansion added a second pool, two water slides, and a splash pad, per the YMCA of Greater Richmond.
- The Cultural Arts Center at Glen Allen, which runs the RVA Makers Market days, four rotating galleries, and a summer camp program that fills up fast every spring.
- Glen Allen Day at Meadow Farm and Crump Park, hosted by the Glen Allen Ruritan Club with Henrico Recreation and Parks. This year is the 30th annual, with a 9:30 a.m. parade stepping off from John Cussons Drive and Mountain Road and 100-plus vendors and food trucks through the afternoon.
You can build a full weekend inside a three-mile radius here without leaving the corridor. That is the point.
What Short Pump still gets, and what it doesn't
Short Pump is not going anywhere. Perry's Steakhouse & Grille is still the anchor special-occasion room, still 350 seats, still open five days a week for dinner and Fridays for lunch. If someone is flying in and you need a reservation that reads legible on a text message, that is the answer.
But that is a specific job. Most weeks, most residents are not booking a steakhouse. They are picking up a pizza on a weeknight, killing thirty minutes in a store their kid actually wants to walk through, and trying to route the errand loop so it does not require getting on 64. The mid-Broad corridor is where those weeks live.
The two openings underline the shift. A 700-square-foot takeout pizza shop and an 18,400-square-foot western wear store are not competing with the mall. They are competing for a share of the ordinary week, and both are betting that share is still growing on the older stretch of Broad, not the newer one.
What to actually do with this before fall
A short list, because a list is what this deserves:
- Watch the Ridge Road Shopping Center marquee for a Billy Pie open date this month. Fallen's crust has a following.
- If you have been driving past the dark JoAnn at Merchants Walk for the last two years wondering, that is your answer. Fall for La Herradura.
- Put Glen Allen Day on the calendar. The parade route and Meadow Farm layout are both public on the Henrico County events page.
- If you already have a Shady Grove Y membership, the outdoor functional strength space is genuinely the only one in the association. Worth using in the summer before the humidity gives up.
A note for anyone paying attention to the corridor for other reasons
Retail leasing is one of the more honest signals a submarket sends. A full-line apparel tenant absorbing a legacy vacancy at a mid-Broad grocery-anchored center, and a returning local operator picking a strip-center address over a mall outparcel, are not the same kind of news. They tell a compatible story. The Far West End's daily-use retail is healthy, and the money is moving toward footprints that serve people who live here rather than people who drive here.
If you own on this side of the corridor, that is useful context the next time someone tells you all the action is at Short Pump. If you are thinking about a move within the Far West End, it is worth asking which anchor you actually want to live nearest, because the answer for a lot of families in 2026 is not the one it would have been in 2016.
When you want to talk through what any of this means for your specific block or your specific timeline, Carrie Robeson knows this corridor stop by stop. Let's connect.