Here's a question for anyone who's driven past the construction fencing at 12925 Bellaire Boulevard in the last year: how many opening dates does a food hall get before you stop checking?
Chợ Ba Miền, the Vietnamese food hall anchoring the Bellaire Market District, has been chasing its own opening date for two years. The shopping center built around it was originally supposed to be finished by June 2025, according to the developer's 2024 announcement. That slipped to August 2025. Then it slipped again, to October 2025, once the 55,000-square-foot retail center was closer to done. Only after that did anyone put a date on the food hall itself: developers said they hoped to have it running by the time Houston hosted World Cup matches in June 2026. That date has also come and gone. As of the most recent public reporting, the food hall's opening has been pushed to the fourth quarter of 2026. If you've been planning a dinner around this place, you've had every reason to give up.
But here's what nobody covering this project has connected: the same family behind the delayed food hall already has a restaurant open one parking lot away, and it already made a statewide best-of list.
The timeline that keeps moving
The Bellaire Market District has been in the works since 2024, when it was first announced as a $20 million shopping center at the corner of a stretch some residents call Little Saigon. Construction ramped up through 2025, and by last fall the plan called for a coffee drive-thru to open first, in January 2026, as the leading edge of a much bigger buildout. That drive-thru did open on schedule.
What didn't stay on schedule was the anchor. Chợ Ba Miền was originally described as a two-story space with 25 vendors, three kiosk counters, and 400 seats, built to feel like a busy street in Saigon with live music and cultural programming worked into the design. By early 2026, the vendor count being reported had grown to 28, which tells you contracts were still being finalized well after the building itself was supposed to be done. A karaoke bar and lounge attached to the project didn't even start its own build-out until February 2026. None of that lines up with a food hall that opens on time.
To be fair to the developer, the rest of the project has moved. Phase 1 leasing hit 100 percent within three months of going to market, a pace the ownership group itself flagged as unusual for this corridor. A second phase, an 18,000-square-foot building anchored by a high-end Vietnamese coffee shop, was targeted for completion by the end of 2025. And the ownership group has since announced yet another expansion beyond that, a $30 million addition with rooftop pickleball courts, a rooftop bar, and coworking space, with completion now pushed out to 2027. The corridor is clearly getting built. The single piece everyone actually wants to eat at is the piece still not open.
What you can already walk into
If you live near this stretch of Bellaire Boulevard, here's what's real right now rather than promised:
- The coffee drive-thru at Bellaire Market District, open since January 2026
- A karaoke lounge under active construction as of this year, attached to the food hall building
- Retail space in Phase 1 fully leased, meaning storefronts are filling in even while the anchor sits unfinished
- Di An Pho, open now, directly across the street at Prosperity Plaza
That last one matters more than it sounds like it should.
The proof of concept already has a plaque
Di An Pho isn't part of the food hall. It's a standalone restaurant at Prosperity Plaza, owned by the same Huynh family and operated under their Di An Hospitality group, which is also behind Chợ Ba Miền. And in March 2026, Texas Monthly named Di An Pho one of the ten best new restaurants in the entire state, praising its 70-year-old chef for serving only his own definitive versions of beef and chicken pho rather than a sprawling menu.
That's the detail worth sitting with. The developer betting on a 28-vendor food hall has already proven, on the same block, that they know how to put a single excellent Vietnamese kitchen in front of Houston diners and get statewide recognition for it. The food hall is that same bet scaled up by a factor of 28. Whether it lands the same way is still an open question, but it's not a bet made by someone without a track record here.
Developer Charlie Huynh has been direct about the ambition behind the project, saying he wants it "remembered as a place that brought Vietnamese culture to the forefront of Houston, while welcoming everybody." That's a landmark-sized goal for a food hall that, as of this writing in September 2026, still doesn't have a firm open date.
Two construction fences, two different projects
One more thing worth knowing if you drive this corridor regularly: not every stretch of orange fencing along Bellaire Boulevard belongs to the same project. A separate development, labeled the Bellaire Shopping Center and owned by Kimco Realty, broke ground in March 2026 at 5130 Bellaire Boulevard, a different address entirely from the Huynh family's Market District. That project's two retail shell buildings were expected to be complete by late December 2026, on a timeline that has nothing to do with Chợ Ba Miền's delays.
If you've clocked two active construction sites on Bellaire Boulevard this year and assumed they were phases of the same thing, they aren't. One is the food hall project everyone's tracking. The other is an unrelated retail center further down the same road, moving on its own schedule.
What this means if you already eat on this street
Don't hold a birthday dinner or a Tết gathering around Chợ Ba Miền opening this year. Every public timeline points to a fourth-quarter 2026 opening at the earliest, and this project has already missed three prior targets, so treat any date you hear as a hope rather than a reservation. If you want to see what this same ownership group is capable of right now, Di An Pho across the street is the place to go, and it comes with a Texas Monthly endorsement rather than a rendering.
The karaoke lounge build-out that started in February is probably the better thing to watch if you want an early signal. Construction on a smaller, simpler space tends to move faster than a 28-vendor food hall with live entertainment programming, so if that lounge opens before the fall is out, it's a reasonable sign the anchor building isn't far behind. If it drags into 2027, that tells you something too.
And if you're mapping the corridor in your head, keep the two projects straight. The Kimco-owned shopping center off Bellaire Boulevard finishing its shells by December has nothing to do with the Huynh family's food hall further down the street. Confusing the two means you'll keep expecting the wrong opening at the wrong address.
The most reliable thing you can do this year is treat the storefronts that are already open, the drive-thru, the fully leased Phase 1 retail, and Di An Pho across the street, as the actual state of this stretch of Bellaire Boulevard right now. The food hall is still a promise. The rest of it isn't.
If you're watching this corridor because you're thinking about buying nearby rather than just wondering where to eat next, that's a different conversation, and one Jennifer Delaney is glad to have. Let's connect, find your next home or investment, and talk through what a corridor like this one actually means for property values while it's still under construction rather than after the ribbon is cut.
