For the better part of two years, the southwest corner of Roosevelt and Finley was the kind of spot you stopped noticing. A shuttered Dania Furniture warehouse. An empty Fifth Third Bank branch. An auto glass shop that had seen better decades. If you commute along Roosevelt anywhere near the Glen Ellyn line, you drove past all three without a second thought.
On September 4, the Lombard Area Chamber of Commerce held a ribbon cutting there. Village President Anthony Puccio showed up. So did trustees, the fire department, and the police department. Burj Plaza officially opened, and the dead corner became a working one, at least in part. That last phrase matters more than it sounds like it should, because the plaza everyone is now walking through is not the plaza that was promised. The dining room is open. The banquet hall, the part that made this a $40 to $50 million project instead of a strip mall facelift, is not.
What Used to Be Here
The bones of Burj Plaza are almost entirely reused, not rebuilt. The main building is the old Dania Furniture store, a 106,000-square-foot warehouse that developers are remodeling section by section rather than tearing down. The corner where the bank used to sit is now a drive-through restaurant space. The auto glass shop on Finley Road is being converted into a smoking lounge. A smaller vacant building next to the Dania site was razed to make room for more parking.
The people behind the project, operating as Burj Plaza LLC alongside State Group Management LLC and 83rd Holding LLC, bought the roughly 10.8-acre site in December 2024 and started demolition and construction in 2025. The same ownership group runs Omni Plaza elsewhere in Lombard, so this isn't an outside developer parachuting into town. It's a local operator making a second, much bigger bet on the same stretch of Roosevelt Road.
What's Actually Open Right Now
The tenant roster reads like a food hall built around South Asian, Middle Eastern, and North African kitchens, plus a handful of retail and service shops filling in the gaps. Some of these are open today. Others are still in build-out, with the plaza's own site noting that more locations are scheduled to launch throughout the rest of 2026.
| Business | What It Is |
|---|---|
| Usmania | Pakistani fine dining |
| Panwaari | South Asian street food, paan, and desserts |
| Al Manakeesh | Palestinian restaurant |
| Shelby's | Middle Eastern restaurant |
| Dosa Inn | Vegan Indian restaurant |
| Karahi Boys | Pakistani restaurant |
| Milk Cake Bakery | Cafe and desserts |
| Melt n Dip | Dessert restaurant |
| Bumper-to-Burger | Drive-through burger stand, a second Lombard location for the brand already established on South Main Street |
| Gulf Perfume | Fragrance retail |
| Easy Suites | Services |
That's eleven named businesses, and the plaza's leasing plan called for something closer to twenty-one tenants across food, dessert, retail, and service categories once every space is filled. If you've been past the site recently and noticed some storefronts still dark, that's not a construction delay so much as the plan working as designed. This was always meant to fill in over the course of the year, not open all at once.
The Traffic Math Nobody Finalized
Here's the part that didn't make it into the ribbon-cutting photos. When the developer's team presented the project to Lombard's Plan Commission in June 2025, their own traffic consultant found that if you added up parking requirements for every individual use on the site the way zoning code technically calls for, the plaza would need 775 spaces. The approved plan provides 688.
Village staff and the traffic consultant signed off on that gap as workable given the mix of uses, but neighbors weren't as convinced. Three residents from the nearby Point West and International Village condo buildings spoke at that meeting. Juanita Keizer told the commission her biggest concern was the driveway conflicts she expected once traffic picked up. Marcia Cucci pushed back on the idea that existing conditions should be preserved just because nothing had changed yet, telling commissioners that didn't mean the problems didn't need fixing now. Alicia LeFlore raised a different worry entirely, that older residents in the area could end up boxed in by heavier traffic, and said the banquet hall's eventual hours and noise levels were still an open question.
Those concerns are on the public record from a June 2025 Plan Commission hearing covered by Citizen Portal, and they haven't fully resolved. The developer has proposed valet service for large banquet events once occupancy climbs toward 1,200 to 1,300 guests, which tells you the traffic question was never really about the food court. It's about what happens when the banquet hall starts booking full houses.
The Banquet Hall Is the Real Project
Everything that opened on September 4 is Phase 1 and part of Phase 2 of a three-phase plan. Phase 3, the banquet facility carved out of the southern portion of the old Dania building, is the piece the project's attorney described to village planners as the reason for the whole redevelopment. In a June 2025 interview with Shaw Local, attorney Mark Daniel said the hope was to have that 1,500-seat hall open and operating by Memorial Day 2026. That date has come and gone, and Burj Plaza's own website still markets the banquet space in future tense, describing it as a venue for weddings and corporate galas without listing an open date or booking information.
There's also a scheduled public hearing on September 21, 2026, at Lombard Village Hall, where the Plan Commission will consider further amendments to the conditional use permit for the site. That's more than two weeks after the ribbon cutting most residents saw covered locally. In plain terms, the version of Burj Plaza open right now is not the finished version the village approved. The zoning is still being adjusted, the parking lot reconfiguration tied to Phase 3 hasn't happened yet, and the anchor attraction, the one Daniel told commissioners could turn Lombard into "a bit of a tourist destination" pulling visitors from outside Illinois, is still an empty shell behind a working food court.
What This Means If You're Already Nearby
None of this should stop anyone from stopping in this month. The restaurants that are open are open, and a lineup this concentrated in South Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine is not something Lombard has had in one location before. If you've been driving to Devon Avenue in Chicago or out to the western suburbs' scattered halal spots for a Pakistani karahi or fresh paan, several of those options are now a few minutes from your own driveway.
The timing argument is the one worth paying attention to. Once the banquet hall opens and starts pulling in the kind of regional weekend traffic its own developer is hoping for, parking on a Friday night is going to look different than it does today. Right now, before Phase 3 wraps and before that 1,500-person hall starts booking events, the plaza is still mostly a neighborhood discovery. That window won't stay open long. The Village of Lombard posts updates on pending site changes on its public hearings page, and it's worth a glance if you want to know what's coming before the parking lot gets busier.
Lombard has absorbed a lot of new commercial development over the past year without losing what makes it Lombard, from the Lilac Time traditions downtown to the steady turnover of small businesses along Main Street. Burj Plaza is a different scale of project, built on the bones of a landmark most residents had written off. Worth a visit now, worth watching over the next several months as the rest of it comes together.
If you're weighing what a fast-changing corner like Roosevelt and Finley means for property values nearby, or you're just curious how commercial redevelopment like this tends to ripple into surrounding home values, the team at Sold by Tully tracks these shifts across Lombard and the western suburbs as part of how we advise sellers and buyers. Reach out any time you want a local read on what's changing in your corner of town.
