If you drive past the outparcel across from La Roche University often enough, you already know the joke. For the better part of three years, the sign for Shabu Shabu Hot Pot and Grill sat there promising an opening that kept not happening. Locals tracked it the way you'd track a delayed flight, half expecting the gate to change again. When it finally opened on May 5 this year, the wait had stretched past 1,000 days from the moment the first signage went up in July 2023.
Here's what that long wait obscures. While one restaurant took three years to seat its first table, the actual social life of Wexford and McCandless never paused for it. The Town Green kept filling up on Monday and Thursday evenings. The trivia night kept running. The garden club kept selling plants. If you measure this place by its newest opening, you'll always be a little behind. If you measure it by what keeps showing up on the calendar year after year, you get a much better picture of what living here actually feels like.
Three Summers of Waiting for a Hot Pot Table
The Shabu Shabu saga is worth walking through because it's a genuinely useful data point about how development timelines here can outlast most people's patience. Signage first appeared at the McCandless Crossing outparcel, the one shared with Midwest Shooting Center, in the summer of 2023. A January 2025 opening was floated and missed. By this spring, the local blog PennsylvAsia was tracking the delay by the day, noting the project had been "coming soon" for over 1,009 days as of mid-April. The restaurant that finally opened on May 5 is McCandless's own outpost of a chain that had already opened a second Pittsburgh-area location in Robinson back in June 2025, meaning the Robinson restaurant beat McCandless to market despite starting years later.
None of that is a knock on the restaurant itself, which is now open and slinging hot pot to residents who'd all but given up checking. It's a reminder that a single high-visibility opening tells you almost nothing about the health of a neighborhood's day-to-day life. The interesting story was never the restaurant. It was everything that didn't need the restaurant to happen.
The Calendar That Never Needed the Restaurant to Open
While that sign sat dark for three summers, the Town Green at McCandless Crossing, the grassy stretch between Old Navy and Ethan Allen at McKnight Road and Duncan Avenue, kept its own schedule running without a hitch. The property's Summer Concert Series is free, outdoors, and has been a fixture long enough that regulars start asking every spring whether the schedule is out yet. This year's lineup, announced in late May, brought back a rotation of regional acts across June and July, including:
- Endeavor, opening night, June 8
- Good Karma, June 11
- Bill Toms & Hard Rain, June 18
- Steel City Calypso, June 22
- Zig Daniels, June 25
- Seven Mile Detour, June 29
- Jay Wiley, July 9
- Jeff Jimerson, the Pittsburgh Penguins' national anthem singer, July 13
- Eclectic Acoustics, July 27
Shows have historically run 6 to 8 p.m. and pulled somewhere between 150 and 200 people on a given night, according to the property manager, Adventure Development LLC. That's not a one-time draw. That's a standing weekly habit that a lot of households in Wexford and McCandless have built their Monday and Thursday evenings around for years, long before anyone knew when, or if, the hot pot place would ever seat a customer.
The Rest of Your Weekend, Mapped
The concerts aren't the only piece of infrastructure that kept running while everyone waited. North Park, which sits inside the Wexford and McCandless footprint, has its own steady rotation. Early August brought a Two Face Road and Trail outing staged out of the Olympia Shelter, and the Latodami Nature Center on Brown Road ran its Young Naturalist summer camp sessions the same week. If you want a low-key Saturday morning that doesn't involve a reservation, that stretch of the park has been quietly delivering one all summer.
Closer to McKnight Road, North Park Lounge in McCandless has run a standing Monday trivia night hosted by Buzzworthy Pub Trivia, the kind of recurring, unglamorous fixture that never makes a headline but fills a table every week regardless. And for sit-down dinner that doesn't require checking whether the doors are finally open, Wexford Public on Perry Highway has been doing that job for a while now, run by longtime Wexford locals John and Melanie Dober. It's the kind of place that was never going to generate a three-year waiting saga, because it just opened and started serving people.
None of this needed a grand opening or a countdown. It was already working.
A Town Older Than Any Restaurant's Opening Date
Here's the detail that puts the whole comparison in perspective. The Town of McCandless is marking its 175th anniversary this year, with McCandless Community Day scheduled for Saturday, September 19, at 9955 Grubbs Road. A restaurant that took three years to open is a rounding error against a town that's been organizing itself, building its parks, and running its own civic calendar for a century and three quarters. The concerts on the Town Green, the trivia nights, the trail outings at North Park, these are the current version of something that's been happening in one form or another for a very long time. The hot pot place is new. The habit of showing up for each other on a Thursday evening in summer is not.
If you live in Wexford or McCandless, you already know most of this in your bones. You've sat on a blanket at the Town Green waiting for Jeff Jimerson to start. You've driven past that same restaurant sign for years and made the same joke your neighbor made. What's worth noticing is the pattern underneath it. The things that make this place feel like home were never waiting on the next opening to arrive. They were already there, running on their own schedule, long before anyone was counting days.
That's the version of Wexford and McCandless worth paying attention to this fall, whether you're heading to Community Day on the 19th or just walking the dog past the Town Green on a Thursday evening out of habit. The restaurant finally caught up. The rest of the neighborhood never needed to wait.
If you're already part of this community and know someone weighing a move to Wexford or McCandless, or you're curious what a home here is actually worth in today's market, Lauren knows these streets well enough to tell you more than the concert schedule. Reach out anytime.
