Gran Maya Eastwood Lansing Opens Second Location in October

On a quiet Monday afternoon near the Eastwood Towne Center, a storefront that has cycled through three different restaurant concepts in under a decade sits waiting, its windows reflecting the passing traffic along Showtime Drive. Inside, the work of transformation is already underway. This is soon to be the second home of Gran Maya Eastwood Lansing, a family run Mexican restaurant preparing to bring its story to a space with a complicated recent history.

A restaurant space near the Eastwood Towne Center that had sat vacant for the last four years has now been leased, ending a stretch of turnover that saw three different concepts come and go at the address. Two years after Raul Gordillo and his family opened Gran Maya, an authentic Mexican restaurant in a storefront off Ontario Drive in St. Johns, he is now preparing to open a second location at 2328 Showtime Drive. Further details on the original restaurant are available through Gran Maya's official website.

A Space With a Complicated History

The 4,500 square foot space next to Capital Prime was most recently occupied by Amer1can Bistro, which closed in 2022. Before that, it was home to Cantina Eastwood, a Mexican restaurant that closed after less than a year, and prior to that, Tony Sacco's, which shut its doors in November 2016. That pattern of short tenancies makes Gordillo's decision to move in notable, a bet that his own restaurant's established track record in St. Johns can succeed where three previous concepts could not.

A Timeline Tied to a Liquor License

Gordillo aims to open Gran Maya Eastwood sometime in October, though the exact date still hinges on a pending approval. "We are waiting for the liquor license to be approved and then we should be able to open a couple weeks later," he said. The comment reflects a common reality for new restaurant openings, where the final steps of preparation are often at the mercy of a regulatory timeline outside the operator's direct control.

Keeping the Menu Simple

The restaurant will serve well known Mexican dishes including tacos, fajitas, burritos, tortas and sopes, with dishes ranging in price from twelve to thirty dollars. Gordillo described his approach to the menu in straightforward terms. "We try to keep it as simple as possible, but like with a good flavor on the food," he said. "We try to provide a good service to the customers. Our main goal is to have best tacos in the area." The quote matters because it lays out Gordillo's priorities plainly, favoring consistency and flavor over an overly elaborate menu, a philosophy that has evidently worked well enough at his first location to justify expansion.

Alongside the food menu, Gran Maya Eastwood will offer a full service bar built around margaritas, beer and liquor. "We're going to try to have like a local cider from the cider mills in town," Gordillo said. "We have our Mexican draft beers. Then we try to have good margaritas." The bar program reflects an effort to blend Gran Maya's own culinary identity with a nod to the local Michigan drinks scene.

Confidence in a Growing Area

Gordillo pointed to the activity surrounding Eastwood Towne Center as part of what drew him to the location. "It seems like that place has grown in the last few years," he said. "We'll be right there." That confidence in the area's trajectory mirrors a broader pattern across food and beverage development, where operators increasingly weigh a neighborhood's momentum as heavily as the property itself, a consideration not unlike what has shaped other recent restaurant relocations into long vacant sites, including Nando's planned move into a long-vacant Prestwich building.

What to Expect at Opening

Gran Maya Eastwood will employ about a dozen people initially, Gordillo said. The dining room is expected to seat approximately 160 people, with an additional 40 seats available on a patio along the side of the restaurant, giving the new location considerably more capacity than a typical neighborhood storefront.

For a space that has struggled to hold onto a single concept for more than a few years at a time, Gran Maya's arrival carries a quiet kind of expectation, not just from Gordillo and his family, but from a stretch of Lansing Township that has watched three restaurants come and go in roughly the same footprint. Whether Gran Maya Eastwood breaks that pattern will depend less on the liquor license now pending approval and more on the same simple formula Gordillo has already proven once, good tacos, steady service, and a bar that knows its neighborhood.