How a Former Kmart Became Guaynabo's Real Town Square
August 27, 2026
August 27, 2026
On a Wednesday night at La Faena, the terrace fills before the sun finishes setting. A guitarist tunes up near the railing. Servers move between tables with plates built around whatever came off a farm that week. Nobody here is dressed for a mall. Nobody thinks of it as one either, even though the dining room sits inside San Patricio Plaza, on ground that used to hold a Kmart.
That contradiction is the whole story. Guaynabo's town square, the place where people actually gather on a Wednesday, isn't a plaza with a church and a bandstand. It's Liberty Square, a 120,000-square-foot outdoor addition that Empresas Caparra built where an anchor store stood since 1964. It opened in phases starting in November 2022, and nearly four years in, it has quietly become the place residents default to when they want dinner, a drink, or somewhere to bring out-of-town guests who don't know Guaynabo has a food scene at all.
The restaurant most worth knowing about wasn't built for foot traffic from the parking lot. La Faena is run by Chef Kevin García, a 2025 James Beard Awards finalist for Best Chef: South, and García isn't an import. He grew up in Guaynabo's rural Hato Nuevo barrio, went to public school there, and started an agroecological farming project in the same area before opening the restaurant. The menu changes with the seasons and leans on farmers he already knew before any of this had a Michelin-adjacent shine to it. Fried yucca in a creamy pajuil sauce with homemade sauerkraut is the kind of dish that shows up when a chef is cooking from memory rather than a trend report.
Here's the part worth knowing before you plan a night around it. OpenTable lists a standing Wednesday terrace performance from 7 to 9 p.m., live music timed for a dinner or cocktail crowd. La Faena's own booking page, by contrast, lists dinner service as Thursday and Friday only, 5 to 9 p.m. The restaurant is small, the terrace has limited seating, and the hours appear to still be settling into a rhythm. If you're building a night around it, call ahead rather than trusting either page blindly. That's a small thing, but it's the kind of detail that separates a guide written by someone who's actually tried to get a table from one assembled off a press release.
A few minutes away, near the plaza but with its own address, Argento Patio Bar runs its kitchen under Chef René Marichal, another James Beard Best Chef South nominee with roots at Bacoa and Aldeana. Between García and Marichal, Guaynabo is quietly stacking up chef credentials that most people driving past a shopping center would never guess were there.
If La Faena is the reason to make a reservation, Ocean Lab Brewing Co. is the reason to just show up. Ocean Lab bills itself as Puerto Rico's largest craft brewery, and the San Patricio outpost backs that up with an 8,500-square-foot buildout, the single largest tenant space in the whole Liberty Square development, built with a bar that looks directly onto the brewing tanks, a full restaurant menu, a retail shop, and a stage for live music. It pours 30 beers on tap, four of them brewed on site, which puts it well past taproom scale and closer to a genuine production brewery that happens to also be Guaynabo's Friday night default.
The detail that says something about how the plaza actually works: Pimentón, the Neapolitan pizza spot that opened its third location inside Liberty Square, pours a house beer brewed specifically for it by Ocean Lab. Two supposedly separate businesses collaborating on a house tap is a small signal that this isn't a collection of unrelated tenants renting adjacent boxes. It behaves like a food and drink scene that knows its own neighbors.
The plaza's ownership group, Empresas Caparra, added more than 15 new shops, restaurants, and offices across San Patricio Plaza and its sister properties by the end of 2025. Most of it is retail you'd expect in any expansion. A few are worth flagging because they changed what a resident can actually do here on a random evening:
None of this reads like a mall refresh. It reads like a developer deciding that Guaynabo residents want options they'd otherwise have to drive to Condado or Santurce for, and building them here instead.
The one recurring event most likely to slip past someone who doesn't already follow the plaza's Instagram is the SanPa Wellness Market. It's a free outdoor fitness gathering that Liberty Square hosts with sponsors like StarKist, Caulipower, and OIKOS, and it isn't a one-off activation. The next one lands Sunday, August 30, 2026, from 8 a.m. to noon, opening with a Sculpt and Flow class led by Tina and moving into a bootcamp session with Christian Torres. Bring your own mat and water. It's the kind of thing that turns a parking lot into a genuine community fixture, and it costs nothing to show up.
An architecture critic who visited Liberty Square not long after it opened made an observation worth sitting with. Guaynabo's actual urban core doesn't have much in the way of true public plazas, the kind of open, walkable gathering space that towns like Río Piedras or Ponce built into their downtown grids decades ago. Liberty Square fills that vacuum, but it does so as private property, shaped by a landlord's incentives rather than a municipality's. The critic noted the irony directly: a space meant to evoke a public square is literally named after its corporate sponsor.
That tension doesn't change how the space functions day to day. People sit in Liberty Square with coffee, read, take meetings, just idle the way you'd idle in an actual plaza. It works the way a plaza is supposed to work, even if the deed says otherwise. For a Guaynabo resident deciding where to spend a free evening, the debate about who should have built this space matters less than the fact that it exists and it's good.
If you live in Guaynabo, the useful takeaway isn't that a mall got nicer. It's that the map of where to eat, drink, and gather on a weeknight has shifted toward one address, and it's worth learning that address well enough to move through it like a local rather than a visitor. Know that La Faena's schedule is still finding its footing and call ahead. Know that Ocean Lab is the reliable Friday option when you don't want to plan. Know that the last Sunday of the month has a free fitness market most people in this town haven't heard of yet. And know that Ujeong Korean BBQ brought something to Puerto Rico that hasn't really existed here before, which is reason enough to go find out for yourself.
None of this requires a real estate decision. It just requires paying attention to what's actually changed a few minutes from home.
If you're weighing a move within Guaynabo, curious what a specific street or community is really like day to day, or thinking about what your home might be worth in a market that keeps adding reasons to stay, Mariángel Martí knows this area block by block, not just listing by listing. Let's Connect.
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