What's New at Tuscan Village in Salem, NH This Season

Ask someone who lives near Via Toscana what actually changed this summer, and they probably won't mention a new restaurant. Tuscan Village has never lacked for restaurants. They'll mention the one thing the development didn't have until July 22: a place to buy a gallon of milk.

That's the detail worth sitting with. For years, Tuscan Village asked you to drive somewhere else for groceries, then drive back for dinner. As of this summer, that round trip is gone, and it's changed what kind of place this actually is.

The Grocery Gap Closed in July

Whole Foods Market opened its doors at 24R Via Toscana on July 22, 2026, a 34,900-square-foot store that marks the chain's first location in Salem and its fifth in New Hampshire. The store carries more than 800 local New England items, and its design leans on nods to Salem's older architecture rather than a generic big-box shell. On opening day, the first 300 customers in line walked away with a Salem-branded tote bag and a coupon worth up to $100. Whole Foods also tied the launch to two local causes, donating to the Merrimack Valley Food Bank and Sonshine Soup Kitchen.

That single opening reclassifies the whole property. A 170-acre development built on the old Rockingham Park racetrack site has spent the past several years adding hotel rooms, apartments, and restaurant after restaurant. What it hadn't added was the errand you can't skip. Now it has.

What Else Was Already Built to Stay

The grocery store didn't land in a vacuum. It joined a short list of tenants that were never designed to be seasonal draws, they were designed to be the reason you don't need to leave:

• SweatHouz, a cold plunge and infrared sauna studio, for the kind of recovery routine people used to drive to a spa for
• A Needham Bank branch, actual banking, not just an ATM in a lobby
• The Cooking School at Tuscan Market, run in partnership with Williams Sonoma, offering daily hands-on classes and mixology sessions
• Free People and Day's Jewelers, retail that isn't tied to a meal
• Festa Studio, rounding out the personal-services mix

None of these needed a ribbon cutting to matter. They're the difference between a place you visit and a place you run your week through.

That second column matters just as much as the first. It's where Tuscan Village keeps experimenting, and where residents should know not to get too attached.

The Part That Comes Down After New Year's

The other big addition this summer sits directly across from that permanent layer, and it was never meant to be permanent. Sun Cruiser Social Club opened in front of Tavern in the Square as an open-air space built around two bars made from repurposed shipping containers, a turf field with a giant checkerboard, cornhole, and Jenga, and a run of firepits and Adirondack chairs. The menu leans on canned cocktails, and it reads exactly like what it is: a warm-weather hangout, not a year-round fixture.

That's not a guess. According to Union Leader reporting on the opening, the space was approved last year as a "flexible turf area" tied to apartment building approvals, and Salem's planning board signed off on the plaza design without a full site plan review, with shipping containers already on site before the vote happened. The original concept for the space included a stage, which got scrapped because it would have blocked fire truck access. Tuscan Village itself has said the space will likely stay open through a New Year's Eve celebration before it closes for the season.

Put those two openings side by side and you get a clearer picture of how this development actually operates. Whole Foods is infrastructure. Sun Cruiser is a pop-up with a closing date already built in. Tuscan Village isn't trying to be one thing. It's layering a permanent errand-running base under a rotating cast of seasonal social spaces, and residents who assume everything they see this month will still be there in February are going to be wrong about at least one storefront.

One More Reason to Walk Over This Month

If you're weighing whether it's worth the walk before summer fully turns, there's a specific date on the calendar. Tuscan Village's Epicurean apartments are hosting a Wine Social on September 9 at 5 p.m., with more than fifteen wine samples from local wineries and light bites from the Epicurean and Tuscan Brands teams. It's a small event, but it's the kind of thing that only shows up if you're already checking the calendar rather than waiting for a mailer.

Around the same window, Tuscan Village runs its September Shoppes, an outdoor artisan market with live music built for people who want to find a new maker rather than shop a chain. Neither of these needs a special occasion. That's the point. The permanent tenants handle the every day. The rotating events handle the reason to show up on a random Tuesday.

What This Means If You Already Live Here

None of this is really about whether Tuscan Village is a good place to visit. It always was. The shift is smaller and more useful than that: for the first time since the development replaced the old racetrack, you can do a full week of actual errands, banking, groceries, a workout, a haircut appointment, without leaving Via Toscana, and you can still walk over for something that didn't exist last season.

That's worth knowing if you live in Salem and have been treating Tuscan Village as a place for dinner out. It's also worth knowing which parts of what you're seeing right now are permanent and which parts, like Sun Cruiser, are built to disappear once the containers get hauled off after New Year's. The property is still figuring out its own shape in real time, and the smartest way to use it is to stop assuming this month's version is the final one.

If you're the kind of person who tracks these shifts because you're curious what they mean for your own street, not because you're shopping for a new one, that's exactly the kind of local read Key Team | Compass keeps an eye on season over season. And if all this new activity around Via Toscana has you wondering what it's actually done to your home's value, whether you're a five-minute walk from Tuscan Village or a few towns over, Key Team offers a free home valuation any time you want a real number instead of a guess.