Irvine burger fans no longer have to make the trek to Campus Drive for their fix. A new In-N-Out opened Friday at 7900 Great Park Blvd. inside the Canopy shopping center, giving the city its second location and its first inside the rapidly growing Great Park Neighborhoods.
The opening was reported by KTLA, which detailed the new restaurant's layout: seating for 34 customers on the patio and 84 more indoors, along with a drive-thru lane built into the design. The store opened with roughly 70 associates and plans to keep hiring in the coming months, according to the station's report.
The privately owned chain, founded by Harry and Esther Snyder in 1948, now operates locations across California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Texas, Oregon, Colorado, Idaho, Washington and Tennessee, per the same account. In-N-Out has also signaled it plans new California locations in Chino, Woodland Hills and Commerce, the outlet notes.
A Second Stop Relieves Campus Drive Congestion
For years, the chain's only Irvine outpost sat at 4115 Campus Drive near UC Irvine, a location known for persistent vehicular backups, according to The Korea Daily. That Campus Drive store previously topped Hoodline's own rundown of Irvine's best budget burgers back in 2019, underscoring just how long it carried the city's In-N-Out demand solo.
The new Great Park store is designed with that congestion history in mind. Its drive-thru lane is engineered to handle local vehicle queues, according to construction details reported by New University, which put the building at 3,860 square feet. In-N-Out drive-thru lines are known to spill into public streets at popular locations, so the design choice matters for a neighborhood still filling in around it.
Anchoring a New Shopping Center
The restaurant serves as an anchor tenant for The Canopy at Great Park, a 12-acre, 90,000-square-foot outdoor retail and dining center developed by Almquist Development that broke ground in April 2025. The center is co-anchored by a 34,000-square-foot T&T Supermarket — the Canadian Asian grocery chain's first Orange County location, which expanded into the U.S. in 2024 before choosing Irvine for its premier Southern California store.
For years, residents of the master-planned Great Park community lacked immediate daily commercial services and had to drive to distant retail centers for groceries and dining. The Canopy, with In-N-Out and T&T Supermarket as its anchors, is meant to change that dynamic for a neighborhood that has grown largely without a commercial core of its own.
Wages Above the State's Fast-Food Floor
In-N-Out associates at the new store start at $22 an hour, two dollars above California's mandated $20 minimum wage for fast-food chains with at least 60 national locations. That state wage floor took effect in April 2024 under Assembly Bill 1228, which also created the Fast Food Council overseeing industry wages and standards statewide, according to the California Department of Industrial Relations.
The Great Park location is led by store manager Jonah Halverson, a 10-year veteran associate of the chain — a promotion consistent with In-N-Out's practice of elevating managers from within its long-serving ranks. The restaurant follows the company's standard schedule, opening daily at 10:30 a.m. and closing at 1 a.m. Sunday through Thursday and 1:30 a.m. on Friday and Saturday.
A Corporate Exit Even as Irvine Retail Grows
The new store's debut comes amid a notable contrast: In-N-Out announced in February 2025 that it will close its longtime West Coast corporate headquarters at 4199 Campus Drive in Irvine by 2029, according to the Orange County Business Journal. The company plans to shift West Coast operations back to Baldwin Park while building a new eastern hub in Tennessee, ending an Irvine corporate presence that dates to 1994 — a relocation Hoodline has previously covered in detail.
So while In-N-Out is pulling its offices out of Irvine, it's simultaneously planting a new restaurant flag in one of the city's fastest-growing neighborhoods. The Great Park sits on the former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, decommissioned in 1999 and now the site of a $1.1 billion, multi-year municipal transformation spanning more than 1,300 acres into lakes, sports complexes and cultural venues.
That transformation includes Great Park Live and a planned 10,000-seat outdoor amphitheater expected to open around 2030 near The Canopy, part of the city's broader push to turn the Great Park into a regional weekend destination. As that vision fills in, the new In-N-Out and its neighbors at The Canopy are positioned to become a first stop for the crowds the amphitheater and future attractions are expected to draw.
