Daly City Shopping Center Changes: Serramonte & Westlake

Walk into the grand court at Serramonte Center on any given Saturday and you'll pass the koi pond, the crowd waiting for a table at Jagalchi, and a storefront near the east wing that has said "Coming Soon" for the better part of two years. That storefront belongs to Koi Palace, the dim sum institution that Daly City has been told, repeatedly, is about to move a few miles down Junipero Serra Boulevard into the mall. It still hasn't. Meanwhile, ten minutes away on Southgate Avenue, a seven-story apartment building is rising toward the winter 2027 opening its developers named when they broke ground.

Both of these are real stories about how Daly City's two big commercial centers are changing. They are not the same story, and the difference matters if you're trying to figure out what to actually do with your Saturday, or your next five years here.

The reservation nobody can make yet

Koi Palace's move has been announced enough times that it's easy to assume it already happened. Willy and Ronny Ng, who opened the original restaurant on Gellert Boulevard in 1996, confirmed in January 2025 that the flagship would relocate into a 20,000-square-foot space inside Serramonte Center, right next to the then-new Jagalchi Korean market, with room for 760 to 800 guests. The target was December 2025. By the time KRON4 checked in, Regency Centers, the mall's owner, had pushed that to the first quarter of 2026.

It's now the fall of 2026, and Serramonte's own store directory still lists the Koi Palace space as "Coming Soon." The original Gellert Boulevard location, the one Willy Ng said would close the same day the new space opened, is still running its regular hours. Nobody has announced a new date. If you've been holding off on dim sum until the mall location opens, you can stop holding off. The restaurant that's actually open is the one that's been open for thirty years.

What already landed

The gap between announcement and reality doesn't mean nothing at Serramonte has changed. Jagalchi, the Korean grocery and food hall that took over the space left vacant when JCPenney closed in 2019, opened on March 28, 2025, and by its own count drew close to 100,000 visitors that first weekend, according to the marketing manager for its parent company, Megamart. The complex includes a full grocery store, a restaurant called POGU, two bars, a butcher, and a bakery. Regency Centers' managing director Patrick Conway has pointed to Jagalchi as the kind of anchor that pulls foot traffic to everything around it, and the mall's food court holdouts, MOD Pizza, Panda Express, Yoshi Ramen & Sushi, are all still there, unaffected by any of the churn happening around them.

The newest confirmed opening is smaller but worth knowing about if you haven't been to the mall lately. Hama Film x Kono Karaoke, a photo booth and karaoke concept making its first U.S. appearance, opened at Serramonte on September 18, 2026, according to the mall's own updates. If you want the freshest thing actually operating at Serramonte right now, that's it, not the restaurant everyone keeps writing about.

Here's where things stand as of this September:

The hot pot chain that dances, eventually

Some of what's still pending is worth knowing about even before it opens, because it tells you what kind of mall Serramonte is trying to become. Haidilao, the Chinese hot pot chain that has gone viral for tableside servers who perform choreographed routines between courses, already operates in Fremont and Cupertino and is on the list for Serramonte. Fogo de Chão, the Brazilian steakhouse chain, would open its third Bay Area location here, joining existing restaurants in San Francisco and Emeryville. Cheesecake Factory is taking over the old Buffalo Wild Wings footprint, and a company spokesperson described a winter opening target when asked earlier this year, language that points toward late 2026 or early 2027 rather than anything happening this week. For Daly City residents, it would be the closest Cheesecake Factory location, closer than the current drive to San Francisco or to Hillsdale Shopping Center in San Mateo.

None of these have opening dates you can put on a calendar yet. Large restaurant build-outs take time, and at Serramonte the stretch between naming a tenant and seating the first guest has run longer than first projected.

Ten minutes south, nobody's behind schedule

Southgate Avenue runs along the edge of Westlake Shopping Center, and the project rising there is moving at a completely different pace than anything happening at Serramonte. The Chester at Westlake broke ground in September 2025 as a partnership between Kimco Realty, which has owned and operated Westlake since 2002, and Bozzuto, a national developer building its first ground-up project on the West Coast. The seven-story building at 99 Southgate Avenue will bring 214 apartments, ranging from studios to three-bedrooms, above a two-story parking podium, with nearly 10,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space and nothing that's changed its opening target since the announcement. Bozzuto and Kimco have said the building is set to open in winter 2027.

That timeline matters beyond the construction itself. Bozzuto's own team described the project as a response to what they called strong demand for market-rate housing paired with very limited new supply in the area, and this is Daly City's first major predominantly market-rate apartment community to break ground in more than fifteen years. When it opens, it won't just add units. It will test what fifteen years of pent-up demand actually does to rents and turnover in a part of Daly City that's mostly been built out since the shopping center itself opened as one of the country's earliest planned commercial developments.

Kimco's own framing of the project, transforming an established retail center into a mixed-use destination, is the same language being used at malls across the country right now. What's different at Westlake is that the timeline has held. Groundbreaking happened in September 2025, and as of this fall the project remains on its winter 2027 target.

What this actually tells you

Put these two projects side by side and the lesson isn't that one mall is winning and the other is losing. It's that press releases and construction schedules move at different speeds, and confusing the two means you either show up disappointed at a restaurant that isn't open yet, or you assume nothing is actually changing here when in fact a 214-unit building is going up in real time a few blocks away.

If you're deciding where to eat this weekend, Jagalchi and the new karaoke spot are real options right now, and the original Koi Palace on Gellert Boulevard hasn't gone anywhere. If you're paying attention to what Daly City looks like in two years, the more reliable signal isn't the mall directory, it's the crane on Southgate Avenue.

Either way, both of these stories are still being written, and the next twelve months will settle a lot of what's still open to guessing.

If you're weighing what either project might mean for your own plans in Daly City, whether that's timing a move around new housing supply or just understanding how a changing commercial corridor affects a specific block, NEXTGEN Properties is happy to walk through it with you over a complimentary home strategy session.