What Just Opened in Millbrae: A Resident's Guide to the New Dining Map
August 6, 2026
August 6, 2026
If you have lived in Millbrae for more than a few years, your mental map of where to eat probably starts and ends on Broadway. That is a reasonable habit. Broadway earned it. But the map is outdated. The last twelve months added restaurants and anchors on two other corridors, and the center of gravity for a weeknight dinner or a Saturday grocery run is quietly shifting a few blocks west and south of where most residents still default to.
Here is the thesis in one line: Broadway is no longer the only story. El Camino Real and Friendship Plaza are where 2026 is happening, and the reason has less to do with taste than with the fact that our little downtown sits on top of the only station on the Peninsula where BART and Caltrain share a platform.
Broadway keeps doing what Broadway does. wonderful, the Hunanese and Sichuan spot at 270 Broadway, is a Michelin Guide restaurant serving boldly flavored Hunanese cuisine that has attracted many a local and curious palate. The Hong Kong-style cafes a few doors down are still packed on Sunday morning. Nothing about that has changed, and nothing about that needs to.
What has changed is that Broadway is no longer where new operators are choosing to land. The interesting leases in 2025 and 2026 have been signed on El Camino Real and around Murchison Drive. If your Saturday routine has not adjusted, you are eating in the same three restaurants you were eating in three years ago while a second dining district assembles itself six minutes on foot away.
The corridor along El Camino Real used to be a place you drove through, not a place you stopped. That is changing.
Slice House by Tony Gemignani opened on February 21, 2026 in a spot that tells you a lot about where the operator thought foot traffic was heading. Located on El Camino Real near Fiddlers Green, Slice House Millbrae is a half block from Broadway in the city's bustling downtown and walking distance from Millbrae Square Shopping Center. The pizzeria is small by design, with indoor seating for 16 guests, as well as takeout, online ordering, and delivery. The menu tilts toward slices in New York, Sicilian, Grandma, and Detroit styles, with gluten-free, vegan, and vegetarian options available. There is also a location-exclusive slice called the Hot Ron, a New York-style pizza topped with mozzarella, hot honey sausage, pepperonata, roasted red bell pepper, basil, ricotta, Romano cheese, oregano, and finished with hot pepper and garlic oil.
Gemignani is a 13-time world champion pizzaiolo, which matters less than the operator behind this specific location. The franchisee is the Yuksel Family, whose hands-on leadership has shaped the success of the Haight Street and Belmont locations. A family that already runs a Peninsula outpost is a stronger signal about the health of the corridor than any celebrity chef sign-off.
A few blocks up, at 1663 El Camino Real, a new cafe is preparing to open in what used to be Otto's Appliance Service. Millbraes Cafe filed with the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control at the end of July 2026, applying for a license to sell beer and wine. The filing lists Maria Guadalupe Davalos as the owner. No opening date has been posted, and no menu has surfaced yet, but the ABC filing is a reliable leading indicator that a lease has been signed and buildout is underway.
Two independent food businesses within a short walk of each other on El Camino Real is not a trend on its own. Combined with what is happening at Friendship Plaza, it is.
The single most consequential opening for Millbrae dining this year is not a restaurant. It is a grocery store.
T&T Supermarket, the largest Asian grocery chain in Canada, is opening a 52,000-square-foot store at Friendship Plaza, on Murchison Drive at South El Camino Real, in Winter 2026. That is roughly the footprint of a full-size Safeway. It brings hundreds of jobs and, more importantly for the rest of the neighborhood, a reason for people from Burlingame, San Bruno, and even further down the Peninsula to make Friendship Plaza a weekly destination.
An anchor tenant of that size does not just sell groceries. It resets the economics of every adjacent storefront. The cafe that opens next door in 2027 will sign its lease based on the traffic T&T pulls in on a Saturday afternoon. The dumpling counter that takes the endcap will price its menu around the customers already in the parking lot. Residents who live within a mile of Friendship Plaza are about to find themselves inside a walkable food radius they did not have last year.
Between Broadway and the Millbrae Station, the Gateway development has been quietly filling in with ground-floor tenants. Modern Eats opened in early 2025 with a Chamber of Commerce ribbon cutting that pulled dragon dancers and a crowd onto the sidewalk. Whether Modern Eats itself becomes a staple is beside the point. What the ceremony told us is that the city's business community is actively courting new tenants and treating each opening as a civic milestone rather than a routine transaction.
Downtown Millbrae sits within roughly a three-minute walk of Millbrae Station, which is the only point on the Peninsula where BART and Caltrain share a station. That fact used to matter mostly to commuters heading to SFO or downtown San Francisco. It now matters to restaurant operators looking for locations with reliable foot traffic across breakfast, lunch, dinner, and the late train home. Every new lease on Broadway, El Camino, or at Gateway is priced partly against that transit reality.
If you want a practical way to update your Millbrae routine, here is where to start:
The old shorthand was simple: dim sum on Broadway, groceries at Trader Joe's, coffee at Peet's, done by noon. That routine still works. It is also leaving half of the new Millbrae unexplored.
The neighborhood you actually live in now has three distinct food corridors instead of one. Broadway carries the reputation. El Camino Real is where the last twelve months of independent openings landed. Friendship Plaza is about to become an anchor node that pulls foot traffic from outside the city. Each corridor draws a slightly different crowd at a slightly different time of day, and together they cover a wider slice of the week than Broadway alone ever did.
None of this happened by accident. It happened because a piece of transit infrastructure that has been sitting under the neighborhood for two decades finally started dictating where operators wanted to be, and because the city's economic development office and Chamber of Commerce have been treating small openings as events worth showing up for. The result is a dining scene with more range and more weeknight utility than the Broadway-only version most residents grew up with.
Try one new corridor this month. If you have lived here long enough that your Saturday feels automatic, that is exactly the point.
Curious how the changes rolling through Millbrae's downtown corridors are shaping property values, walkability scores, and long-term neighborhood demand? NEXTGEN Properties tracks the block-by-block story behind the Peninsula's most active micro-markets. Book a complimentary home strategy session to talk through what Millbrae's next chapter means for your address.
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