For years, the reason to come to Millbrae was Broadway. Specifically, the stretch of it between the train station and the freeway, where you could spend a weekend morning in a Hong Kong-style cafe nursing milk tea and eating wonton noodles before anyone in San Francisco was awake. That draw was real, and it still is. But something has shifted. The city now has two other food corridors taking shape at the same time — one built around a transit village that only finished construction in 2023, the other anchored by a grocery store that hasn't opened yet. The result is a city whose food options are expanding in three directions at once.
If you live here, you've probably noticed it piecemeal: a new sign on El Camino Real, a line outside something you didn't know had opened, a construction fence that finally came down. The pattern only becomes visible when you look at all of it together.
Broadway Is Getting Sharper, Not Just Bigger
The Broadway corridor didn't need rescuing. It already had a reason to exist. But in the past year, the mix has gotten more interesting.
wonderful at 270 Broadway carries a Michelin recommendation — not a star, but the guide's explicit endorsement of a restaurant worth seeking out. The kitchen focuses on Hunanese and Sichuan cooking, which puts it in a different register than most of Broadway's Cantonese and Hong Kong-style spots. The line out the door on weekends is not a rumor.
New Broadway Bistro opened at 349 Broadway and brought something specific: a women- and Asian-owned Hong Kong-style cafe with a tight menu built around dishes like Dried Scallop Bitter Melon with Egg White Rice Noodles and Ovaltine French Toast. This is not a category description. These are dishes that regulars already know to order. The cafe also carries Cantonese-influenced comfort food at the kind of prices that make it a Tuesday option, not a special occasion.
Won Kok, whose original location is on Monterey Boulevard in San Francisco, opened a Millbrae branch. For anyone familiar with the SF location, the move makes sense: Millbrae's residential density supports the same lunch and dinner volume, and the transit connection makes the trip easy for people coming from both directions.
The corridor isn't reinventing itself. It's adding depth.
The Chamber Ceremony and What It Signals
On January 18, 2025, the Millbrae Chamber of Commerce hosted a grand opening for Modern Eats Restaurant. There were dragon dancers. The crowd spilled onto the street.
A Chamber-hosted grand opening with that kind of turnout is a signal worth reading. It means the city's business community is actively recruiting new tenants and treating openings as civic events, not just real estate transactions. Modern Eats is one restaurant. The ceremony around it tells you something about the environment it opened into.
Millbrae's economic development office describes downtown as being within a three-minute walk of Millbrae Station, the only point on the Peninsula where BART and Caltrain connect in the same place. That transit fact used to matter mostly to commuters. It now matters to restaurant operators looking for locations with reliable foot traffic across multiple hours of the day.
What Gateway Actually Built
Gateway at Millbrae Station spent years as a rendering. The $401 million development, built by Republic Urban Properties on 9.5 acres of former BART surface parking, officially opened in April 2023. It added 320 market-rate apartments, 80 affordable units for veterans, a 164-room Residence Inn by Marriott, 150,000 square feet of Class A offices, and a pedestrian-only paseo called Garden Lane running between the apartment and office buildings.
Garden Lane is the part that matters for this conversation. The paseo was designed for outdoor dining, social gathering, and retail — upscale furnishings, commissioned art, landscaping, the kind of public space that encourages people to linger. The idea was to create a neighborhood within a neighborhood, walkable from the transit platforms.
The retail is filling in. Chick-fil-A opened at 106 N. Rollins Road on June 18, 2025, creating approximately 90 jobs. Crumbl Cookies and Panda Express are already there. The development's director of investments cited the transit location as the reason national brands wanted in: "That's why Crumbl wants to be there, that's why Chick-fil-A wants to be there." The upcoming addition of life sciences and biotech campuses nearby is expected to bring consistent daytime foot traffic — those developers anticipate that 60 percent or more of their employees will take public transit through Millbrae Station.
This is not the same dynamic as Broadway. Gateway draws commuters, hotel guests, and office workers. It runs on a different schedule and serves a different impulse. That's the point. It's not competing with Broadway's slow weekend mornings. It's filling a different part of the week.
Slice House on El Camino Real
In December 2025, Slice House by Tony Gemignani opened at 357 El Camino Real. The franchise is operated by the Yuksel family, who also run Slice House locations on Haight Street in San Francisco and in Belmont. Gemignani holds 13 World Pizza Championship titles. The concept is fast-casual: New York, Sicilian, Grandma, and Detroit styles, fresh pasta, beer, wings.
The location on El Camino Real is worth noting. It's not on Broadway, and it's not in Gateway. It's on the third commercial corridor — the one running along the western edge of the city, carrying tens of thousands of cars per day between San Francisco and the South Bay. El Camino Real has historically been where the fast-food chains and the car dealerships go. A fast-casual concept from a named chef choosing a Millbrae address on that corridor suggests the operator sees residential density and daytime traffic as sufficient to support a quality product, not just a drive-through.
The Anchor That Changes Friendship Plaza
The largest single announcement affecting Millbrae's food landscape in recent memory hasn't opened yet. T&T Supermarket, Canada's largest Asian grocery chain, confirmed in November 2025 that it will open a 52,000-square-foot store at Friendship Plaza — 95 Murchison Drive and 135-143 South El Camino Real — in Winter 2026. The store will create 350 jobs.
T&T CEO Tina Lee explained the location choice directly: "I have had my eye on Millbrae for a while — it's a great spot to serve families living in the peninsula and well spaced between our San Francisco and San Jose locations. We hope our store becomes a place where neighbors come together to shop, eat, take comfort in familiar flavors and discover new tastes."
A 52,000-square-foot grocery store is an anchor tenant. It changes the behavior of every other business in the plaza. It drives weekly repeat visits from a customer base that already lives within a short drive or walk. It creates the kind of sustained foot traffic that supports cafes, quick-service restaurants, and specialty shops in the surrounding spaces.
T&T stores are not generic supermarkets. The chain built its reputation in Canada on a curated mix of pan-Asian groceries, prepared foods, and specialty items that function as both a grocery run and a food experience. For Millbrae residents, the store will sit between the Broadway corridor and the Gateway development — a third node, completing a triangle that now covers most of the city's commercial geography.
What Three Corridors Mean for a Resident
A city with one food corridor is a city where your options are fixed by geography. You go to Broadway for the Cantonese breakfast. You get fast food on El Camino Real. You drive to Hillsdale or downtown San Mateo for anything else.
Millbrae in 2026 is a different set of choices. On Broadway, you have a Michelin-recommended restaurant, a growing set of Hong Kong-style cafes, and an evolving mix that keeps adding specificity without losing its character. At Gateway, you have a walkable paseo that is still filling in, supported by hundreds of residents and office workers who live and work within steps of it. On El Camino Real, a craft pizza concept has arrived, and Friendship Plaza is about to have a 52,000-square-foot Asian grocery anchor that will draw from across the Peninsula.
None of this happened because of a single development decision. It happened because the transit infrastructure finally matched the residential density, and operators started noticing. The Broadway corridor earned its reputation over decades. What's been built around it in the past two years is the infrastructure that makes the rest of the week as interesting as Sunday morning.
If you're thinking about what this kind of momentum means for your home's value — or if you're looking to buy into a city before the rest of the Bay Area catches up — Julie Flouty knows this market from the ground up. Let's connect.
