Pull into the lot at Edgewater Place on a Saturday afternoon and you will circle twice before finding a spot near the front doors. That crowd is headed to one destination: Osaka Marketplace, the Japanese supermarket that took over the old Lucky space at 919 Edgewater Blvd. in December. Walk fifty feet in the other direction, past the boardwalk that runs along the lagoon, and you will pass storefronts with paper still taped over the glass. Same shopping center, same afternoon, two completely different moods.
Most people who shop here have noticed the gap and assumed it means the center is struggling. It is the opposite. The empty storefronts and the packed parking lot are both symptoms of a plan that has been in motion since 2017, and Osaka's arrival is the first visible proof that the plan is finally working.
What Actually Moved In
Osaka Marketplace opened its doors on December 12, 2025, with a ribbon cutting, a Taiko drumming performance, and a Dassai sake ceremony that drew the mayor and local chamber representatives to the parking lot before the store even opened. The 35,000-square-foot store is the company's second location, following its original Fremont store, and it fills the entire footprint of the Lucky supermarket that closed earlier that year.
Owner Kazuhiro Takeda told Nichi Bei News in January that the Foster City store has been pulling in roughly 2,400 customers a day since opening, enough that he has kept hiring to keep pace. The draw is specific rather than generic: fresh seafood imported from Japan, wagyu beef, a Sakura sushi buffet, a Kobe melonpan bakery counter, and a hot buffet line that runs Japanese, Chinese, and Japanese-style sandwich items side by side. Takeda has said the onigiri case and the seafood counter are the two sections that empty out fastest.
He has also been direct about why Foster City specifically. In an interview with SFGate, Takeda said he chose to open here after noticing there was no authentic Japanese grocery option serving the Peninsula's long-established Japanese American community, one he sees as diverse enough that the same experiment made sense in Pleasant Hill, where a third location is expected this year.
"Our goal has always been to make shopping at Osaka Marketplace feel like a small trip to Japan."
That line, which Takeda has repeated in several interviews, matches what the store actually does inside its four walls. It is not trying to be a grocery store with an ethnic aisle. It is trying to be a destination, complete with a rotating events calendar that turns ordinary weekends into something closer to a food festival.
The Neighbors Who Never Left
Osaka did not arrive into an empty shell. Several longtime tenants have been running through the vacancy years and are still there:
- Waterfront Pizza, which holds one of the only restaurant patios in Foster City that actually sits on the water, has kept its lagoon-facing tables full through every phase of the center's slow turnover.
- Rickshaw Corner and Ritha Indian Restaurant have anchored the center's Asian and South Asian dining mix for years, both still doing steady lunch and dinner business.
- Sana'a Cafe, a Yemeni coffee house, and Warehouse Buffet, a Korean barbecue spot, round out a dining lineup that was unusually varied even before Osaka became the headline tenant.
- Quickly, the boba and Asian dessert chain, still serves the after-school and after-dinner crowd that cuts through the plaza on foot from the surrounding condos.
None of these businesses needed Osaka to survive. What Osaka does is give people already headed to Waterfront Pizza or Rickshaw Corner one more reason to park once and stay for two stops instead of driving straight home.
Why the Empty Storefronts Aren't a Warning Sign
To understand why some pads are still sitting empty while Osaka pulls thousands of shoppers a day, it helps to know what happened at this shopping center nine years ago.
In 2017, the center's ownership group, Edgewater Holding Corporation, asked the city to approve converting the 123,000-square-foot retail site into a mixed-use project with 150 townhomes and flats, roughly 59,300 square feet of retail, and 516 parking spaces. More than 170 residents showed up to a city council study session to weigh in, and the council unanimously rejected the idea, citing concerns about school crowding and traffic. Instead, the city pushed EHC to fix up the existing shopping center rather than tear it down.
EHC's own chief operating officer, Joshua Kwan, told the Daily Journal at the time that the company wasn't planning to attempt redevelopment again for "10 or more years" and that in the meantime it would make incremental improvements, starting with redoing the boardwalk.
Nine years later, that boardwalk still runs along the water, Osaka has replaced the anchor grocery tenant, and current commercial listings for the property describe a new monument sign, new landscaping, and improved common areas with group seating on the way. What looks like a shopping center that is only half finished is actually a shopping center that is exactly on the timeline its owner set for itself back when the community said no to housing.
That context also explains the remaining gaps. The old Cooking Papa space along the boardwalk, the former Fashion Wok location with its own lagoon-side seating, and a vacant Baskin-Robbins storefront are all still listed for lease. These are not failed businesses the center couldn't replace. They are pads the ownership is holding open while it finishes the common-area work and decides what fits alongside a Japanese supermarket that is already outperforming expectations. A shopping center doesn't usually invest in new signage and landscaping around spaces it plans to leave dark.
What This Looks Like If You Actually Go
The clearest sign that Osaka is treating Foster City as more than a satellite location is how often it turns the store into an event. In May, the Foster City location hosted an Ibaraki Fair spotlighting products from Ibaraki Prefecture, including the region's well-known melons, dried sweet potato, natto, and chestnut mochi. In August, that expanded into a four-day Summer Festival running Hokkaido and Ibaraki fairs side by side, with regional street food, desserts, and vendor demos and giveaways running the entire weekend.
Smaller versions of that same format show up on ordinary weekends too. A typical Friday-through-Sunday stretch might bring free sample stations from brands like House Foods, Pulmuone, and Calpico, the kind of rotating in-store demo that turns a routine grocery run into something closer to a tasting. If you have wandered past the store on a weekend and wondered why there was a crowd around a folding table near the entrance, that is what it was.
None of this changes what a home near Edgewater Place is worth this week. It does change what a Saturday afternoon in this part of Foster City actually looks like now compared to two years ago, when the anchor space sat dark and the boardwalk felt more like a shortcut than a destination.
The shopping center is still mid-transition. Some pads will stay empty for a while longer, and that is by design rather than neglect. What has already changed is real: a grocery anchor that draws thousands of people a day, a set of longtime restaurants that finally have foot traffic to match their food, and a landlord finishing a promise it made back in 2017.
If you already live near Edgewater Place, you have probably felt this shift without knowing the backstory behind it. And if you are weighing whether this stretch of Foster City fits what you're looking for, whether that's a walk to a lagoon-side patio or a shopping center that's clearly still investing in itself, Julie Flouty knows this corner of the Peninsula well enough to talk through it honestly. Let's Connect.
