Millbrae Doesn't Have One Downtown Anymore. It Has Three.

For as long as most people can remember, there was one reason to go downtown in Millbrae: Broadway. You went for Cantonese breakfast, milk tea, and the particular quiet of a Saturday morning before anyone in San Francisco was awake. If you wanted anything else, you drove to San Mateo or Hillsdale.

That's no longer the whole story. Millbrae now has three separate stretches of the city adding restaurants and retail at the same time, and they're not competing with each other so much as splitting up the day. Broadway still owns breakfast and dinner. A newer paseo near the train station is filling in with lunch crowds who live and work within a few blocks of it. And El Camino Real is about to get an anchor tenant big enough to change the shopping habits of half the Peninsula. Most residents have noticed this in pieces: a new sign here, a line outside something they didn't know had opened, a construction fence that finally came down. Almost nobody has connected the three.

Broadway is still doing what it always did, just with more options

Broadway between the train station and the freeway remains the corridor people picture when they think of Millbrae. New Broadway Bistro at 349 Broadway has become a steady name in the mix, known for Hong Kong-style cafe plates like baked minced beef with spaghetti and beef curry over rice. A few blocks down, wonderful has earned recognition in the Michelin Guide for Hunanese cooking that leans into smoked, cured, and fermented ingredients, including a stir-fried cilantro beef and a fish filet served in a Sichuan peppercorn broth. At 448 Broadway, 16 Mile House keeps the corridor's evening side going as a bar and cocktail lounge with live music.

None of this is new construction. It's densification of an existing strip, and it means Broadway is doing more per block than it used to. The corridor isn't growing outward. It's filling in.

The paseo near the station is the corridor most people haven't clocked yet

Walk a few minutes from Broadway toward the BART and Caltrain station and you hit Gateway, a walkable paseo built as part of a transit village that finished construction in 2023. It's still filling in, but it's already drawing lunch traffic from the residents and office workers who live and work within steps of it rather than from people driving in for dinner.

This matters for a simple reason: Millbrae's station isn't a minor stop. It's the largest intermodal terminal west of the Mississippi, moving roughly 30,000 passengers a day across BART, Caltrain, SamTrans, and airport shuttle connections. A corridor built to serve people who already live and work adjacent to that volume of daily transit behaves differently than a corridor built to draw people in from outside. Gateway's lunch crowd doesn't need a reason to be there. They already are.

El Camino Real is about to get an anchor big enough to change the other two

The most significant single change to Millbrae's food landscape hasn't opened yet. T&T Supermarket, the largest Asian grocery chain in Canada, confirmed in November 2025 that it will open a 52,000-square-foot store at Friendship Plaza, at 95 Murchison Drive and 135-143 South El Camino Real, in winter 2026. The store is expected to create 350 jobs. T&T's CEO, Tina Lee, said the chain had been watching Millbrae for a while, drawn by a location she described as "a great spot to serve families living in the peninsula" and conveniently positioned between the company's San Francisco and San Jose stores.

A 52,000-square-foot grocery store isn't a restaurant opening. It's an anchor tenant, and anchor tenants change the math for everyone around them. They drive weekly repeat visits from a customer base that already lives within a short drive or walk, which is exactly the kind of foot traffic that makes smaller businesses viable nearby. A few doors down, a Slice House pizza concept has already landed on El Camino Real, and it's a reasonable bet that a grocery anchor pulling hundreds of weekly visits will bring more names to that stretch before winter is out. Separately, a new café called Millbraes Cafe filed for a beer and wine license in July 2026 to take over the former Otto's Appliance Service space at 1663 El Camino Real. No opening date has been announced, and the business hasn't confirmed a concept publicly, but the filing and a similarly named social account suggest a coffee shop is the likely direction.

Three corridors, three different jobs

The reason this is happening in three places at once instead of one isn't a single development decision. It's that Millbrae's transit infrastructure finally matched its residential density, and operators noticed. A grocery chain doesn't commit to a location because a neighborhood has charm. It commits because the rooftop count and the drive-time math pencil out. When that math works in three different pockets of the same small city simultaneously, you get three corridors instead of one.

What's actually on the calendar before summer ends

If you want to see the corridors in motion rather than read about them, the next few weeks give you a reason to walk downtown. The city's Beats, Brews & Vines concert series runs every third Thursday from August through October at the intersection of Broadway and Hillcrest, with the next date landing August 20 under the theme Pride and Joy. It's free, outdoors, and puts you within a block of both New Broadway Bistro and wonderful if you want dinner after.

The bigger date on the calendar is Labor Day weekend. The 55th Annual Millbrae Art & Wine Festival takes over Broadway Avenue between Victoria Avenue and Meadow Glen Avenue on September 5 and 6, with free admission, more than 170 artists and crafters, two stages of live music, and a wine and craft beer garden. It's the largest end-of-summer street fair on the Peninsula, and it's easy to reach without a car since the festival sits a short walk from Millbrae's BART and Caltrain platforms.

A few things to keep in mind if you're planning around transit that weekend or any weekend this summer:

• BART's schedule changed on August 10, 2026, which can affect Millbrae connections to Caltrain, so check the current timetable before you go.
• Train control modernization work is causing intermittent evening delays between Millbrae, SFO, and Daly City through the summer.
• Downtown parking has gotten tighter as the corridors fill in, so walking or taking transit to festival weekends is genuinely the easier option, not just the eco-friendly one.

What this actually means if you live here

None of this required a single ribbon-cutting to notice. It required paying attention to three different blocks at the same time, which is easy to miss when you only have a reason to visit one of them. Broadway isn't going anywhere. The paseo near the station is quietly becoming the place people grab lunch without getting in a car. And El Camino Real is about to get busier in a way that will likely pull more small businesses along with it once T&T opens its doors.

If you've lived in Millbrae for a while, this is probably the first summer where you could reasonably spend a full day downtown without leaving a few connected blocks: breakfast on Broadway, an afternoon errand near the station, and a Thursday evening at Beats, Brews & Vines before the Art & Wine Festival closes out the season on Labor Day weekend.

If you're weighing what any of this means for your own home, or just want a straight answer about how Millbrae's shifting corridors affect value in a specific part of town, Nick Villanueva knows these blocks well enough to walk you through it. Get in touch anytime for a conversation, or start with your Instant Home Valuation to see where your property stands today.