September 17, 2026
If you've scrolled past a headline about Serramonte Center this year, you already know the pitch. Koi Palace is moving in with a koi pond. Cheesecake Factory is coming. So is a Brazilian steakhouse, a hot pot chain, and a katsu spot nobody in the Bay Area has tried yet. The story has been told with almost the same words since early 2025, updated with a new date every few months, and if you've been holding off on a reservation you deserve a straight answer about what's actually behind those doors right now.
The answer, as of September 2026, is shorter than the headlines suggest. One new concept has opened. Everything else is still a permit, a rendering, or drywall behind a "Coming Soon" sign.
Jagalchi is real, and it's worth the drive even if nothing else on this list ever materializes. The 75,000-square-foot Korean market took over the space that sat empty for six years after JCPenney closed in 2019, and it opened its doors on March 28, 2025, after two rounds of construction delays pushed the date from an original end-of-2024 target.
Inside, it's less a grocery store than a food hall built around one. There's a seafood and butcher counter, an oyster bar, a cocktail bar, and Basquia Bakery, a gluten-free bakery serving castella cake and rice-flour breads. At the center of the floor is POGU, a restaurant run by chef Tony Yoo, who trained at San Francisco's Michelin-starred Aqua and later served as head chef at the Korean Embassy during the 2012 London Olympics. Yoo has said the location works in his favor precisely because he's shopping the same aisles his kitchen draws from: "If I want cabbage, I got it. If I need more beef, I can get them there."
Jagalchi isn't a promise. It's a place you can walk into today.
The name attached to nearly every Serramonte headline is Koi Palace, and it's also the clearest example of how far the announced schedule has drifted from what's on the ground.
The relocation was first reported in January 2025, when the dim sum institution's co-owner said the new location was expected to open by December of that year. The space, on the east side of the mall where a Wet Seal, a Subway, and a Starbucks used to be, is roughly double the size of the original restaurant, built out to 20,000 square feet with room for 760 to 800 guests. The Starbucks that used to occupy part of that footprint relocated next to the mall's Chick-fil-A.
December came and went. Regency Centers, the company that owns Serramonte, then told local reporters the opening had shifted to the first quarter of 2026. A Bay Area food preview published in the first weeks of September 2026 still lists the relocation as upcoming, on Serramonte's own social media, alongside renderings of the koi pond and LED wall art. As of this writing, the mall's own store directory still marks the listing "Coming Soon."
What that means in practice: if you want Koi Palace's dim sum tonight, you're still driving to the original location at 365 Gellert Boulevard, the one that's been serving the neighborhood since 1996.
Koi Palace isn't the only concept stuck in the pipeline. A Serramonte spokesperson told a local outlet in August 2026 that six new food tenants were in the works for the mall. Besides Koi Palace, that list includes:
None of these had opened as of the most recent reporting. If you're mapping out where to eat this month, treat every one of these as a future plan rather than tonight's dinner.
It's easy to read a year and a half of missed dates as a mall in trouble. The more accurate read is the opposite. Serramonte sat on a fully vacant anchor space, the old JCPenney box, for six years before Jagalchi signed on. A shopping center backfilling that kind of vacancy in stages, with named tenants attached to real construction rather than sitting on an empty box indefinitely, is a sign of steady leasing rather than a mall in decline. The existing tenant mix at Serramonte, which includes Macy's, Target, Nordstrom Rack, and Dick's Sporting Goods alongside the food court, hasn't gone anywhere while all this construction has played out.
The gap between the announcement and the ribbon-cutting is normal for retail build-outs of this size. It's just longer than the headlines have made it sound.
If you're planning an evening or a Saturday around Serramonte right now, here's what you can count on without checking a construction timeline first:
If you want to round out a fall weekend beyond the mall, the Cow Palace on Geneva Avenue has a rodeo with dates you can actually put in your calendar. The Grand National Rodeo runs Friday, October 9 and Saturday, October 10, 2026, with Friday's program starting at 5:30 p.m.
None of this means Serramonte's transformation isn't happening. It means the transformation is slower and less linear than the press releases suggest, and if you're deciding where to eat this week rather than where to eat sometime next year, the honest answer is Jagalchi, the food court that's already there, and a drive to Gellert Boulevard for your dim sum. Everything else is worth watching for, just not worth planning around yet.
For Daly City residents who've watched this stretch of Mission Street and John Daly Boulevard evolve for years, that kind of patience is familiar. Big changes here tend to arrive in stages, not all at once, and the neighborhood is usually better for the wait once they land.
If you're curious how retail growth like this tends to ripple into home values and buyer interest around Daly City, Nick Villanueva tracks those shifts alongside the neighborhood itself and is always glad to talk through what's actually changing on the ground here, not just what's been announced.
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