On April 2, the city of Burlingame cut a ribbon on a parking lot. That undersells it. What used to be Lot E, a strip of asphalt between Park Road and Lorton Avenue, reopened that afternoon as Burlingame Town Square, and the celebration ran to face painting, champagne, and a silent disco after council members past and present made it official. Mayor Michael Brownrigg had waited a long time for the moment.
"This has been a passion of mine for about 16 years."
He ran on building a town square back in 2009. It took until this year to deliver, and the wait matters less than what's happened since. Five months in, the square hasn't just given downtown a place to sit. It's exposed something that was true about Burlingame Avenue long before anyone broke ground: the street had restaurants for decades, but it never had a reason for people to stay put between them.
A Downtown Built for Passing Through
Burlingame Avenue has drawn shoppers and diners from across the Peninsula for generations. What it hasn't had, since the city's earliest days, is a signature open space where people go simply to sit and stay, according to SWA Group, the landscape architecture firm behind the square's design. You could spend a full afternoon on the Avenue and still feel like you were moving through it rather than in it. The square cost $6.4 million, split between the city and the developers of the adjacent 220 Park office building, and it grew out of a pedestrian-friendly downtown initiative the mayor and council kicked off back in 2009.
What's interesting is what filled in around it once it opened. The businesses that have shown up on that block over the past year didn't arrive randomly. Lined up against the clock, they read like a district solving one problem at a time: there was no reason to be downtown at noon unless you already had a lunch reservation, and no reason to linger at 3 p.m. at all.
The Midday Math
Start with the office tower next door. The 220 Park development took over the site of Burlingame's 1940s post office, which had sat empty for nearly a decade after closing in 2015. The 185,000-square-foot building went from 5 percent leased to fully leased in nine months, filling up with tenants including Confluent, Upstart, and SkyKnight Capital, plus roughly 20,000 square feet of Industrious co-working space on the fourth floor, according to reporting from the SF Standard. That's a fast lease-up in a Peninsula office market where, as of early 2026, roughly a quarter of the region's 40.8 million square feet sits vacant, per Cushman & Wakefield data cited in the same report. Burlingame's own office vacancy rate runs closer to 10 percent, well under half the rate in San Mateo, Redwood City, or Menlo Park, each of which carries more than twice Burlingame's total office square footage.
That gap between a nearly-full building and a mostly-empty regional market is the reason Sweetgreen and Local Kitchens both opened on Lorton Avenue in early 2026. Neither restaurant is chasing foot traffic that already existed. They're chasing a lunch crowd that didn't have anywhere to go a year ago, because the building generating it wasn't full yet.
The Afternoon That Used to Not Exist
Lunch is the easy part. The harder gap to fill is the stretch after lunch and before dinner, when a downtown either has something going on or it doesn't. Two openings on the Downtown Burlingame Business Improvement District's list are aimed squarely at that window: Trad Bone Broth, a ready-to-drink broth concept founded by brothers Jonathan and David Kim, and Almondette, a French-inspired bakery. Neither is built around a sit-down meal. Both are built around the kind of quick stop that only makes sense if people are already circulating through the square in the middle of the day, which is a different bet than betting on lunch or dinner traffic alone.
Evening Belongs to Amado
If the square needed one restaurant to prove that people would come downtown specifically to eat, it got that answer in early 2026 when Amado opened at 1100 Burlingame Ave. Chef Gloria Dominguez, whose family has run Bay Area Mexican restaurants since opening Taqueria Salsa in 1988 and Tamarindo Antojeria in 2005, built the menu around moles that go well past the dark Oaxacan and Puebla styles familiar to most Bay Area diners. The pink mole from Guerrero, made with white chocolate, nuts, beets, and pale chiles güeros, is the dish that turned into a reason to drive there. Lines were forming down the block before the doors opened, and by May, diners were making the trip from outside Burlingame specifically for the mole rosa.
That's the shape of an anchor restaurant, and it's exactly what the evening side of the square needed. Stella, the Italian restaurant that's occupied downtown since 2005 under owners Matteo and Alisa Ferrari, handles the other end of evening business, the parties and private events that need a 20-seat bar and private dining rooms scaling up to 300 guests. Between Amado and Stella, dinner downtown now covers both the date-night table and the group of twelve.
Here's how the current lineup breaks down by time of day:
| Time of day | Who's there | What it's solving |
|---|---|---|
| Midday | Sweetgreen, Local Kitchens | Lunch demand from the newly filled 220 Park tower |
| Afternoon | Trad Bone Broth, Almondette | The quick-stop gap between lunch and dinner |
| Evening | Amado, Stella | Destination dinner and large private events |
| Coming | The Old Post Office (Bacchus Management Group) | The white-tablecloth anchor the block doesn't have yet |
The One Seat Still Empty
Every one of those openings solved a scheduling problem. The piece still missing is a different kind of gap entirely, and it's taking longer to fill because it's a harder problem.
The building at the center of downtown, the 1941 Spanish Eclectic and Art Deco post office that anchors 220 Park, was designated a historic resource in 2020. During construction of the underground garage beneath it, the entire structure was cut from its foundation, moved roughly 120 feet away on temporary beams, and later returned to its original site. Bacchus Management Group, which runs Michelin-starred Spruce in San Francisco, the Village Pub in Woodside, and Selby's in Atherton, signed a ten-year lease on the restored ground floor and an outdoor terrace that faces directly onto the square.
Company president Tim Stannard has described the concept in blunt terms: full-service, white tablecloth, gorgeous and dramatic. What's more telling is how his team arrived at that description. Rather than building a menu around what Bacchus already does well, the team spent time on listening tours through Hillsborough and Burlingame asking residents who already have access to good restaurants what was actually missing. That's not a hunger problem. It's a destination problem, and it takes longer to solve than a lunch counter does.
Job listings for prep cooks, line cooks, sous chefs, and dishwashers went up in mid-2026, which reads as the standard early signal for a restaurant this size gearing up to open. Reporting throughout the year has pointed to a fall 2026 debut, though no specific date has been set. Once it opens, downtown Burlingame will have a lunch tier, an afternoon tier, and two distinct registers for dinner, plus the anchor that sets the tone for the whole block.
What the Square Itself Adds
The restaurants get most of the attention, but the square is worth knowing on its own terms if you're downtown regularly. It splits into two zones. The Park Road half stays open and flexible, sized for markets and small performances. The Lorton Avenue half holds communal tables and outdoor games, angled toward the retail underneath 220 Park. At the center, a water feature clad in dichroic glass shifts color from white to aqua to gold depending on where the sun sits, and it doubles as a screen for the public restroom behind it. After dark, projectors wash the main walkway with a light pattern that traces the path of Burlingame Creek, which now runs underground beneath the site.
The city's existing traditions have started organizing around that physical space rather than sitting apart from it. The Downtown Burlingame Wine Walk ran in late July on the square's new footprint. Fall Fest returns October 25, and the Winterfest Holiday Kids Train follows on December 4. None of these events were invented for the square. They're simply using it now, which says more about how the space has settled into downtown life than any single restaurant opening does.
The Day That's Almost Whole
None of this happened because someone decided Burlingame needed more restaurants. It happened because a specific hole in the day, from the first office worker looking for lunch to the last table turning over at 9 p.m., finally had a physical center to organize around. Sweetgreen and Local Kitchens answered midday. Trad Bone Broth and Almondette are answering the afternoon. Amado already answered evening on its own. The one piece still missing is the room built for occasions rather than schedules, and that's precisely why it's taking the longest to open.
If you're already spending your Saturdays on Burlingame Avenue, you've probably felt the shift without naming it. The block finally runs from morning to night without a gap in the middle, and the last chapter is still being written a few doors down from where the mail used to get sorted.
If you're curious how downtown Burlingame's changes connect to what's happening with home values or timing on the Peninsula, Chris A. Sabido has been tracking this market since 2005 and is always glad to talk through it. Book an Appointment anytime you'd like a local read on what's next.
