What's New at Burlingame Town Square Before the Anchor Opens?

Walk through Burlingame's Town Square on a Tuesday at noon this August and you will not find an empty lot waiting on its main event. You will find office workers from Confluent and Upstart carrying Sweetgreen bowls to the communal tables on the Lorton Avenue side, a woman with an MNT Studio tote bag walking past the fountain toward Burlingame Avenue, and a line at Trad Bone Broth for something warm to go. What you will not find, roughly four and a half months after the square itself opened, is the restaurant everyone has actually been waiting for.

That restaurant sits inside the old Burlingame post office, the Spanish and Art Deco building the federal government put up in 1941 as part of a New Deal program. It closed in 2015, sat empty for nearly a decade, and is now the ground floor of a six-story office tower, the tallest building in Burlingame, with Bacchus Management Group signed to open a white-tablecloth restaurant inside it. That deal is nearly three years old. The restaurant was originally supposed to open alongside the square by the end of 2024. It still hasn't.

Here is the part worth sitting with: the square has already proven itself without the one tenant it was built around.

The Anchor That Still Hasn't Opened

Bacchus is not a random operator. This is the same group behind Michelin-starred Spruce in San Francisco, The Village Pub in Woodside, and Selby's in Atherton. President Tim Stannard has described taking on the post office project as something more ambitious than a typical expansion for his company, a job he called "cooler for sure" than the usual play. His team spent months on listening tours through Hillsborough and Burlingame, asking residents who already have plenty of good restaurants what they actually wanted from this one.

That kind of care takes time, and this project has taken more of it than almost anyone expected. Restoring a historic building for restaurant use means salvaging marble, brass, and bronze piece by piece rather than gutting and starting over, and reporting from late 2025 pointed to code issues tied to the historic portion of the structure as the reason the opening kept slipping. The building itself was worth the wait as a piece of preservation. Burlingame's own historic designation gave the developers latitude other cities rarely allow, permitting them to remove one wing of the original post office to make way for infrastructure upgrades while keeping the rest intact. But for a neighborhood that was promised a signature restaurant timed to the square's debut, "worth the wait" and "still waiting" are not the same thing.

What Filled In While Everyone Waited

While the anchor tenant worked through its punch list, everything else around it opened on schedule, and in an order that happens to cover a full day rather than a single meal:

• Sweetgreen opened at 235 Lorton Avenue in late 2025, doing the job of a midday counter for the office towers above it
• Local Kitchens signed on for the storefront next door at 225 Lorton Avenue, bringing a rotating multi-concept menu spanning pizza, wings, Mexican food, and salad to the same block
• Amado opened on Burlingame Avenue this spring, with the Burlingame/SFO Chamber hosting a ribbon-cutting mixer on April 29 to formally welcome it to the neighborhood
• Trad Bone Broth, founded by brothers Jonathan and David Kim, filled a gap nobody else was covering with a ready-to-drink broth concept built around the idea that healing food should be simple to grab
• Joe & The Juice returned to downtown Burlingame after a previous closure
• MNT Studio brought a wellness concept to the block in June, with mini classes and what its opening promised as a full wellness crawl

None of these businesses were the reason the square got built. The one-acre space, designed by SWA Group and funded jointly by the city and the developers of the surrounding office complex at a cost of $6.4 million, was conceived as a stage for whatever high-profile restaurant eventually filled the old post office. Instead, the supporting cast showed up first and started doing the work.

Why the Order Matters

Most downtown revitalization stories run the other direction. A city builds a plaza, signs a marquee tenant, and waits for the destination restaurant to pull foot traffic before the smaller shops around it feel safe opening. Burlingame's square did the opposite. The salad counter, the broth shop, the juice bar, and the wellness studio each solved a narrow, unglamorous problem, quick lunch, ready-to-drink health food, a place to grab a smoothie, somewhere to take a Pilates class, and in solving those small problems they built a square that already has a reason to exist at 8 a.m., at noon, and at 6 p.m. The full-service, white-tablecloth anchor that was supposed to define the space is arriving into a place that no longer needs it to define anything. It will simply be the best meal in a square that was already working.

That is a different kind of proof than a ribbon-cutting for a big name. It says something about how this particular stretch of downtown Burlingame actually functions: not through one splashy centerpiece, but through several ordinary businesses solving ordinary daily needs, stacked closely enough together that the sum reads as a district. The Sunday farmers market, which has run year-round on Park Road at Burlingame Avenue for longer than any of this redevelopment has existed, sits one block from the new square and never depended on any of it to draw a crowd. The square borrowed that same logic. It did not need its headline tenant to become a place people actually use.

There is one detail in the square's design that captures this better than any tenant list. After dark, projectors wash the main walkway with a light pattern drawn from the historic course of Burlingame Creek, which now runs underground beneath the site. The creek is invisible. You would never know it was there without being told. But the light on the pavement traces exactly where it flows, a quiet acknowledgment that the ground underneath a modern gathering space still has its own history running through it, whether or not anyone built a monument to it.

What This Fall Actually Changes

The city's Fall Fest returns to downtown Burlingame on October 25, with the same mix of activities the event has run for years, arts and crafts, a petting zoo, a costume contest for kids. If the Old Post Office restaurant finally opens before then, this fall becomes the first season where a resident can walk from a Sunday market stall to a lunch counter to an evening reservation at the district's most anticipated restaurant, all within the same one-acre footprint, all without leaving downtown. If it slips past Fall Fest, the square will do exactly what it has done all year: keep working anyway.

That is the actual news here, not a list of new storefronts, but what those storefronts prove about a neighborhood that keeps rebuilding itself in small, unglamorous pieces rather than waiting on one big one. Burlingame has always had a reputation for this kind of patience, the kind that restored a 1940s post office marble slab by marble slab instead of tearing it down for something faster. The square just gave that patience a public stage.

If you are watching this corner of downtown for reasons that have nothing to do with lunch, whether you are weighing a move within Burlingame or simply want a clear-eyed read on how this market is actually shifting block by block, that is exactly the kind of on-the-ground detail LeDoux Group tracks for Peninsula clients every day. Reach out any time you want a conversation grounded in what is actually happening here, not what a listing sheet says.