Forget San Francisco. Restaurants see ‘huge opportunity' in this quiet suburb

San Francisco Chronicle​

14-05-2025

There's a running joke in Menlo Park, a quiet Bay Area suburb just north of Stanford University: It's full of rug stores.
There are indeed six carpet stores in this diminutive downtown, nearly outnumbering restaurants. But that's starting to change: At least nine new restaurants have recently opened or will open soon in Menlo Park. It's a level of activity never seen before for this small, affluent city better known for its Silicon Valley history and excellent public schools than its food scene.
Within the last year, a wave of newcomers has included chic Cal-Indian restaurant Eylan; Texas seafood chain Clark's Oyster Bar; tea and cake shop Temp & Time; Middle Eastern bakery LeVant Dessert; cocktail spot Bar Loretta; and Little Sky Kitchen, a sister restaurant to nearby Little Sky Bakery. They'll soon be joined by Yeobo, Darling, a Korean-Taiwanese restaurant from an acclaimed chef couple; Cafe Vivant, a chicken-focused spot from two New York City sommeliers; an outpost of San Francisco's Causwells; and Bubbelah, a Jewish-inspired deli from the owners of Che Fico.
The new food businesses come from both local and out-of-town operators who see opportunity in a city perpetually described as sleepy.
'To replace the empty carpet shops with more food options would be super exciting,' said Little Sky owner Tian Mayimin, who has lived in Menlo Park since 2016. 'There's a huge opportunity in the wealthy suburbs, because you're serving a population that really surprisingly has a much lower quality of life in terms of eating than their counterparts in an urban area.'
For Clark's, a scene-y seafood spot founded in Austin, Texas, Menlo Park wasn't immediately on the radar for expansion. But as the chain spread to locations in Aspen, Houston and Montecito, customers, friends and investors started talking about the Bay Area city as an 'underserved market' with wealthy customers, co-owner and chef Larry McGuire said. (The median household income in Menlo Park is $206,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.)
'Once we visited, we saw what people were talking about,' McGuire said. 'It's a very affluent market that didn't seem like there were much offerings.' They didn't even consider San Francisco, and instead spent the last three years transforming what was once a longtime, beloved diner into a stylish seafood restaurant. It's been busy since opening last month, with raw oysters, buttery lobster rolls and piles of crispy shoestring fries.
'The general sentiment is: 'We're so glad you're here. We need more,'' McGuire said.
Similarly, the owners of Cafe Vivant focused on Menlo Park rather than San Francisco, or even New York, where they already operate a wine business, citing the prospect of lower competition. Their restaurant will focus on heritage chickens raised exclusively for Cafe Vivant at a Pescadero farm, and include a next-door wine shop.
Local operators are also homing in on the city. When Meichih and Michael Kim started looking for spaces for a new restaurant, they zeroed in on Menlo Park. Their previous, now-closed restaurant, Maum, won a Michelin star in Palo Alto, a city with double Menlo Park's population of 32,000. But the Kims liked the 'small town vibe' and ample parking of Menlo Park, and saw that it lacked modern Asian food. Yeobo, Darling, which replaced a decade-old Mediterranean restaurant, will serve creative Korean-Taiwanese food that honors their backgrounds.
'A lot of these older spaces are going through a generational shift in the sense of maybe they're retiring or moving on, and a lot of new talent is coming into the neighborhood,' Michael Kim said. Likewise, Clark's took over the former 75-year-old Ann's Coffee Shop space, and Cafe Vivant, a longtime sandwich cafe. 'It's revitalizing the area a little bit,' Kim said.
For many existing business owners, the newcomers represent welcome, exciting momentum. When Jesse Cool opened her now-famed restaurant Flea St. Cafe in 1976, 'honestly, even people in Palo Alto barely knew where Menlo Park was,' she said. She said she's never seen this many openings at once in the city.
Rather than fear the competition, she said: 'They say you should always hope the best restaurant moves next door to you.'

But like any city in the Bay Area, operating a restaurant in Menlo Park is fraught with challenges. Labor is costly and hard to find; given the Peninsula's high home prices, most employees can't afford to live nearby. Clark's brought staff from other locations for the opening, and they've stayed longer than anticipated due to hiring challenges, McGuire said. Rent and construction are expensive. To help entice tenants, Presidio Bay Ventures, the San Francisco real estate firm behind new development Springline, paid to build out all of its restaurant spaces, and charges tenants percentage-based rent, taking a portion of their gross revenue instead of a fixed amount every month.
But owners are typically left to shoulder construction and operating costs on their own, said Mayimin, the Little Sky owner. 'For most people who are maybe not backed by a corporate umbrella who are trying to get going, A, can you really afford to live in the area; and B, can you really afford the million dollar buildout?'
Permitting bureaucracy can also be frustratingly onerous and slow. McGuire, who has opened Clark's locations throughout the country, said Menlo Park's process was particularly complicated. For example, the city required the business to hire a biologist to conduct a bat roosting survey to ensure the building wouldn't disturb the animal's local habitat.
The city is also currently at odds with local businesses over a controversial plan to build affordable housing on three downtown parking lots. A group of downtown business owners sued the city last month in an effort to block the development, arguing the project will harm them by limiting parking and increasing traffic congestion.
Mayor Drew Combs said he hopes small businesses see the city more as a partner. The City Council is considering loosening downtown zoning rules to allow more types of businesses to open there. Current zoning only permits retail businesses on downtown's main strip, Santa Cruz Avenue, which excludes something like a yoga studio, for example. He credited Springline and a large mixed-use development from Stanford on El Camino Real with spurring new business in Menlo Park.
'It is very important for us to lean into these investments that we see being made in the city in the private sector,' Combs said.
Still, not all of the new ventures have been successful. Canteen, a wine bar at Springline from the owner of Menlo Park's popular restaurant Camper, closed in December, and Che Fico's high-end Italian market closed last month, but owners will soon replace it with the casual Jewish restaurant. To replace Canteen, Springline successfully lured another popular San Francisco restaurant: Causwells, which is in final talks to take over the Canteen space.And Menlo Park often gets second billing to neighboring Palo Alto, whose downtown draws more foot traffic. Because of this, Ayesha Thapar looked to downtown Palo Alto for her first restaurant, Ettan, which opened in early 2020. 'I would not have dared to open Ettan on Santa Cruz Avenue,' she said of Menlo Park's main downtown street.
But now she's taken a chance on the city. Thapar designed her group's new Menlo Park restaurant, Eylan, with this in mind: a stunning, vibrant space that, despite its location in a somewhat soulless development, feels like a portal into another universe — or perhaps, a livelier city.
'It's still a sleepy town that I'm trying my hardest to wake up,' she said.