Serramonte Center New Restaurants in Daly City: What’s Open

If you live near Serramonte Center, you have probably read at least three headlines by now announcing that Daly City's mall is turning into a food destination. Koi Palace is moving in. Cheesecake Factory is coming. So is Fogo de Chão, Haidilao, Marugame Udon, and a hot pot chain or two. The story has been told so many times it starts to feel like it already happened.

It has not. As of today, exactly one new food concept has actually opened its doors at Serramonte Center, and it opened back in March 2025. Everything else you have read about is still a permit, a rendering, or a stretch of drywall behind a "Coming Soon" sign. That gap between the announcements and the actual state of the mall is worth understanding if you are deciding where to eat this week rather than where to eat sometime next year.

The One Thing That's Actually Ready to Eat

Jagalchi opened on March 28, 2025, in the space that had sat empty since JCPenney closed in 2019. At 75,000 square feet, it is the real anchor of Serramonte's food overhaul so far, and it is worth treating as three destinations in one building rather than a single restaurant.

There is the market itself, stocked with the kind of Korean grocery selection that previously meant a drive to San Francisco or Fremont: a seafood and butcher counter that carries everything from everyday cuts to Japanese A5 wagyu ribeye, a wall of instant ramyun, and a bulk section built around pantry staples like Gompyo wheat flour and Sempio soy sauce. There is Pogu, the sit-down restaurant at the center of the store led by chef Tony Yoo, the first Michelin-starred chef in Korea's traditional cuisine category. And there is Basquia Bakery, a gluten-free rice-flour bakery that also has locations in Sunnyvale and at a Mega Mart store in Fremont.

The opening weekend drew more than 49,000 visitors, and the layout takes a cue from Ikea rather than a typical grocery store, guiding shoppers in a loop around Pogu at the center. If you have not been yet, this is the one part of the "new Serramonte" story you can actually verify in person tonight.

The Restaurant Everyone Keeps Announcing

Koi Palace is the name that keeps anchoring every headline about Serramonte's transformation, and it is also the clearest example of how far the announced timeline has drifted from reality.

The relocation was first reported in January 2025, when Palo Alto Online quoted co-owner Willy Ng saying the new location was expected to open in December of that year. The new space, at 3 Serramonte Center in what used to be a Wet Seal, Subway, and Starbucks, is roughly double the size of the original Gellert Boulevard restaurant, at 20,000 square feet with room for 760 to 800 guests. Regency Centers, the company that owns the mall, later told KRON4 the opening had shifted to the first quarter of 2026. A San Francisco Chronicle roundup of anticipated Bay Area openings, updated as recently as April 2026, still listed it as an upcoming 2026 arrival, describing a design with Chinese art, LED projections, and a koi pond.

None of that has happened yet. Serramonte Center's own store directory still lists the Koi Palace listing as "Coming Soon," and the original Gellert Boulevard restaurant, the one Willy Ng said would close the same day the new location opened, is still operating on its regular hours as of this month. A Peninsula Buzz report from earlier this August still described Koi Palace as one of six restaurants "in the works" for the year ahead, not one that had already opened.

Put together, that means a restaurant announced with a December 2025 opening date has now missed that date, missed a "Q1 2026" date, and is heading toward a fourth stated timeline. If you have been holding off on dinner reservations for the new Koi Palace, the dining room you actually want is still the one on Gellert Boulevard.

Four More Names on the List, All Still Pending

The same Peninsula Buzz report that placed Koi Palace among upcoming openings named five other concepts in the pipeline for Serramonte, none of which have opened as of this writing.

The Cheesecake Factory is taking over the former Buffalo Wild Wings space, and a company spokesperson described a winter opening target when asked earlier this year, which points toward late 2026 or early 2027 rather than anything imminent. It would be the closest location for Daly City residents who currently drive to the chain's outposts in San Francisco or Hillsdale Shopping Center in San Mateo.

Fogo de Chão, the Brazilian steakhouse, would become its third Bay Area location alongside its existing restaurants in San Francisco and Emeryville. Haidilao, a Chinese hot pot chain with locations in Fremont and Cupertino, was described as targeting an early opening in the coming year. Marugame Udon, which already has multiple Bay Area locations including San Francisco, Berkeley, and Palo Alto, and Kin No Katsu, which would mark the chain's first Bay Area location entirely, round out the list.

All five are still described in the future tense by the mall's own spokespeople. None have posted opening dates firm enough to plan a dinner around.

What This Means If You're Just Trying to Get Dinner Tonight

None of this is a criticism of the project. Mall redevelopments on this scale, especially ones anchored by full-service restaurants with hundreds of seats, routinely take longer than the first press release suggests. Regency Centers is clearly building something real here, and Jagalchi's opening weekend crowd is a good sign that the appetite for it exists.

But if you live in Daly City and keep seeing these names pop up in local coverage, the practical version of the story is simple. Right now, the food-hall side of Serramonte Center means Jagalchi and its three concepts: the market, Pogu, and Basquia Bakery. The mall's existing food court tenants, including MOD Pizza, Panda Express, and Yoshi Ramen & Sushi, are also still there and unaffected by any of this. Koi Palace's dim sum is still best had at the original Gellert Boulevard location, at least until its own directory listing stops saying "Coming Soon." Everything else on the list, from Cheesecake Factory to Kin No Katsu, is still a name attached to a target date that keeps moving.

That kind of slow, layered build-out is actually a pretty good sign for a neighborhood. A mall that is filling in gradually with named, recognizable concepts, rather than sitting on vacant anchor space the way it did when JCPenney closed in 2019, tends to reflect steady rather than speculative investment. It is the kind of change that shows up first in foot traffic and slowly, over a longer stretch, in what people are willing to pay to live near it.

If you are watching Daly City for reasons that go beyond where to get dinner, whether that is a home you are thinking about selling, a purchase you are timing, or just curiosity about what a changing commercial corridor means for property values nearby, that is exactly the kind of on-the-ground context worth having before you make a decision. Wang Tang Group works this stretch of the Peninsula every day, in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese, and can walk you through what a shift like Serramonte's actually means for your street. Request a free home valuation when you are ready to talk specifics.