Millbrae Labor Day Weekend and What’s New on Broadway

For years, Labor Day was the weekend Broadway stopped being a quiet Peninsula main street and became, briefly, a destination. Tents went up between Victoria and Meadow Glen. Kettle corn air drifted past the Chamber office. Then Tuesday came, the barricades came down, and the corridor went back to its normal Broadway self.

Something shifted in 2026. The festival is still the loudest weekend of the year, but it is no longer the only reason a Millbrae resident might treat downtown as a plan rather than an errand. Between February and the end of summer, a nationally known pizza brand opened on El Camino Real, a café quietly filed paperwork to take over a shuttered appliance shop, and Canada's largest Asian grocery chain confirmed a 52,000-square-foot anchor two blocks from the festival gate. If you already live here, this is the first Labor Day where the walk to Broadway passes three things that were not there twelve months ago.

The festival, in the specifics that matter

The 55th Annual Millbrae Art & Wine Festival runs Saturday and Sunday, September 5 and 6, 2026, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days. The footprint is Broadway between Victoria Avenue and Meadow Glen Avenue. Admission is free.

A few logistics worth pinning down before you leave the house:

• Artists and makers. The Chamber is listing 170+ artists and crafters this year across jewelry, ceramics, glasswork, textiles, wood, and photography.
• Transit. Millbrae BART and Caltrain sit directly across El Camino Real from the festival route. From the station, walk west toward El Camino Real, cross at Millbrae Avenue, one block north to Broadway, then down to Victoria where the festival begins.
• Bands. The main stage sits at Taylor Boulevard, with a community stage in the city parking lot in the 200 block of Broadway between La Cruz and Victoria.
• Cost of getting fed. Free entry, but the food and wine booths are cash-or-card à la carte. Budget accordingly if the whole family is going.

The Chamber has run this festival for more than half a century, and the muscle memory shows in how efficiently the street gets set up and taken down. What is new is the neighborhood the festival opens into.

What's new within a five-minute walk of the gate

Slice House by Tony Gemignani opened on El Camino Real on February 21, 2026. The address puts it near Fiddler's Green and roughly a half block from Broadway, which means it is a short detour from the south end of the festival footprint. The Yuksel family, who also runs the Haight Street and Belmont locations, is operating it. Sixteen indoor seats, plus takeout, online ordering, and delivery. Every new Slice House gets an exclusive slice, and Millbrae's is called the Hot Ron — a New York-style slice with hot honey sausage, pepperonata, ricotta, and finishing oils. If the festival lines get long on Saturday afternoon, this is the pressure-release valve two minutes away.

Millbraes Cafe is preparing to open at 1663 El Camino Real, taking over the former Otto's Appliance Service space. As of a July 31, 2026 report from WhatNow, the owner, Maria Guadalupe Davalos, has filed for a beer and wine license with the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, and the business is presenting as a café. No opening date has been confirmed. Worth watching if you live within walking distance.

T&T Supermarket at Friendship Plaza is the biggest structural change coming to downtown. In November 2025, T&T confirmed a 52,000-square-foot store at 95 Murchison Drive and 135-143 South El Camino Real, with a Winter 2026 opening and 350 jobs. CEO Tina Lee framed the location choice around Millbrae's position between the chain's San Francisco and San Jose stores. For a resident, a 52,000-square-foot Asian grocery anchor two blocks off Broadway changes what a Tuesday grocery run looks like. It also reorders the plaza around it, which is the kind of shift that quietly pulls foot traffic and new tenants for years.

The Broadway anchors worth a second look this weekend

The festival will hand you a plastic wineglass and a lot of options, but Broadway's year-round restaurants are still the reason to keep coming back after the tents come down.

• wonderful, at 270 Broadway, remains the Michelin Guide's Millbrae listing, running Hunanese and Sichuan cooking that leans into cured, smoked, and fermented ingredients. The godfather's noodles with pork and pickled chili and the boneless fish in Sichuan-peppercorn broth are the dishes to send an out-of-town guest home talking about.
• 16 Mile House on Broadway keeps its role as the American bar-and-grill anchor, useful when the group cannot agree on cuisine.
• Fiddler's Green sits near the south end of downtown as the resident Irish pub, which becomes relevant around 4:30 p.m. when the festival music winds down and you need a place with actual chairs.
• Dean's Produce is the Broadway grocer that predates almost everything around it and is a good stop for Sunday morning fruit before the crowds arrive.
• Modern Eats opened with a Chamber-hosted grand opening on January 18, 2025, complete with dragon dancers. Roughly a year and a half in, it is now a working part of the block rather than a novelty.

The point is not the individual restaurants. The point is that in 2026, a Labor Day Saturday can start at the festival on Broadway, detour to a fast-casual pizza on El Camino Real that did not exist in January, and finish at a Michelin-listed dining room, all within a walk.

A resident's Saturday, mapped

If you have already done the festival five or ten times and want a route that uses what is new:

1. 9:45 a.m. Coffee and produce at Dean's before Broadway closes to traffic.
2. 10:15 a.m. Enter the festival at Victoria. Do the artist booths first while the crowd is still light.
3. 12:30 p.m. Cut over to El Camino Real for a Hot Ron slice at Slice House. Sixteen seats means you may end up eating on the walk back.
4. 1:30 p.m. Back to the main stage at Taylor Boulevard for the afternoon bands.
5. 4:00 p.m. Loop through the community stage in the 200 block for the lower-key sets.
6. 5:15 p.m. Festival closes. Walk to wonderful for an early dinner while the tents are still coming down. Reservations by phone; the restaurant handles its own bookings.
7. 7:30 p.m. Fiddler's Green for a nightcap.

Sunday, run it in reverse and skip the parts that did not work.

The festival is the same festival it has been for 55 years. The five-minute walk around it is not the same walk it was in 2024.

The transit detail that quietly changes who shows up

Millbrae's downtown sits inside a three-minute walk of Millbrae Station, the only point on the Peninsula where BART and Caltrain connect in the same station. That fact used to matter mostly to commuters heading north to San Francisco or south to San Jose. It now matters to festival planning, because it means friends from the East Bay and the South Bay can meet you on Broadway without a car, on the same day, with one transfer or none. If you have hosted out-of-town family for Labor Day and dreaded the parking conversation, the answer this year is to send them a BART link.

It also matters to why operators keep picking Millbrae. A grocery anchor the size of T&T does not sign a lease for a Peninsula city on foot traffic alone. It signs because BART, Caltrain, and residential density finally line up in one spot, and because the surrounding food and retail have started responding.

What this means if you already live here

Two practical things.

First, this is the last Labor Day where downtown will look the way it looks now. Once T&T opens at Friendship Plaza this winter, the pedestrian pattern on the south end of El Camino Real will shift, and the businesses in that plaza will orient around a new anchor. The Labor Day 2026 walk is a snapshot of a transitional downtown.

Second, if you own a home within walking distance of Broadway or the station, the changes happening around you are the kind that shape long-term neighborhood value quietly rather than dramatically. Three-corridor food districts, a Michelin-listed anchor restaurant, a 52,000-square-foot grocery, and a genuine transit hub are the ingredients that keep a small Peninsula downtown from turning over into vacancies. They also affect how a listing on your block reads to a buyer six months from now.

That is our job at Wang Tang Group — to read the block-by-block shifts in downtowns like Millbrae's and translate them into what your home is worth this quarter, not last. If you are curious what the past year of downtown activity has done to values on your street, we would be glad to walk you through it. Request a free home valuation and we will send you a market read specific to your block, in English, Mandarin, or Cantonese.