Serramonte Center's Restaurant Boom Has Been "Coming Soon" Since January 2025. Here's What's Actually Open.

Drive down Serramonte Boulevard any weekend this month and you'll pass the same banner that's been hanging outside the mall's east wing since last winter: Koi Palace, Coming Soon. It was there in the spring. It was there over the summer. It's still there now, in mid-September, more than a year and a half after the relocation was first announced. If you've been holding off on a reservation because you assumed the new location must be close, you've been holding off longer than you needed to.

Here's the pattern worth understanding if you live near Serramonte Center and keep seeing these names pop up in local coverage: the small, quick-serve additions to this mall have opened almost exactly on schedule. The big, full-service restaurant relocations have not. One of them isn't a delay anymore so much as a fourth stated timeline. Knowing which is which tells you where to actually eat this week, and it explains something real about how retail construction works in a shopping center that's midway through a $37 million renovation.

The One Big Opening That Already Happened

Start with what's real. Jagalchi, the 75,000-square-foot Korean market that took over the space left empty when JCPenney closed in 2019, opened to the public on March 28, 2025. It came in a few months later than its original end-of-2024 target, but that's a modest slip for a project of that scale, and it landed. Inside, you'll find POGU, a 160-seat restaurant led by Chef Tony Yoo, who trained at San Francisco's Aqua and later served as head chef at the Korean Embassy during the 2012 London Olympics. There's also Basquia, a gluten-free bakery built around rice flour. The San Francisco Chronicle's first look inside Jagalchi described a complex big enough to include a grocery, two bars, a butcher counter and a seafood section, and it drew a reported 49,000 visitors over its opening weekend, according to Regency Centers, the company that owns the mall.

That's the baseline. Everything since has been slower.

What's Still Just a Sign

Here's where the six names you've probably read about actually stand, based on the most recent reporting available:

Koi Palace is the clearest case because it has the longest paper trail. Palo Alto Online first reported the relocation in January 2025, quoting co-owner Willy Ng, who said the new 20,000-square-foot space at 3 Serramonte Center, roughly double the size of the original Gellert Boulevard restaurant and built to seat 760 to 800 guests, would open that December. December passed. KRON4 later reported that Regency Centers had pushed the date to the first quarter of 2026. That quarter has also passed. As of last month, Peninsula Buzz was still describing all six concepts as "in the works," quoting mall spokeswoman Chelsea Careccia on a Cheesecake Factory winter opening and a Haidilao target of early next year.

There's a reason Koi Palace's timeline has slipped more than the others. Willy Ng's original plan wasn't a simple new tenant fitout. He told Palo Alto Online the Gellert Boulevard location would close the same day the new one opened, meaning this isn't construction on its own schedule so much as a synchronized handoff between two working restaurants, one of which has been serving the same neighborhood since 1996. That kind of same-day swap has more that can go wrong than opening a new storefront in a vacant box, and it's a reasonable guess at why this particular relocation keeps missing dates that Jagalchi, despite being nearly four times the square footage, mostly didn't.

The Small Stuff Landed on Schedule

The contrast gets sharper when you look at what Regency Centers built at Serramonte before any of this made headlines. In late 2024, the company's own announcement described new food concepts arriving at the mall, including Devil & Angel, a Korean dessert shop serving milk teas and mochi doughnuts, Burnin' Mouth, a Nashville hot chicken spot known for a Korean corn dog, and Simmer Huang Miao Grill, a Chinese dry-pot restaurant occupying a 2,556-square-foot space. Regency's own press blog covered these as completed openings, not future plans. None of them needed a banquet hall or a same-day restaurant swap, and none of them are still sitting behind drywall.

Kukje Bakery is a smaller-scale version of the same lesson. Kukje Supermarket has operated across the street in Daly City since 2002, and as of late 2025 the bakery expansion into the former Jade Dragon Restaurant space on Junipero Serra Boulevard was expected to open in spring 2026, according to a roundup of anticipated Silicon Valley openings. That's a small, single-tenant buildout, nothing close to the scale of a 20,000-square-foot flagship relocation with a synchronized restaurant closure attached, and it shows in how much less drama surrounds it.

What's Actually Worth a Trip This Week

If you're deciding where to eat rather than where to eat someday, here's what's real right now:

• Jagalchi, POGU, and Basquia Bakery at Serramonte Center, open since March 2025
• Koi Palace, still at its original location, 365 Gellert Blvd, running its regular hours
• Kukje Bakery, on Junipero Serra Boulevard, expected to be running by now based on its spring 2026 target
• The Daly City Farmers Market, held Saturdays at Serramonte Center starting around 9 a.m.

None of these require you to check a "Coming Soon" sign first.

The One Date You Can Actually Put on a Calendar

If you're mapping out plans for the next few weeks rather than the next few months, the more reliable venue for a locked date isn't Serramonte. It's the Cow Palace, a few minutes away on Geneva Avenue. This arena has hosted everything from Beatles concerts to rodeos since 1941, and its fall lineup this year includes back-to-back dated events: the Women of Rodeo showcase on Saturday, October 3, an all-women competition in barrel racing and breakaway roping, followed by the Grand National Rodeo itself on Friday, October 9 and Saturday, October 10, with Friday's program running from 5:30 to 10 p.m. Unlike the restaurant announcements a few miles over, these are dates you can actually build a weekend around.

None of this is a knock on what Regency Centers is building. 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, and Jagalchi's opening weekend crowd is a good sign the appetite for it is real. But if you live near Serramonte and keep seeing the same six names recycled through local coverage, the practical version of the story is simple: check the square footage before you check the headline.

Daly City's food scene keeps shifting in small, specific ways like this, and it's exactly the kind of on-the-ground detail worth having whether you're grabbing dinner this weekend or thinking ahead about what's changing in the neighborhood. If you ever want that same close-to-the-ground read applied to your own plans on the Peninsula, Daniel Choi is always glad to talk it through.