What Keeps Downtown Millbrae Busy Between Festivals

Ask anyone who has lived in Millbrae longer than a summer what defines downtown, and they will say the same thing: Labor Day weekend, Broadway closed to cars, an art booth every few feet from Victoria Avenue up to Meadow Glen. That answer is not wrong. The Millbrae Art & Wine Festival turns 55 this year, runs September 5 and 6 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and still counts as the Peninsula's biggest end-of-summer street fair. It also describes exactly two days out of 365.

The more interesting story is what happens on the other 363, because it turns out downtown Millbrae has been quietly running on a much older schedule than the festival, and this particular summer has added three new reasons to pay attention to it.

The Market Has Been Running Since 1993

The Millbrae Farmers' Market sets up every Saturday, 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., in the city lot on Broadway between La Cruz and Victoria, directly adjacent to the blocks between Victoria and Meadow Glen where the festival tents go up each September. The Millbrae Chamber of Commerce has sponsored it since 1993, which means it has now run for 33 straight years.

Do the arithmetic and the comparison gets stark. Thirty-three years of weekly Saturdays works out to somewhere around 1,700 market mornings. Fifty-five years of a two-day festival adds up to about 110 festival-days, total, across its entire history. The market has quietly logged more open Saturdays in the last decade alone than the festival has logged days since Nixon was in office. Nobody closes streets or hires two stages of live music for a Saturday market. But it is the thing that has actually been there, week after week, while the festival became the postcard version of downtown.

Three New Kitchens Opened Within Blocks of Each Other

If the market is the steady pulse, this summer added a burst of new activity around it. Three separate restaurant stories are unfolding on or near Broadway right now, and none of them are connected to one another.

• Millbraes Cafe filed for a beer and wine license with the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control to open at 1663 El Camino Real, taking over the former Otto's Appliance Service space. The filing lists Maria Guadalupe Davalos as owner. No opening date has been announced yet, and there is no website live as of this writing, but the name and a matching social account point toward a coffee shop concept.
• New Broadway Bistro is serving Chinese food at 349 Broadway, a few doors from where the farmers market sets its tables.
• wonderful, a Hunanese restaurant, earned a spot in the 2026 MICHELIN Guide USA, which described it as a "snug gem" in a corner of the Bay Area's Chinese food scene that usually gets less attention than Cantonese or Sichuan kitchens.

None of these three are chains. That matters for a downtown that spent years being described, fairly or not, as a place people passed through on the way to the airport. A café, a bistro, and a Michelin-noted spot opening in the same stretch of months is not a coincidence anyone planned. It is closer to three separate bets that this particular block of Broadway and El Camino is worth showing up on.

The Steakhouse That Never Actually Left

The clearest proof that downtown Millbrae has staying power is the restaurant that has technically been open since 1872. The original 16 Mile House stood at Center Street and El Camino Real, built by the family of Rancho Buri Buri grantee Jose Sanchez as a stagecoach stop on the road between San Francisco and San Jose. It survived nearly a century as an inn, a general store, and a bar before the building was demolished in 1971.

The demolition did not go quietly. A group of residents fought to save the original building, and although they lost that fight, the effort led directly to the founding of the Millbrae Historical Society, which still runs the Millbrae Museum and a self-guided History Walk past ten historic sites around town. The restaurant itself reopened the following year at 448 Broadway, where it still serves steak and seafood and still hosts live music on Friday and Saturday nights. A business that survived its own building's demolition and came back a block away is a reasonable definition of a neighborhood anchor.

What's Actually on the Calendar Through Fall

Between the market, the new restaurants, and the festival, there is a fuller fall calendar than the festival alone would suggest.

The movie series runs the second Friday of the month, June through September, and this year's lineup landed a genuinely kid-friendly slate. SamTrans picked downtown Millbrae for its half-century celebration, a fitting choice given the city's spot on the regional BART and Caltrain map.

There is one more small item worth mentioning even though it is not an event you can put on a calendar. The city's Bayside Manor Park Improvement Project just won an Outstanding Parks and Recreation Project Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers' Golden Gate Branch, recognizing what the city itself called a transformation 25 years in the making. That is a strange kind of honor, an award for finishing something a quarter-century after it started, but it fits the general pattern here. Millbrae does not move fast. It moves steadily, and the steady part is the part that lasts.

The Pattern, If You're Paying Attention

None of this is really about one weekend in September. The festival draws more than 50,000 people and gets the write-ups, the sponsor logos, and the two stages of live music. But the market has opened almost 1,700 Saturday mornings since 1993 without needing any of that. The steakhouse survived its own demolition. Three new kitchens picked this particular summer to open on streets that already had a 33-year-old market running through them. A park project that took 25 years just won an award for finishing.

If there is a single thread through all of it, it is that downtown Millbrae rewards showing up regularly more than it rewards showing up once. That is probably true of most small downtowns on the Peninsula, but it is unusually easy to see in Millbrae right now, because the ordinary and the new are happening on the same six or seven blocks at the same time.

If you are thinking about what it actually looks like to put down roots on streets like these, whether in Millbrae or elsewhere on the Peninsula, Daniel Choi can walk you through what different blocks and different budgets actually get you. Schedule a free consultation whenever you are ready to talk specifics.