At the ribbon-cutting on April 2, Mayor Michael Brownrigg told the crowd what the whole project had been about from the start. "What makes a great downtown isn't really great parking, it's great vitality," he said. "It's great liveliness. It's great restaurants. It's seeing other human beings because, as humans, we want to be with humans."
About 300 people showed up that day for champagne, face painting, and a silent disco on a patch of pavement that had been a parking lot for decades. Five months later, if you walk the same block, you'll find almost everything Brownrigg described. You will not find the one restaurant the whole square was arguably built around.
What's already running
Downtown Burlingame's stretch between Park Road and Lorton Avenue has filled in fast since the square opened. Sweetgreen took 235 Lorton Ave and Local Kitchens took 225 Lorton, both inside the 220 Park development's ground-floor retail, and both are pulling from the six-story office tower above them, now fully leased with 185,000 square feet of office space and 17,000 square feet of retail, according to details shared at the ribbon-cutting. Tenants there include SkyKnight Capital, Confluent, and Upstart, plus a large Industrious co-working floor, which is a lot of desk jobs generating lunch orders within a two-minute walk of the square.
A short walk up Burlingame Avenue, Amado opened in February, the fifth restaurant from chef Gloria Dominguez and her family, whose Taqueria Salsa has been running since 1988. Her daughter Erika runs the kitchen alongside her, and her son Alfonso designed the interior. It draws enough of a crowd that by May, people were reportedly making the trip from outside the area specifically for the mole rosa. Twelvemonth, the plant-based restaurant and bakehouse on Lorton, keeps a late-night bar going on weekends. Stella, the Italian spot on Broadway that's been in Burlingame since 2005, still handles the private dinners and group events the newer spots aren't set up for.
Put those together and the block covers a full day now. Coffee and lunch on one end, dinner and a late bar on the other, private events somewhere in the middle. That's the part of the story every local business feed and every neighborhood post has already told you.
Here's what those posts tend to skip: the building the whole redevelopment was designed around, the one directly facing the square, is still empty.
The building that had to leave before it could stay
The corner at 222 Park Road is Burlingame's old post office, built in 1941 under the Works Progress Administration. When the city and its development partners, Sares Regis and Dostart Development, built the underground parking garage and six-story office tower on that site, they couldn't just build around the historic structure. They cut it loose from its foundation, moved it roughly 120 feet out of the way on temporary supports, built underneath it, and then moved it back to where it had always stood. The building was designated a historic resource in 2020, which is part of why it got preserved rather than demolished, and part of why putting it back exactly where it belongs mattered enough to attempt in the first place.
That is an unusual thing to do to a building, and it left an unusual problem behind. According to reporting from the Burlingame Voice, the community blog that has tracked this project since the 2021 groundbreaking, code issues tied to the historic portion of the building, the part that got moved and returned, have introduced delays on the street-level restaurant space. It's the kind of complication that doesn't show up in a press release. A structure that's been detached from its foundation and reattached has to satisfy inspectors on terms that a building which never moved wouldn't need to think about twice.
The tenant waiting on the other side of that inspection process is Bacchus Management Group, the operator behind two Michelin-starred restaurants on the Peninsula, The Village Pub in Woodside and Selby's in Atherton, along with Spruce in San Francisco. Bacchus signed a lease for the ground floor at 222 Park Road and has listed the project as "Coming Fall 2026" on its own site for months. Job postings for line cooks, sous chefs, and dishwashers went up over the summer, which is usually the clearest sign an opening is close. But close and confirmed aren't the same thing, and nobody involved, not Bacchus, not the city, not the BID, has put a specific date on the calendar.
What we do know, from the Chronicle's own reporting on the space, is what the restaurant is meant to be. The team plans to keep original details from the post office gallery, including brass light fixtures, marble wainscoting, and terrazzo floors, and the food is described as California inspired, with ambitions toward a Michelin star. There will be a bar and lounge with a la carte options, including a burger, alongside a full dining room.
That's a specific, deliberate restaurant, built inside a building with a genuinely unusual construction history. It is also, right now, the one storefront on the square still behind glass.
Why "fall" doesn't mean what it usually means here
If you've been watching the Old Post Office's Instagram or checking the windows on your walk to Sweetgreen, the useful thing to know is that "fall 2026" has been the stated target since at least December of last year, well before the code complications became public. A target announced that far in advance, tied to a building with this kind of structural history, is worth treating as a range rather than a date. The hiring activity says the restaurant is close to functional. The building's own past says the last mile of any construction timeline here runs through inspectors who have to sign off on a structure that spent part of its life sitting somewhere else.
None of this is a criticism of the project. Moving a 1941 post office 120 feet and setting it back down without losing the terrazzo floors is a harder job than most buildings ever face, and the fact that it's happening at all is the reason the corner still has its original character instead of a generic ground-floor lobby. It just means the calendar is softer than the word "fall" implies.
What actually has a date
While the anchor restaurant waits on its paperwork, the square already has a full slate of programming with real dates attached. The Downtown Burlingame Business Improvement District's Fall Fest runs October 25, with a petting zoo, a small train for kids, arts and crafts, and a Halloween costume contest, right on the square itself. The Winterfest Holiday Kids Train follows on December 4, with hot chocolate and the annual tree lighting.
Those events used to happen somewhere in downtown Burlingame regardless. What's different this year is that they finally have a room built for them. A one-acre space with a flexible performance area on the Park Road side and communal seating on the Lorton side, designed by SWA Group at a cost of roughly $6.4 million split between the city and the 220 Park developers, gives a costume contest or a holiday train somewhere to actually happen instead of just occupying a closed-off street.
The short version, if you're heading downtown this week
Everything that opened in the last eight months is running the way it was designed to. Sweetgreen and Local Kitchens have the lunch crowd. Amado and Twelvemonth have the evening. Stella still hosts the parties too big for anywhere else. The square itself, the actual public space, has been finished and in use since April.
The one piece still missing is the building the whole thing was arranged around, and it's missing for a reason specific to that building. When the Old Post Office opens, expect the block to read as complete in a way it hasn't quite reached yet. Until then, "fall" is the honest word for it. Just don't treat it as a date on your kitchen calendar.
If you're curious how a change like this actually shows up in property values on the surrounding blocks, that's the kind of question Cheryl Bower fields often from people who've lived here for years. She's local, she's watching the same construction fencing you are, and she's happy to talk through what it means for your street specifically. In the meantime, Fall Fest is October 25. That one you can actually plan around.
