Saturday morning on Broadway starts the way it has for more than three decades: folding tables going up in the city parking lot between La Cruz and Victoria Avenue, crates of stone fruit and cut flowers arriving before 8 a.m., regulars circling twice before they buy anything. The Millbrae Farmers Market has been run by the Chamber of Commerce since 1993, and by midmorning the sidewalk in front of it is doing what it's always done: funneling people into the restaurants a few doors down.
That part of Millbrae hasn't changed. What has changed is what happens after you leave the market. For most of this town's history, Broadway was the only reason to walk anywhere downtown. Now there's a second pull a few minutes away, on the other side of the train tracks, and the two rarely show up in the same Saturday for the same person. That's the part worth understanding if you live here: Millbrae's downtown didn't get bigger this year so much as it split into two distinct centers of gravity, and the walk between them is shorter than the way most people actually shop it.
Broadway Kept Its Character While Adding a Register It Didn't Have
Broadway has always been a Cantonese and Hong Kong-style strip, the kind of block where a bowl of congee or a milk tea is a Tuesday errand rather than an event. That's still mostly true. New Broadway Bistro, at 349 Broadway, fits squarely into that tradition: a women- and Asian-owned Hong Kong cafe built around comfort dishes like bitter melon with egg-white rice noodles and dried scallop, plus an Ovaltine French toast that's become one of its calling cards.
What's different is a restaurant three doors down. Wonderful, at 270 Broadway, earned a specific Michelin Guide recommendation for Hunanese and Sichuan cooking, not a cuisine Broadway has historically carried in any depth. That's a small fact with a real implication: the strip that used to have one register now has two, and the newer one is drawing people who weren't necessarily coming for the older one. Won Kok, whose original location has operated for years on Monterey Boulevard in San Francisco, chose Millbrae for a branch of its own, another sign that operators from the city are starting to see Broadway as worth the drive rather than a fallback.
Further down the block, the Sixteen Mile House at 448 Broadway carries the oldest story on the street. Built in 1872 by the Sanchez family, the original landholders of what became Millbrae and Burlingame, it takes its name from its exact distance from San Francisco and reopened as a restaurant and bar after a renovation, giving the after-work crowd a reason to linger past the market's early-afternoon close. None of this required Broadway to become something else. It just got a wider range of reasons to be there.
The Walk Most People Skip
The newer pull sits on the other side of the Millbrae Intermodal Station, where BART and Caltrain share a single platform, one of the few places on the Peninsula where that's true. Gateway at Millbrae Station opened in 2023 on what used to be surface parking for the station, and for its first couple of years it was mostly known for its residential towers and a handful of ground-floor tenants still filling in.
This year it filled in further with a T&T Supermarket, a roughly 52,000-square-foot store from a chain that built its reputation in Canada on pan-Asian groceries and prepared foods rather than a standard supermarket lineup. For Millbrae residents, that's a genuinely different kind of stop than anything Broadway offers: less a sit-down meal, more a grocery run that doubles as a browse, and it sits close enough to the station that transit commuters can fold it into a normal week without a special trip.
Here's the part that doesn't get said enough: Gateway and Broadway are close. Not a drive-and-park kind of close, a walk kind of close, separated mostly by the tracks and a shift in feel rather than any real distance. But because they opened at different times, serve different needs, and don't share a sightline, most people still treat them as two separate places to run separate errands on separate days. A market morning on Broadway and a grocery stop at Gateway used to have no reason to happen in the same outing. Now they do, and the residents who've figured that out are the ones getting more out of a single Saturday than the geography used to allow.
If you're testing that loop yourself, the order that tends to work is simple:
- Farmers market first, while the produce is freshest and the lot isn't full
- Lunch on Broadway, at whichever end of the cuisine spectrum you're in the mood for that week
- The walk over to Gateway, timed for whenever the market crowd starts thinning
- A T&T run for whatever the week's cooking calls for, on your way back toward the station or home
Central Park Closes Out the Day the Way It Always Has
None of this changes what happens once the sun starts going down. Central Park still runs its free summer Movies in the Park series, a blanket-and-lawn-chair tradition that recently screened The Wild Robot for a crowd of families who treat it as the standard way to end a Saturday. It's the one piece of downtown life that hasn't needed reinventing, because it never depended on which side of the tracks was busier that week.
That's really the shape of Millbrae right now. The market anchors the morning the way it has since 1993. Broadway carries more range than it used to, without losing what made it Broadway. Gateway gives the other side of the station a genuine reason to be a stop rather than a pass-through. And Central Park still closes the loop at night, unbothered by any of it. The town didn't get louder. It got a second half.
Debbie Elowson has spent years helping families find their footing in towns like this one, where the character of a neighborhood shows up less in a listing sheet and more in the way a Saturday actually unfolds. If Millbrae's split downtown has you curious about what it would mean to call one side of those tracks home, Work with Debbie and start the conversation.
