Broadway between Victoria Avenue and Meadow Glen Avenue will close for the same two days it has closed on Labor Day weekend for more than half a century. What sits on either side of that closure has quietly changed since the last festival packed up. If you live here, the useful question is not what the festival looks like. It is what to do with a Broadway that has more anchors, more foot traffic, and a different food map than it had twelve months ago.
The three-corridor downtown you did not have last Labor Day
For years, Millbrae's downtown was a single spine. Broadway did the heavy lifting. El Camino Real was where you drove past on the way somewhere else. That is no longer the shape of the place.
A craft pizza operator opened on El Camino Real in February, a 52,000-square-foot grocery anchor is going into Friendship Plaza this winter, and a new café has filed to take over a long-vacant appliance shop between them. The Gateway paseo near Millbrae Station keeps filling in. The result is three walkable corridors within a few blocks of each other, all inside a three-minute walk of the BART and Caltrain platforms.
What actually opened, filed, or was confirmed since the 54th festival:
- Slice House by Tony Gemignani, El Camino Real near Fiddlers Green, opened February 21, 2026, from the 13-time world champion pizzaiolo in a fast casual setting. A half block from Broadway in the city's bustling downtown and walking distance from Millbrae Square Shopping Center.
- T&T Supermarket, Friendship Plaza. Canada's largest Asian grocery chain confirmed in November 2025 that it will open a 52,000-square-foot store at 95 Murchison Drive and 135–143 South El Camino Real in Winter 2026, creating 350 jobs.
- Millbraes Cafe, 1663 El Camino Real. A license filing with the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control shows the business, identified as a café, has applied for a license to sell beer and wine, taking over the former Otto's Appliance Service space.
- Modern Eats, Broadway. On January 18, 2025, the Millbrae Chamber of Commerce hosted a grand opening for Modern Eats Restaurant.
- Gateway paseo, adjacent to Millbrae Station. Still filling in, with residents and office workers within steps of it.
None of that reads as a single story until you overlay it on a festival map. Then the pattern is obvious. Broadway's Labor Day crowd used to be an island. This year it has neighbors on both sides.
What the T&T anchor actually changes about a weekend
A grocery announcement is the sort of thing residents skim past. This one deserves a second look, because a 52,000-square-foot anchor at Friendship Plaza reshapes traffic patterns for every business between Murchison and Broadway.
T&T's CEO Tina Lee framed the choice plainly:
"I have had my eye on Millbrae for a while. It's a great spot to serve families living in the peninsula and well spaced between our San Francisco and San Jose locations. We hope our store becomes a place where neighbors come together to shop, eat, take comfort in familiar flavors and discover new tastes."
Read that as a real estate signal rather than a press quote. A 52,000-square-foot grocery store is an anchor tenant that changes the behavior of every other business in the plaza, drives weekly repeat visits from a customer base that already lives within a short drive or walk, and creates the kind of sustained foot traffic that supports cafes, quick-service restaurants, and specialty shops in the surrounding spaces. The reason Millbraes Cafe filed for a space at 1663 El Camino this July, and the reason a Gemignani-branded pizzeria took a lease on El Camino in February, is that operators started reading the same map T&T did.
The mechanism behind all of it is transit. Millbrae's economic development office describes downtown as being within a three-minute walk of Millbrae Station, the only point on the Peninsula where BART and Caltrain connect in the same place. That transit fact used to matter mostly to commuters. It now matters to restaurant operators looking for locations with reliable foot traffic across multiple hours of the day.
The festival, stripped to the logistics you actually need
The dates are set. The footprint is unchanged. Here is the whole thing in one glance.
| Detail | 55th Annual Millbrae Art & Wine Festival |
|---|---|
| Dates | Saturday and Sunday, September 5 and 6, 2026 |
| Hours | 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., both days |
| Footprint | Broadway Avenue between Victoria Ave. and Meadow Glen Ave. |
| Admission | Free |
| Scale | 170-plus artists and crafters, two music stages, wine and craft beer garden |
| Draw | Around 50,000 attendees over the weekend |
| Transit | Caltrain and BART to Millbrae Station, SamTrans routes 122 and the SFO shuttle |
Sources: Labor Day Weekend on Saturday and Sunday, September 5 and 6, 2026, 10 AM–5 PM both days, on Broadway Avenue between Victoria Ave. and Meadow Glen Ave.; drawing 50,000-plus attendees over Labor Day weekend with 170-plus artists and crafters, two stages of live music, a wine and craft beer garden, gourmet food booths, and a family fun zone; Caltrain and BART from Millbrae Station with SamTrans routes 122 and the SFO shuttle stopping near the festival zone.
The parking math is worth taking seriously. If 50,000 people arrive over 48 hours on a corridor that normally serves a residential neighborhood, the streets nearest Broadway saturate before noon on Saturday. Walking in from a residential block, or riding two stops on Caltrain, is not a hardship in September. It is the shortest route to a table.
A Labor Day weekend that uses the new map
If you already live in Millbrae, the reason to plan around this year's festival is that the perimeter has more to offer than it did last September. A resident's weekend now looks something like this:
- Friday evening, pre-festival. Walk El Camino Real for dinner rather than fighting Broadway. Slice House is the obvious first stop, and its half-block distance from Broadway means you are already in position for Saturday morning. The pizzeria joins downtown's diverse mix of restaurants, shopping, and professional businesses including Safeway, Trader Joe's, Peet's Coffee, Dean's Produce, 16 Mile House, and many more.
- Saturday, 10 a.m. to about 1 p.m. Enter the festival from the Meadow Glen end, work south toward Victoria while the crowd is still thin, and hit the artist booths first. There are 170-plus artists and crafters, and by afternoon the interesting ones are three deep.
- Saturday lunch, off the spine. Duck a block off Broadway. If you have guests visiting, wonderful at 270 Broadway serves Hunanese and Sichuan cuisine and has attracted many a local and curious palate, which is more interesting than a festival food booth and reads better on a first visit to Millbrae than a sausage-on-a-stick.
- Sunday morning. Skip the festival's opening hour. Walk the Gateway paseo toward Millbrae Station instead, then loop back for the music stages once the sun is over Broadway.
- Sunday afternoon closer. Parking is tighter than it used to be, and public transit is genuinely the easier choice. If you drove in, leave before 4 p.m. If you walked, stay for the second music set and finish at 16 Mile House or Fiddlers Green on the way home.
That is a plan built on a downtown that has three corridors, not one.
The Broadway anchors that still set the tone
Nothing about the new arrivals displaces the restaurants that gave Broadway its reputation. It is still the case that on Broadway you have a Michelin-recommended restaurant, a growing set of Hong Kong-style cafes, and an evolving mix that keeps adding specificity without losing its character. 16 Mile House is still the American bar-and-grill anchor at the south end. Fiddlers Green is still the pub the airport crowd knows by name. The Chamber grand opening for Modern Eats in January 2025 pulled dragon dancers and a crowd that spilled into the street, which is the kind of civic detail that tells you the business community is treating openings as events rather than lease signings.
What has changed is the surrounding context. Broadway used to carry the whole weight of the Millbrae dining conversation. This September, it is one of three walkable corridors that share it. The festival is the moment residents notice.
If you have been thinking about how the changes downtown affect what your home is worth, or you are watching the Peninsula from farther out and want a sense of what a Labor Day weekend in Millbrae actually feels like, Lana Morin Pierce has spent eighteen years working these streets as a San Mateo native. Book a consultation and we can walk through the market you are actually buying into, block by block.
