Walk east on Oak Grove Avenue on a Thursday in late July, and the block reads differently than it did a year ago. Springline's plaza is loud again. A martini cart rolls between tables at the old Canteen address. Two doors down, a Singaporean kitchen that used to live on Chestnut Street is back in service under the same family that opened it in 1999. And a block over on Santa Cruz Avenue, the storefronts that sat dark through most of 2024 and 2025 are quietly being rezoned for tenants nobody would have predicted when the current specific plan was written.
The shorthand version of downtown, the one long-term residents carry around in their heads, is being rewritten in real time. Summer 2026 is the inflection point, and it is worth understanding what changed and why, because the version of Santa Cruz Avenue that emerges over the next twelve months will not look like the one that came before.
Springline Is Finally Full
For four years, Springline has been the story of a Menlo Park development slowly courting San Francisco operators across the county line. That project closed in June. Alisios, a contemporary Mexican restaurant and bar from the team behind Burma Superstar, Burma Love, Teakwood and Kayah, opened next to Barebottle Brewing on June 11, with executive chef Carlos Villegas and sous chef Renee Gomez drawing on flavors from Oaxaca and Baja and using many recipes from Villegas' family.
The detail that matters: Alisios is the final tenant. Burma Food Group opened the first restaurant at Springline and, as bar director Humberto Galeano put it, they were the first one and now they are the last one. The lineup is closed. If you have not walked the plaza recently, the operators now anchored there include Andytown Coffee Roasters, Barebottle Brewing, Burma Love, Che Fico, Proper Food, Causwells, and Alisios. It is, functionally, a curated pocket of San Francisco dropped between Oak Grove and El Camino Real.
For a resident, that changes the weekday calculus. The reason to leave Menlo Park for dinner used to be that a specific restaurant did not exist here. That excuse is getting harder to make.
The Martini Cart Is a Bigger Signal Than It Looks
Causwells took over the former Canteen space at Springline and opened in April. The obvious read is that another Marina bistro found its way south. The more useful read is what the operators did with the room.
The 50-seat art deco restaurant features peacock-print wallpaper, sage green velvet chairs, and brushed gold hardware, with a garage roll-up wall that opens to seat an additional 60 outdoors. The menu is about 75% new, chef-owner Adam Rosenblum's cooking is shaped by classical French training and time in New Orleans, and co-owner Elmer Mejicanos built out a bar program using the doubled footprint to run a martini cart.
Two things follow from that. First, the operators are treating Menlo Park not as a satellite of the original but as a distinct concept. Second, the martini cart is a design choice that only works when the room is large enough and the average check supports table service that slows down on purpose. Neither the size nor the pacing exists at the original SF location. Menlo Park got a version built for a market with more time and more space, which is a decent one-sentence description of what has been drawing SF operators here for four years.
A Displacement Story With an Actual Ending
The Springline arc is the confident half of downtown. The other half of the block has been the Chestnut Street vacancies, and the counter-narrative there arrived in April.
After being forced out of its longtime Menlo Park home last year, Shiok! Singapore Kitchen reopened in a new space on Oak Grove Avenue with the same kitchen staff dishing up the same family recipes. The restaurant has served traditional Singaporean food since 1999, started by co-owner Dennis Lim's sister after she moved from Singapore and cooked for friends at home in San Carlos before the business outgrew that space and moved to Menlo Park about thirteen years ago under Lim's ownership.
When the Chestnut Street building was sold, Shiok!, along with other tenants including Gerry's Cakes, was forced to leave by January 1, 2025, and Lim struggled to find a new location that fit his needs. In the interim, the restaurant operated as delivery and takeout out of a Redwood City ghost kitchen, which Lim said was not the same because the connection with customers was missing.
"I drove up and down the Peninsula, but we really wanted to come back to Menlo Park, because of the community." — Dennis Lim, quoted in The Almanac, April 2026
The Chestnut Street building where Shiok! spent decades is still boarded up. That, in miniature, is the tension that pushed the City Council to act in June.
What the June 23 Vote Actually Changed
For years, the storefronts on Santa Cruz Avenue have operated under a set of rules written to preserve retail. The rules did not preserve retail. They preserved vacancy.
The Menlo Park City Council approved a package of zoning changes on June 23 to allow more types of businesses on Santa Cruz Avenue, responding to a growing vacancy problem, after Windy Hill Ventures, owner of 870 Santa Cruz Ave., argued that existing zoning had made it difficult to attract tenants and contributed to persistent vacancies along the city's main commercial corridor, with large storefronts sitting empty and rents outpacing what many retailers can afford, all under an El Camino Real/Downtown Specific Plan adopted in 2012 that had imposed strict limits in order to cultivate a retail-focused streetscape.
The practical changes are narrower than the headlines suggest, and worth reading carefully if you actually live on this street.
Spas, salons, and similar personal service businesses can now operate on the ground floor without a conditional use permit, where they were previously generally restricted to upper floors. Other newly permitted uses still require discretionary approval. Small-scale recreation, including gyms and arcades, may now apply for use permits after being previously prohibited, subject to Planning Commission review. Massage parlors remain outside the downtown core, and banks, which already account for about 28,000 square feet, are capped at a total of 30,000 square feet on Santa Cruz Avenue.
Councilmember Drew Combs put the case for the change bluntly at the June 23 meeting, saying the specific plan had been almost a complete failure in terms of actually revitalizing Santa Cruz Avenue and that projects there had been few and far between.
Translated to the sidewalk: expect the next round of leases to skew toward services rather than storefront retail. A yoga studio at street level, a salon in a space that used to sell handbags, a small climbing gym behind a facade that once held a boutique. The council did not remove the retail character. It stopped forcing it.
There is one detail worth flagging for anyone curious about the mechanics. As the project applicant, Windy Hill was responsible for covering the city's staff costs associated with processing the proposal, and records obtained through a Public Records Act request show it paid the city at least $57,658 in staff time between November 2024 and the end of March 2025. That is the private cost of moving a public zoning process, and it is why proposals like this tend to come from institutional owners rather than individual shopkeepers.
What Is On at the Guild This Summer
The Guild Theatre keeps the calendar interesting on the block. It is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit performance space at 949 El Camino Real, holds about 500 patrons, and hosts a wide range of music, film, and special events programming. For residents planning around dinner reservations, here is what is coming through in the next six weeks, drawn from the venue's public schedule.
| Date | Show |
|---|---|
| July 18 | Margo Price |
| July 26 | The White Buffalo |
| July 30 & 31 | Christone "Kingfish" Ingram |
| August 1 | Save Ferris |
| August 6 | Bad Nerves |
| August 14 | Cowboy Mouth |
| August 15 | Petty Theft, Tom Petty tribute |
| August 16 | David Lee Roth |
| August 17 | Cat Power |
| August 21 | Inner Wave |
The 500-seat scale is the point. A Cat Power show or a David Lee Roth date at this room is a fundamentally different night than the same artist at the Fox in Oakland or the Warfield in San Francisco. It also means the block around Santa Cruz Avenue and Curtis Street hums on show nights in a way it did not four years ago, which is part of why operators like Causwells were willing to sign the Springline lease in the first place.
The Thread Running Through All of It
Springline finished its build-out. Shiok! came back. The council removed the guardrails that were producing vacancies. The Guild books rooms that draw people who would not have crossed the Dumbarton five years ago.
Each of these looks like a separate story. Read together, they describe a downtown that is being rebalanced away from a preservation-era retail plan toward a service, dining, and entertainment mix that reflects who actually walks these blocks in 2026. That shift is visible on the street this month. It will be more visible by the holidays, when the first of the new personal-service tenants sign leases under the June 23 rules.
For a resident, the practical takeaway is small and immediate: the map of what is worth walking to has changed. Alisios is new. Causwells is new. Shiok! is back. The Guild's summer slate is one of its strongest yet. And the storefronts you have been walking past for two years are about to look different.
If you would like to talk through what any of this means for a property you own in Menlo Park, or how the shape of downtown factors into a specific decision, Luxury Inc. is available for a private consultation. Reach us at 1‑800‑LuxuryHomes, or schedule a private consultation at your convenience.
