Serramonte Center's New Restaurants Aren't Landing in the Order You'd Guess

If you've walked past the old JCPenney entrance at Serramonte Center lately, you already know something changed. What's less obvious is why six more restaurant names have suddenly attached themselves to the mall's future, and why some of them will show up wrapping paper on their menus by winter while others won't seat a single table until sometime in 2027. The gap isn't random. It maps almost exactly to which vacated box each one is taking over, and whether that box comes with a liquor license attached.

That's the part worth understanding if you live in Daly City and have started hearing "Serramonte's getting a Cheesecake Factory" and "Serramonte's getting Fogo de Chão" as if they're the same kind of news. They're not.

The Food Hall That Made the Rest Possible

The reason any of this is happening traces back to March 2025, when Jagalchi opened inside the mall's former JCPenney space. At 75,000 square feet, it's run by Mega Mart, the U.S. retail arm of Korea's Nongshim Group, and it's the company's fourth and largest American location after Atlanta, Sunnyvale and Fremont. Its opening weekend pulled in more than 49,000 visitors between Friday morning and Sunday evening, according to Regency Centers' own recap of the launch.

Inside, the format is closer to a Korean food hall than a grocery store: a seafood and butcher counter, an oyster bar, a gluten-free bakery called Basquia, and at the center of it all, POGU, a sit-down restaurant led by Michelin-starred chef Yoo Hyun-Soo. On weekends the market runs a live tuna-cutting demonstration, according to Korea Daily's coverage of the opening.

What matters for the rest of this story isn't the menu, it's what the traffic did. The retail analytics firm Placer.ai tracked Jagalchi's customer base after the opening and found it skewed toward higher-income shoppers than the mall had typically drawn, the kind of visitor who tends to spend more once they're already on-site. For a landlord like Regency Centers, that's the signal that a single large food anchor can outperform slicing the same department-store box into a dozen small specialty leases. Jagalchi wasn't just a restaurant opening. It was the pilot program.

Six Restaurants, Two Different Clocks

According to an early-August 2026 report from Peninsula Buzz, which cited mall spokeswoman Chelsea Careccia, six more food tenants are now committed to Serramonte Center. Here's how they line up:

Notice that only one of the six has a firm season attached. The Cheesecake Factory's own spokesperson told Peninsula Buzz the chain had been hunting for a Daly City site for years and considers Serramonte the right fit, and the opening is pegged specifically to this winter. Everything else Careccia described in the vaguer shorthand of "by end of next year."

Fogo de Chão is the clearest example of why. Steakhouses that plan to serve wine and cocktails need a liquor license, and Fogo filed for one at 1 Serramonte Center, Suite B, in March 2026, according to Hoodline's reporting on the filing. California's Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control process involves public notice periods and an investigation before approval, and the article notes that stretch can run for weeks or considerably longer with no guarantee attached. A build-out for a full-service steakhouse inside a subdivided anchor space simply takes longer to schedule around than a fast-casual buildout in a former sports bar.

Koi Palace's appearance on the list is its own small puzzle. The restaurant already anchors part of Serramonte's dining reputation, it's listed among the center's current merchants in Regency's own materials, so its name showing up again among six "coming" restaurants suggests an added or expanded location rather than a first arrival. Either way, it's a sign that even an existing tenant sees enough upside in the mall's current trajectory to grow inside it.

The Small Stuff Filled In While You Weren't Looking

The six big names aren't the only thing that's changed since Jagalchi opened. Peninsula Buzz's reporting also notes that Tokyo Beauty, SanFroyo and Onigilly have quietly become some of the mall's newest tenants in the interim, smaller-format additions that filled space while the larger restaurant leases were still working through permitting and construction. If you've noticed the mall feeling busier or slightly different in the last year without being able to name why, this is likely part of it. The leasing team didn't wait for the marquee names to land before making the corridors feel active again.

This Isn't Serramonte's First Reinvention

None of this is happening to a static building. Serramonte Center opened in September 1968 as part of the Serramonte planned community developed by Fred and Carl Gellert, and it's changed hands more than once since, sold in 2002, sold again in 2011, and landing with its current owner, Regency Centers, by 2021, according to the property's history. A mid-2010s expansion added roughly 200,000 more square feet to the original footprint.

When the city produced its environmental review of a proposed Serramonte expansion, it described an enclosed mall wrapped around four major anchors, Macy's, Target, JC Penney and Dick's Sporting Goods, with 90 retail stores filling in between. That accounting doesn't match what's on the directory today. As of June 2026, mall listings tracked by Malls.com show a five-anchor lineup of Macy's, Nordstrom Rack, Target, Dick's Sporting Goods and Best Buy, with the old JC Penney box gone entirely, replaced by Jagalchi. The anchor turnover here has been happening for years. What's new is the pace, and the fact that the current wave is built almost entirely around food.

What This Actually Looks Like Over the Next Year

If you're mapping this against your own routine, here's the practical version. Jagalchi and its live tuna-cutting weekends are already open now, along with the smaller additions like SanFroyo and Onigilly. The Cheesecake Factory is the next confirmed date, landing in the former Buffalo Wild Wings space this winter. Haidilao follows in early 2027. Fogo de Chão, the expanded Koi Palace, Marugame Udon and Kin No Katsu are all penciled in for sometime before the end of 2027, with Fogo's exact timing tied to how quickly its liquor license clears state review.

None of the six openings is guaranteed to hit its target exactly. Retail construction slips, permitting stalls, chains change plans. But the sequence itself, small format first, fast-casual chains next, liquor-license-dependent concepts last, is a pattern that tends to hold across shopping centers going through this kind of anchor-box turnover, and it's a useful lens for reading the next round of Serramonte news as it comes in rather than treating each announcement as a surprise.

Daly City has spent the last year and a half watching one department store's closure turn into the biggest culinary reshuffle Serramonte has seen since it opened in 1968. Whether you're timing a first visit to Jagalchi's oyster bar or just curious what's replacing the Buffalo Wild Wings you used to catch a game at, the mall down the hill is worth paying attention to for reasons that have nothing to do with property values.

Speaking of which, if watching your neighborhood keep reinventing itself has you thinking further ahead, whether that's a renovation, a move, or just understanding what your own Daly City home is worth in a market that keeps changing around it, the team at Archini & Sebastian Group is happy to talk it through. No pressure, just local knowledge. You can browse more on the Daly City neighborhood page or request a home valuation whenever you're curious.