Sweetgreen Opens Before the Fountain Does: What's Actually Landing at Burlingame's New Town Square

If you've driven down Park Road toward the Caltrain station any time in the last five years, you've watched the same chain-link fence for what felt like forever. Behind it: a squat, boarded-up post office that closed in 2014, and eventually a construction crane that seemed permanently parked over the lot next to it. For most people walking past on their way to the train, that corner has been a placeholder. This year it stops being one.

Here is the part that surprised even people who track downtown construction closely. That old post office did not just sit there while builders worked around it. Crews put the roughly 1,000-ton, 1941 structure on steel rails, rolled it more than 100 feet across the site so they could dig a two-level underground garage, then slid it back to its original spot once the digging was done. The building left downtown Burlingame and came back to it, on rails, without leaving downtown Burlingame.

A post office that moved twice and is now becoming a restaurant

The building matters because of what it's about to become, not just what it is. It sits at the base of 220 Park, a six-story, 185,000-square-foot office and retail project developed jointly by Sares Regis Group of Northern California and Dostart Development Company. Page & Turnbull served as preservation architect on the post office piece, with Ruth Todd overseeing the restoration work that let the 1941 Spanish Eclectic structure keep its original bones while a modern tower rose up behind it.

The deal that made this possible is a small case study in how these things actually get built. Because the post office qualified as a historic structure, the city gave the developers more flexibility on building height than they'd normally allow, in exchange for preservation work that met Secretary of the Interior standards. The developers, in turn, put $2 million toward the city's town square project next door, on top of separate state funding that helped push the square from concept to construction. As one of the Dostart partners put it when the post office slid back into place, you can't create this sort of history from scratch.

What goes inside that reclaimed post office is the part most residents haven't fully clocked. Bacchus Group, the company behind San Francisco's Michelin-starred Spruce, signed a ten-year lease on the space in 2023 and is opening in two phases. The indoor dining room comes first. The patio, which opens directly onto the new town square, comes after. That sequencing is not an accident. The patio only makes sense once the square around it is actually finished and walkable, so Bacchus is essentially waiting on the city's timeline as much as its own build-out.

The fast food arrives first, the marquee restaurant arrives last

That's the detail that changes how you should think about this corner over the next few months. The businesses opening soonest are not the ones getting the attention. As of late July, Sweetgreen and Local Kitchens, tucked into 7,562 square feet of retail space at 235 and 225 Lorton Avenue, were the first tenants through the door, with Sweetgreen on track to open within days and Local Kitchens following at a date the city hadn't nailed down yet. Burlingame's mayor at the time, Peter Stevenson, drew a clean distinction between the two waves of businesses landing on this block: the quick, frequent-visit spots arriving now, and Bacchus, described as a fine-dining name known across the Bay Area, arriving later once its own build-out and the patio timeline line up.

So the order that's actually unfolding looks like this:

• Sweetgreen, a fast-casual salad concept, opening first at 235 Lorton Avenue
• Local Kitchens, a multi-cuisine counter-service spot at 225 Lorton Avenue, opening on a date still to be announced
• The Bacchus restaurant inside the historic post office, opening in two stages, indoor dining first
• The Bacchus patio, which only opens once the adjacent town square is finished enough to sit next to

If you've been assuming the post office restaurant is the anchor tenant and everything else is filler, the sequencing suggests the opposite is happening first. The lunch crowd shows up before the marquee dinner reservation does.

There's a practical reason for that order beyond permitting and construction. The office portion of 220 Park went from 5 percent leased to fully leased in about nine months, according to reporting from The San Francisco Standard, and that's a lot of new weekday lunch traffic landing on a stretch of Lorton Avenue that didn't have much of it before. Fast-casual concepts are built for exactly that rhythm. A ten-year fine-dining lease is built for a different one, dinner reservations and weekend patio seating, which only really works once there's a finished plaza to look at while you eat.

The rest of the block isn't waiting either

Zoom out one block and this isn't an isolated project. Downtown Burlingame has been adding names at a pace that's easy to lose track of if you're not walking it every week. Amado had its ribbon cutting on Lorton Avenue this spring. Trad Bone Broth, founded by brothers Jonathan and David Kim, is already serving ready-to-drink broth a few doors down. Twelvemonth, the plant-based restaurant and bakehouse at 330 Lorton Avenue that changes its menu every season, has become enough of a fixture that its arrival barely reads as new anymore. Almondette is listed as coming soon on the same stretch. None of these are part of the 220 Park lease roster specifically, but they're opening into the same foot traffic the office tower is generating, which is part of why this particular block of Lorton Avenue feels different this year than it did two years ago.

The Burlingame neighborhood has always had two separate downtown identities, the busier Avenue and the quieter Broadway corridor. This is the first time in a while that a third center of gravity, the Park Road and Lorton Avenue pocket near the Caltrain station, has had this much simultaneously landing in one place.

What to actually watch for this fall

If you want a reason to walk down there before the holidays, downtown Burlingame's own event calendar gives you two obvious ones: Fall Fest on October 25 and the Winterfest Holiday Kids Train on December 4. Both put you a block or two from the 220 Park corner, close enough to see how much of the town square has filled in and whether Local Kitchens has opened yet.

None of this requires you to do anything. If you already live in Burlingame, the changes show up on their own, in longer lunch lines on weekdays, in a patio that wasn't there last year, in a post office that spent over a decade closed and is finally doing something again. The interesting part isn't that a historic building got saved. Plenty of buildings get saved and then sit empty for another five years waiting for a tenant that never quite fits. This one has multiple tenants lined up in a specific order, with a fine-dining name waiting on the city's own construction schedule before it can finish opening. That's a different kind of story than "old building becomes new restaurant." It's old building becomes the last piece of a puzzle that fast-casual chains got to skip.

If you're weighing what any of this means for a home near downtown Burlingame, or just want to talk through what you're seeing change on your own walk to the train, the Archini & Sebastian Group knows this stretch of the Peninsula block by block. Reach out any time you want a local read on what's actually happening here.