If you've walked down Chestnut Street this year, you've probably noticed the boarded-up storefront near Santa Cruz Avenue and wondered what happened to it. For nearly two decades it was Shiok! Singapore Kitchen. Now it sits empty, and the restaurant's own owner has said out loud what everyone walking past has been thinking: he doesn't know why it's still vacant either.
A few blocks away, something close to the opposite has been happening. Springline, the mixed-use development on El Camino Real, spent the same stretch of months filling its very last open restaurant space, and it did so without ever appearing to sit on a gap. Same downtown, same season, two completely different stories about what it takes to open a restaurant here in 2026.
The Restaurant That Lost Its Home
Shiok! Singapore Kitchen has a longer history than its Chestnut Street address suggests. It started in 1999 as an eight-table restaurant in San Carlos, founded by Dennis Lim's sister after she moved from Singapore and began cooking for friends using recipes from their family. When it outgrew that space within six months, the business moved to a larger spot on Chestnut Street in downtown Menlo Park, and Lim eventually took over day-to-day operations there about 13 years ago.
That run ended when the Chestnut Street building was sold. Shiok!, along with other longtime tenants including Gerry's Cakes, was forced to leave by the new owner by January 1, 2025. Lim spent more than a year running Shiok! as a takeout-only "ghost kitchen" out of Redwood City rather than lay off his staff. It wasn't the same. "You don't have the same connection with customers," he said afterward. The old Chestnut Street building, meanwhile, has sat boarded up since the tenants left. "We're just wondering why, why is it vacant," Lim said. "We could have been there for a year."
Where It Landed
Shiok! reopened this spring at 625 Oak Grove Avenue, the former home of Lotus Restaurant, after a roughly $100,000 buildout of a 2,700-square-foot space. The new location gave Lim a larger dining room and kitchen than the original ever had, and he brought back the same kitchen staff and family recipes. If you've been looking for Shiok!'s laksa and don't know where it went, Oak Grove Avenue is the answer.
The Development That Never Had a Gap
While Shiok! was displaced, Springline kept adding restaurants without a visible vacancy in between. The development, built by Presidio Bay Ventures, had already brought in Andytown Coffee Roasters, Barebottle Brewing Co., Burma Love, Che Fico and Proper Food over the previous couple of years. On April 2, 2026, Causwells, the Marina district bistro, opened in the former Canteen space in a room roughly twice the size of its San Francisco original, complete with a rolling martini cart and a menu that's about 75 percent new. On June 11, Alisios opened as the final tenant needed to complete Springline's restaurant lineup. Humberto Galeano, bar director for Burma Food Group, put the arc simply: "It's funny because we were the first one, and now we are the last one."
The contrast is the point. Springline is a single-owner development leasing out purpose-built restaurant spaces one at a time. Chestnut Street is a strip of independently owned buildings where one sale can empty out several tenants at once. Both processes happened in the same few months, on streets a five-minute walk apart, and they produced opposite outcomes.
Santa Cruz Avenue Had Already Placed Its Bet
If you assume this was all one sudden wave, it actually started earlier than most of the recent headlines suggest. Yeobo, Darling opened at 827 Santa Cruz Ave back in June 2025, a full year before Causwells and Alisios arrived. The restaurant comes from chefs Meichih and Michael Kim, who previously ran the Michelin-starred Maum in Palo Alto and the more casual Bao Bei in Los Altos. Yeobo, Darling was the first time a chef team with that kind of pedigree chose Santa Cruz Avenue itself rather than routing around it. The name is a small piece of local color worth knowing: "yeobo" is a Korean term of endearment, close to "honey" or "sweetheart," the kind of word grandparents use with each other.
What This Means If You Live Here
Two practical takeaways. First, if a longtime tenant disappears after a building changes hands, it's worth checking Oak Grove Avenue before assuming the business is gone. That block has become something of a landing spot for displaced downtown institutions. Second, downtown's mix is about to widen beyond restaurants. On June 23, 2026, the Menlo Park City Council voted to open ground-floor Santa Cruz Avenue to spas, salons, and other personal service businesses without a conditional use permit, and to let previously banned gyms and small-scale recreation apply for one. Banks, already occupying about 28,000 square feet along the avenue, are now capped at 30,000 total. The next storefront to fill in probably won't be another restaurant.
What's Actually on the Calendar This Week
None of this touches the parts of downtown that were already working before any of it started. The Sunday farmers market on Chestnut Street between Santa Cruz and Menlo Avenues has run since 1992, sponsored by the Menlo Park Live Oak Lions Club, with leftover produce distributed to help feed people in need at the end of each market day. It still runs 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. every week.
The Guild Theatre, at 949 El Camino Real, is in the middle of its 100th-anniversary concert season. The building opened as a movie house in 1926, closed as a single-screen cinema in 2019, and reopened in 2022 as a roughly 500-seat live venue. The centennial season runs from June through November this year, a solid excuse to go back if you haven't been since the renovation.
And this Friday, August 28, downtown holds its monthly Fourth Fridays music series from 6 to 9 p.m., with bands spread up and down Santa Cruz Avenue instead of on one stage. The lineup includes The Song Gardeners at the old Pharmica storefront, Winnie Cheston near Mademoiselle Colette, the Dale Nesbitt Jazz Band at a new Wells Fargo stage, and Up and To The Right playing the 600 block in front of Starbucks. It's free, it's outdoors, and it happens to pass right by both Shiok!'s old address and its new one.
The Real Takeaway
Downtown Menlo Park didn't get one restaurant wave this year. It got two different processes running at the same time on streets a few minutes apart, and the boarded-up building on Chestnut is the clearest marker of where the friction actually was. If you live here, the useful question isn't whether downtown has enough good places to eat now. It's which of the businesses that disappeared over the past 18 months found their way back, and which corner still hasn't.
If you're curious what any of this means for property values or timing near this stretch of downtown, the Fallant Team tracks these blocks closely. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
