What's New on Emeryville's Food Map This Summer

If you moved to Emeryville even eighteen months ago, your mental map of where to eat is quietly out of date. The Public Market finished its renovation and started swapping tenants. Bay Street got a 44,000-square-foot Japanese grocery. San Pablo picked up a Colombian arepa shop, and one of Telegraph Avenue's most recognizable old chocolate buildings is being courted by a local baker with allergen-friendly cookies.

None of this shows up if you only pass through Emeryville on the way to somewhere else. For residents, the changes are close enough together that a Saturday errand loop looks different than it did last summer. Here is what actually moved.

The Public Market is not the Public Market you remember

The food hall you walked through in 2023 has turned over enough that the tenant list is worth rechecking. Mamacita, a fast-casual Mexican spot, opened in Emeryville's Public Market following C Casa's departure, serving tacos, burritos, quesadillas, and pozole in both red and green. If you had C Casa in your rotation, that slot is now Mexican, not Baja-Mexican, and the pozole is the reason to go back.

The bigger news for this summer sits under construction next to the Public Bar. A "Jamaican Food" sign has been added to the under-construction stall adjacent to the Public Bar, with on-site signage indicating the new tenant is slated to open in Summer 2026. Longtime patrons might recall a Jamaican spot at the pre-renovated Market adjacent to the ball-pit, although any affiliation is unclear. If it opens on schedule, that gives the food hall a cuisine it has been missing since the remodel.

A few quick anchors worth keeping in your head:

• Mamacita replaced C Casa at 5959 Shellmound St, ordering counter, pozole on the menu.
• Jamaican stall, unnamed as of this writing, slated for a summer opening next to Public Bar.
• Public Market Food Hall as the operator now frames it, positioned around the "one bite at a time" pitch on their own site.

The Market also programs its own weeknights now. Sound Bites is Emeryville Public Market's weekly live music series, bringing fresh energy to the Market every Friday night, featuring a rotating lineup, and Feature Fridays is a monthly celebration with art, music, community, and food, curated by Firehouse Art Collective. If your default Friday dinner used to end at 7 p.m., it does not have to.

Bay Street picked up a grocery store, and it changed the block

The single largest change to Emeryville's food geography this year is not a restaurant. Tokyo Central opened at Bay Street in Emeryville, with a soft opening on Jan. 29, 2026, followed by a grand opening weekend of Jan. 31 and Feb. 1, 2026, for the 44,000-square-foot grocery and restaurant, with coupons, specials, performances by a Bay Area Taiko drumming group, and giveaways.

For scale: this is not a corner market. The Emeryville Tokyo Central has its own separate parking lot, free for customers for 90 minutes, which is a Bay Street rarity worth remembering when you are running a two-stop errand. The store also brought a restaurant with it. The new Tokyo Central in Emeryville includes the Handroll Factory, a restaurant specializing in hand rolls with fresh sashimi and other fillings accompanied by a dollop of fresh-grated wasabi. The practical effect for residents is that you can now build a hotpot dinner from one stop rather than three. There is a wide variety of sliced beef and pork at a range of prices, an easy addition to hotpot, soups, and stir-fries, and the onigiri is made with freshly-milled rice and uses ingredients like sockeye salmon instead of farmed salmon.

If you have not been back to Bay Street since the store opened, the tenant mix around it reads differently now. Sit-down dining nearby leans on Pippal, near Bay Street, which combines traditional Indian culinary techniques with modern presentation. Between Pippal, the Handroll Factory, and the older mall food-court tenants, Bay Street is closer to being a real dinner destination than it was a year ago.

San Pablo and Telegraph are where the personal openings landed

The Public Market and Bay Street get the foot traffic, but the openings with the most local character are further inland.

On San Pablo, Como en Casa at 4336 San Pablo Avenue is drawing attention on Yelp for traditional Colombian arepas and combo plates featuring seasoned meats, rice, beans, and plantains. This is a corridor that has been slowly filling in with owner-operated restaurants for years, and Como en Casa fits that shape better than another chain-adjacent counter would.

A little south, Los Moles is going through a paperwork change that had readers wondering if the restaurant was closing. It is not. A Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control application for an ownership change was posted in the window, and state records show the restaurant's liquor license is being transferred to a newly formed entity named Los Moles Emeryville Inc., though the listed officers and shareholders appear to be members of the restaurant's existing ownership family. Proprietor Lito Saldana confirmed his involvement remains unchanged, explaining via email that the license was changed to the corporation. The kitchen keeps going. Only the entity name on the license changed.

On Telegraph, keep an eye on the old Hooper's Chocolates building. Choc'late Mama proprietor Empress Kehinde Koyejo, who currently operates her allergen-friendly cookie brand out of a live-work space at The Emery, has her sights set on the former Hooper's Chocolates building on Telegraph Avenue to expand her operations. Nothing is signed yet. If it moves forward, a landmark that generations of East Bay residents recognized as a chocolate factory becomes a new-generation allergen-friendly bakery, which is the kind of transition that changes how a block feels.

One footnote worth clearing up for people who saw the SFGATE piece. Goop Kitchen, the delivery-focused fast-casual concept founded by Gwyneth Paltrow, opened a "Berkeley" location that is actually a ghost kitchen running out of the CloudKitchen/PicNic Digital Food Court on Adeline St. in North Oakland, a decision that was quickly ridiculed by local media. Emeryville is within their delivery zone, so if you have been curious, you can order without pretending it is a Berkeley restaurant.

The weekly shape of an Emeryville summer

Once you know what is new, the question is when to use it. Emeryville's summer calendar has settled into a repeatable weekly rhythm that is easier to plan against than the one-off event lists suggest.

The Emeryville Farmers' Market runs every Thursday from 4:00 pm to 8:00 pm, with 10 to 20 vendors bringing California-grown fruits and vegetables as well as local packaged food producers at the Public Market Parking Lot. That 4 p.m. start is early enough to hit before dinner, which is how most residents actually use it. Brainstormer Trivia runs Tuesdays at 6 pm at the Public Market, which pairs cleanly with a walk-in dinner at the food hall.

Honor Kitchen, on the other end of town, has kept its own separate track. Honor is kicking off its 2026 Wine Dinner Series, featuring a Reserve Wine List with rare and limited-production wines from California, Oregon, Europe, and beyond. If your version of a summer Friday looks less like a food hall and more like a tasting menu, that is where to look.

A short field guide for the rest of the season

A few practical moves if you have not caught up in a while:

• Do your Thursday grocery run at the Public Market parking lot before hitting Tokyo Central for whatever the produce stands did not have.
• Try Mamacita's pozole before deciding whether the C Casa slot got better or worse. Most reviewers so far think better.
• Watch the Public Bar stall for the Jamaican opening. Signage says summer.
• Give Como en Casa an arepa night on San Pablo, and check on the Hooper's building on Telegraph for signs of Choc'late Mama activity.
• If you have out-of-town family this summer, Pippal plus the Handroll Factory covers two very different dinners inside a five-minute walk on Bay Street.

None of this asks you to think about the neighborhood any differently. It just asks you to update the map. The Emeryville that made the "quick errand plus decent dinner" pitch two years ago is doing it better now, with more of the corners filled in and more of the weekly rhythm coming from the Market itself rather than the mall.

If you are thinking about what your home is worth against a neighborhood that keeps adding to itself, or you are house-hunting in this part of the East Bay and want a local read on how blocks are changing, Mike Lane Group is happy to talk. Get a free home valuation or start your East Bay search whenever you are ready.