Burlingame's Old Post Office Block Fills In, One October Date at a Time
October 15, 2026
October 15, 2026
"The Village Pub is the living room for Woodside. Spruce is the living room for Presidio Heights, and we wanted the Old Post Office to be that for Hillsborough and Burlingame." Tim Stannard of Bacchus Management Group told the San Francisco Chronicle that in September. A living room is a place you use every week. A special-occasion room gets used once a year. The block around 220 Park Road was built to work like the first kind, from the pricing to the tenant mix to the public square behind it. This October is the first month that design gets tested.
The block doesn't open all at once. The restaurant opened on October 1, a ramen shop opens on Lorton ten days later, lunch and brunch follow, and the part that links the restaurant to the Town Square won't arrive until spring. Here is how the pieces fit together.
Retail and PO Box service left 220 Park Road years ago. The U.S. Postal Service announced the move to 329 Primrose Road, and the new location opened January 20, 2015. The 1940s building sat empty after its 2014 sale.
Bringing it back took five years of construction and preservation. Crews temporarily moved the entire 1,000-ton landmark, rolling it across steel beams so an underground parking garage could go in beneath the site. Dostart Development Company and Sares Regis Group of Northern California built a 185,000-square-foot, six-story office and retail complex behind the post office, along with that garage and a public outdoor plaza.
The preservation rules shaped the room you sit in today. The designers couldn't alter anything deemed historically significant, including the original terrazzo floors, the marble walls and most of what is now the main dining room. Old memo boards behind a locked glass window have to stay as they are, because the key is long gone and the tenant isn't allowed to install a new lock. The original teller windows and a wall of brass mailboxes are still in place. So is the cast stone relief called "The Letter" above the front doors. Stannard told the Chronicle that during the restoration, locals kept stopping in for impromptu tours, and some still brought their mail.
Bacchus restaurants hold Michelin stars, and the group says plainly that it wants one here. Asked whether they are going for a star, executive chef Jonathan Granada answered "Yes." The prices tell a different story than the ambition does. In Eater SF, Stannard said a room this grand could easily start at $300 or $400 a person, "and that just runs absolutely counter to what our hopes are for this restaurant."
Here is the range as of opening week, October 2026:
| Where | What | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Postmaster's Bar | Burger | $27 |
| Postmaster's Bar | Beef tartare | $26 |
| Postmaster's Bar | Steak frites | $45 |
| Dining room | Lunch prix fixe, weekdays | $55 |
| Dining room | Brunch prix fixe, weekends | $70 |
| Dining room | Dinner prix fixe | $120 |
| Dining room | Dry-aged duck, six per night | $80 for two |
The Postmaster's Bar sits in the wing that once held the postmaster's office and sorting room. It is open all day and serves à la carte, so a burger and a cocktail there don't require a reservation for the dining room. The duck works the opposite way. It is pre-sold when you book, and only six are offered each night.
Stannard explained the prix-fixe format as an economic choice. Diners still pick their courses, and the restaurant gets a fixed price, "which is really important in the economics of restaurants in the Bay Area specifically nowadays." He added, "$120 is not inexpensive," and called it significantly less than what peers charge, set "to make sure that people can use the restaurant quite a lot." That is the living-room plan, expressed as a number.
The other half of the block faces Lorton Avenue, and it is built for even more frequent visits. When Sweetgreen opened at 235 Lorton as one of the first 220 Park tenants, then-Mayor Peter Stevenson told the Daily Journal the Lorton storefronts were "more of an environment for frequent meals, frequent patronage," while Bacchus was the fine-dining anchor.
The newest of those everyday spots is Marufuku Ramen at 225 Lorton Avenue. Its grand opening is Sunday, October 11, with service from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and again from 5 to 9 p.m., according to Marufuku's Burlingame page and the Downtown Burlingame events calendar. The menu centers on Hakata-style tonkotsu, a pork-bone broth with thin noodles and chashu, along with chicken paitan, rice bowls and izakaya-style starters. When WhatNow reported the Burlingame location on August 7, no opening date had been set, and the October 11 date came later.
Marufuku began in San Francisco's Japantown in 2017. Eater SF's ramen guide recalls the long lines when it opened. Its other Peninsula locations include 36 Serramonte Center in Daly City and 865 Middlefield Road in Redwood City. No published source covers reservations or a waitlist policy for the Burlingame shop.
With Sweetgreen and Marufuku on Lorton and the Old Post Office on Park, the block now covers a quick weekday lunch, a casual bowl of ramen and a prix-fixe dinner within a few steps of each other, which is the mix the city described when the first tenants arrived.
Winterfest follows on Friday, December 4, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. It includes a train ride around Burlingame Avenue and hot chocolate after the tree lighting.
The Town Square opened with a ribbon cutting on April 2. It runs between Park Road on the west and Lorton Avenue on the east. Mayor Michael Brownrigg told the crowd that the idea went back to 2008 and appeared in his 2009 council campaign. The city's Town Square facility page lists picnic tables, cornhole, foosball, ping-pong, bike racks, restrooms and Wi-Fi. In June, Downtown Burlingame ran a month of music and arts programming there, and the city calendar listed live music at 265 Lorton Avenue on June 27. The city's October parks calendar shows no Town Square events so far.
What the square doesn't have yet is the restaurant side facing it. Eater reports that Bacchus begins Phase II this winter, building an outdoor patio and a 60-seat glass house set to open in April. The Chronicle describes gardens and patios that will look out onto the plaza. Next spring, the square is scheduled to have restaurant tables along its edge for the first time.
Until then, this is what the block offers on a fall weekday: lunch at Sweetgreen or Marufuku on Lorton, a game of ping-pong in the square, and a $27 burger at the Postmaster's Bar on Park Road once it gets dark.
If the changes around 220 Park Road have you wondering how a busier, more walkable downtown block affects the streets around it, Laura Dunne at D & L Properties follows Burlingame block by block and is happy to talk it through. Let's Connect.
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ADDRESS 251 Park Rd Burlingame, CA 94010