Teens pack Round1, the arcade inside a former Nordstrom, past midnight for a slim chance to win an anime plushy. Hundreds line up at a Korean grocery store in a closed JCPenney to taste freshly fried fish cakes. Superfans beg strangers online to nab a sold-out reservation to snap selfies with their favorite Nintendo characters at a previously boarded-up gift shop.
The buzziest new businesses in recent months have been Asian brands testing the waters in the Bay Area. The frenzy around these openings is reminiscent of the mad rush for Coachella tickets or the peak of Black Friday insanity.
Grocery chains, big-box pharmacies, and department stores are shuttering locations, leaving hollowed-out shopping districts in the process. But you’d never know it from the eruption of consumer enthusiasm that greets seemingly every new manifestation of a beloved or fast-growing international brand.
Across the Bay Area, domestic and international Asian brands are finding a path — propelled by demographic and cultural sea changes — into big-box spaces that were inaccessible to their predecessors because of prejudice by landlords and shoppers.
The openings of Round1 and Jagalchi, the Korean market, represent not only a much-needed bright spot in commercial real estate but a direct solution to the problem of vacancies.
One key example is a former Best Buy that has sat empty in the City Center Mall for eight years. City officials and Amazon executives promised for years that they would open a Whole Foods market at the site, but those plans were quietly scrapped in 2024, leaving the 50,000-square-foot space vacant.
Enter an unexpected savior: T&T Supermarket, an Asian grocery chain based in Canada. Even though the location wasn’t officially listed for lease, brokers from The Econic Company and CBRE pitched it to the fast-growing retailer, known for fresh-made offerings like dim sum, roasted Peking duck, and made-to-order Chinese crepes.
Through the process, which involved three tours, the brokers had to assuage T&T’s headline-driven fears about shoplifting and general mayhem in San Francisco. Eventually, the company was won over by the densely populated neighborhoods that surround the location, mainly the Inner Richmond and Presidio Heights.
Another factor that helped the deal cross the finish line was the fact that T&T CEO Tina Lee’s great aunt and brother both live in the Bay Area.
Another T&T store will open at Westgate Mall in San Jose in the fall of 2025 and the San Francisco store is slated to open in the winter of 2026.
“Ethnic groups now have the buying power to shop in a way they feel like they deserve,” said Jennifer Lee, a vice chairwoman at Deloitte Canada who specializes in the North American consumer market.
Asian groceries are a major contributor to the revival. The opening of Jagalchi in March at Daly City’s Serramonte Center saw hundreds queuing up for steamed jin mandoo buns even before the market was fully stocked.
Japanese grocer and department store Hashi Market is taking the place of a shuttered Sprouts in Cupertino. In the East Bay, Tokyo Central Market is set to open as the major tenant at Bay Street Emeryville in its first Bay Area location, at a site initially built for Amazon Fresh.
“The reason why these retailers are reaching new heights today just speaks to how the overall Asian market has been underserved for so long,” said James Chung, founder and principal of The Econic Company, which represented T&T and brought Korean grocer H Mart to the Bay Area a decade ago.
The Bay Area’s Asian population rose by nearly 30% between 2010 and 2020, according to census data. In each of the region’s four largest counties, Asians comprise more than a third of the population.
“Asian concepts are pouncing on opportunities to gain access to otherwise high-barriers-to-entry submarkets while supply is ample,” said Michael Berne, a retail and real estate consultant. “Pricing is low, and landlords are more desperate.”
But this “moment” is more than just favorable economic conditions, Berne said. Uniqlo, Daiso, Miniso, Pop Mart, and other Asian retailers have managed to generate broader appeal for their products with marketing meant to attract all cultures.
“U.S. retailers just aren’t as fresh anymore,” Kazuko Morgan, a broker at Cushman & Wakefield who helped ink the Nintendo deal in Union Square, previously told The Standard. “The world has gotten smaller because of social media and the internet, so [Asian retailers] are becoming much more mainstream.”
A Nielsen report found that Asian Americans had $1 trillion in spending power in 2019, a figure that more than tripled from 2000.
“After decades of being perceived as the foreigners, Asian Americans now represent a galvanized and influential community that is helping to shape the American mainstream,” the report stated.
Still, H Mart has about 100 locations in the U.S., and the Asian supermarket chain 99 Ranch has about 63. By comparison, there are 4,600 Walmarts, 600 Trader Joe’s, and nearly 500 Whole Foods locations.
“These new operators entering the market aren’t taking away from the pie, but more so making it bigger,” Chung said.
A long time coming
It wasn’t always like this. In fact, for a long time, it was just the opposite. John Luk, a broker with real estate firm GD Commercial, which specializes in Asian shopping centers, said he’s been advocating landlords to “go Asian” for decades in anticipation of demographic shifts in the Bay Area.
The mostly white owners didn’t have the “exposure and experience” with Asian cultures to make the call earlier, said Luk, an immigrant from Hong Kong.
Luk, 75, brokered the first 99 Ranch deal in Northern California more than 30 years ago via a personal relationship with the grocer’s Taiwanese immigrant founder, who started the grocery chain out of frustration with the lack of Asian options for his community in Buena Park.
That relationship has blossomed into 16 Bay Area stores. Three years ago, 99 Ranch opened at the entrance of a Westfield mall in San Jose, which had been struggling to find a reliable tenant for the 30,000-square-foot storefront.
“The upside of Asian grocery stores is that customers from across a region will flood to one location if you can place it correctly,” Luk said. “Now I’m telling tenants that if you don’t enter the market now, then T&T or Mega Mart will.”
Historically, ethnic retailers have been a fragmented group, comprising entrepreneurs like Chen who take it upon themselves to satisfy demand. Over time, immigrant residents and their children became more educated and wealthier. The retailers that serve them have evolved from mom-and-pop operations to corporations designed to accommodate a wide array of shoppers.
Berne added that declining populations and low birth rates in many Asian countries will compel large companies to look further afield for new markets once they’ve “saturated their existing ones.”
Those early to the game, like Luk, have the political and business connections new entrants to the market need. In 2019, a San Francisco property owner approached him to fill a vacant 20,000-square-foot store in Milpitas that was formerly a Michaels craft store.
Luk knows the area well; he represented Chinese farmers who in the 1980s sold to developers the land that became Cisco’s headquarters.
Rather than chase traditional retail, which had fled the building, in 2022 he brought in H.L. Peninsula, a dim-sum house and banquet hall. He also placed H.L. Peninsula locations in South San Francisco and Burlingame. That relationship started 20 years ago, when Luk met the founder of the restaurant group in Guangzhou during a “business trip” that was more about eating his way through China.
Luk’s long campaign to advocate for Asian brands in the Bay Area and frequent trips overseas to build relationships and find operators have been bearing fruit for decades.
“It took a lot of education and perseverance,” Luk said. “You can see now we were correct.”