On Thursday morning, Nov. 5, lion dancers performed in the City Center lot off Geary Boulevard while a line that started forming at 4 a.m. waited for the doors to open, SFGATE reported. At 9 a.m. the doors of T&T Supermarket opened to confetti, and the upper-level space Best Buy left in 2017 had a tenant for the first time in more than nine years.
A week later, most of the coverage has been about the grocery shelves. For anyone who lives within walking distance of Geary and Masonic, the bigger change is the cooked food. City Center used to be where you picked up paper towels at Target. Now the same parking lot leads to roast duck, made-to-order rice rolls and a latte bar, and they're open until 10 p.m.
Why the Upper Level Sat Empty So Long
The space at 2675 Geary Blvd. is about 50,000 square feet on the upper part of the plaza. SFist reported that it had been empty since 2017, when Best Buy left. Whole Foods planned a store there and spent nearly six years on it before giving up over permitting problems. The chain and the property owner, Acadia Realty Trust, agreed to end the lease, and T&T took over the space in March 2025.
T&T CEO Tina Lee told SFGATE that she had raised the timeline with Mayor Daniel Lurie directly before committing. "We can't afford to take six years," she said she told him, and "I don't want to be catching a falling knife." She told SFGATE the permit for this store took four months, the fastest approval she has had in the United States. The store opened a year and eight months after the lease was signed.
That history explains why the store is so big and so complete. The San Francisco store opened with almost everything the chain offers on day one, including a hot bar, a barbecue station, a sushi counter, a live-seafood case and a beauty section stocked with Korean and Japanese products, according to KRON4.
Three Grocery Doors Around One Intersection
Grocery shopping at Geary and Masonic already meant two stops. Trader Joe's sits at 3 Masonic Ave., and Target at City Center has a CVS pharmacy and a Starbucks inside the store. T&T adds a third, and it's the largest of the three by a wide margin.
| Stop | Address | Hours as listed | What it adds to the trip |
|---|---|---|---|
| T&T Supermarket | 2675 Geary Blvd., City Center | 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily | Live seafood, pan-Asian pantry, hot food, bakery, T&T Cafe |
| Target | 2675 Geary Blvd., City Center | 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. on its store page | Household goods, CVS pharmacy, Starbucks |
| Trader Joe's | 3 Masonic Ave. | 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. on its store page | Neighborhood grocery run |
T&T keeps the same hours as Target, so both anchors at City Center open and close together. Acadia describes the center as anchored by Target and T&T, with surface-level parking. A shopper who parks once can now leave with cleaning supplies, a prescription, gai lan and a whole fish.
The produce section is where Lee expects the store to stand out. She told the San Francisco Chronicle, as SFist relayed, that the department carries about 200 kinds of vegetables and 100 kinds of fruit, and she singled out Asian greens such as gai lan and yam leaf sprouts. The selection draws from China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia rather than a single cuisine. The SF Standard describes a selection geared toward home cooks feeding multigenerational families.
The Hot Counters Change What the Trip Is For
The pantry draws people in for a big shop. The kitchen gives neighbors a reason to come back on a Tuesday night.
SFGATE's opening-day account lists a barbecue station with roast duck, barbecue pork and soy sauce chicken, plus boxed sushi, Peking duck kits, and a self-serve hot bar with noodles, fried rice, soup, orange chicken and a fresh hot soy milk station. At the dim sum kiosk, the reporter paid $6.99 for four jumbo shrimp dumplings and $5 for two vegetable steamed buns, and compared them favorably to her regular bakery in Oakland Chinatown.
Two items came up from the chain's San Jose store, according to SFist. One is Papa Chicken, a whole butterflied chicken marinated for 24 hours, then battered and fried. The other is made-to-order fan tuan, a Taiwanese rice roll. The fan tuan line on opening day was long enough that SFGATE's reporter went to the dim sum kiosk instead.
Then there's the cafe. T&T Cafe at this store is the chain's first in the U.S. It serves black sesame and ube lattes and ice-blended "Arctic" drinks, which Lee called "our Canadian version of a Frappuccino" in her interview with the Standard. Her own current pick is the dragonfruit lemonade. She told KRON4 she recommends the Black Sesame Latte, which can be made with protein milk.
Put the hot bar, the barbecue station and the cafe together and the upper level of City Center works as a place to grab a meal. Until last week, that space had been a dark storefront since 2017.
What You Can Only Get on Geary
A few items are made for this store, which gives shoppers a reason to come here instead of driving to San Jose:
- The City Hall Mousse Cake, modeled on the rotunda, a San Francisco version of the San Jose store's mango mousse rotunda cake
- The Butter Bun, which made its U.S. debut here, per KRON4
- Baby bear bao, filled with pulled pork, pickled mustard greens, peanuts and cilantro, which the Standard says the South Bay store doesn't carry
- Tree-ripened mangos from Peru, a seasonal item Lee described to the Standard as "bright orange and super-juicy"
The bakery case also holds matcha pistachio buns and 6-inch mango cakes that the Standard described as "made with more fruit than batter." By its Nov. 8 ranking of the Bay Area's newest Asian supermarkets, the Standard put T&T in first place.
The Calendar From Here
The opening rush has a timeline, and the store's reach will grow over the next several months:
- Nov. 5 to Nov. 8: Each day, the first 300 customers received a free gift, including a T&T San Francisco fridge magnet while supplies lasted. That promotion is over.
- Now: T&T's app highlights discounted items and offers free-delivery codes, the Standard reports.
- Dec. 4: T&T plans to launch online shopping that covers this store, with free express delivery and in-store pickup, according to a company press release cited by KRON4.
- By summer 2027: Lee told the Standard a Peninsula store on South El Camino Real in Millbrae will open, followed shortly by a store in the former Macy's at Newark's NewPark Mall.
The Dec. 4 date matters most to neighbors. Pickup means a household three blocks away on Anza Vista Avenue or Encanto can order the barbecue pork and a sack of greens and collect them at the counter without waiting in the opening-week crowds. The Millbrae and Newark dates matter for a different reason. Until they open, Geary Boulevard has the only T&T north of San Jose, so people from across the Bay Area will keep driving to this one.
Acadia's leasing materials describe City Center as having "few competitors in terms of scale, retail offerings, surface level parking and ease of access within San Francisco," and list nearby landmarks including the University of San Francisco and Kaiser Permanente. On opening morning, two USF employees waited in that line. One told SFGATE, "I was curious because we don't have too many Asian supermarkets out here," and the other said "it's a trek" to leave the city for Asian groceries. For neighbors in Anza Vista, that trip now ends across the street.
The Best Buy space waited more than nine years for a tenant that fit it, and older homes near Geary can take just as much care to match with the right buyer. If you're watching how Anza Vista and the streets around Lone Mountain change, or thinking about what your own older home near Geary means for your plans, Bonnie Spindler would be glad to talk it through. Book an Appointment.
