Castro Valley Boulevard Finally Has Enough Density To Spend A Whole Saturday On One Street

For years the Boulevard was a corridor you crossed on the way somewhere else. Redwood Road to 580. Lake Chabot to the Marketplace. A stop for gas, a stop for the bank, and then out.

That has changed in the last twelve months, and the change is concentrated inside a half-mile stretch between the BART station lot and the old Daughtrey's building. A Cantonese banquet hall bigger than most Bay Area movie theaters opened in a former drugstore. A food hall that spent its first years finding an identity has landed on one. And two long-running community rituals, a Saturday market and a summer car show, now bracket the block instead of competing with it.

The Old Rite Aid Is Now The Largest Cantonese Restaurant In The Country

If you drove past 3868 Castro Valley Blvd last year and wondered what was going into the shuttered Rite Aid, the answer is unusually specific. H.L. Peninsula Restaurant had its grand opening this past Thursday in the former Rite Aid building on Castro Valley Boulevard, with claims of being the largest Cantonese restaurant in the United States, a 28,000-square-foot banquet hall located next door to the new Mei Mei Market.

The scale is the story. Seating is available for more than 800 guests in the main room, plus nine private VIP rooms that bring total capacity to 1,250, which puts it ahead of Kowloon Restaurant in Saugus, Massachusetts, which claims it can seat up to 1,200 people. The building also reflects a very particular kind of local patience: after Rite Aid closed in August 2023, speculation about a replacement included everything from a Sprouts to a car wash to a furniture store, and in August 2024 Alameda County Public Works approved the restaurant and grocery store project submitted by Castro Valley resident Ming Y Li with an endorsement from the Castro Valley Municipal Advisory Council. Two years of an empty box turned into a destination address.

The food itself follows the room. Specialties include handmade dim sum prepared fresh daily, an extensive live seafood selection featuring lobster, Dungeness crab, and abalone, and signature Cantonese banquet dishes such as roast suckling pig, seafood tofu pot, and double-boiled herbal soups. Dim sum service runs weekday mornings from 10:30, weekends from 10, with dinner nightly until roughly 9:15. Practical detail for anyone thinking of walking in without a reservation: on a Sunday at noon, the wait behaves more like a Milpitas dim sum room than a Boulevard restaurant. Come at 10:30 sharp or go on a weekday.

Mei Mei Market next door completes the pair. Together they turn a corner that read as vacant retail into a two-anchor block, which is the shift most residents will feel first.

The Marketplace Has Stopped Being An Experiment

Across the street at 3295 Castro Valley Blvd, the Marketplace has been open long enough that the roster is settling. The lineup as of summer 2026 reads less like a food court and more like a village grocery with restaurants attached.

• Castro Valley Natural Grocery anchors the ground floor in the old Daughtrey's building, an offshoot of the twenty-year-old Alameda Natural Grocery.
• Baron's Quality Meats & Seafood and Seven Hills Baking Co. cover the butcher and bakery corners.
• Amphora Nueva Olive Oil Works handles the specialty oil and vinegar side.
• Akemi Sushi sits on the first floor for a quick lunch counter.
• Beard Papa's cream puffs opened at the Castro Valley Boulevard entrance, and the operator is a Castro Valley resident opening in her hometown, which is worth knowing when you are choosing between it and a chain sweet spot elsewhere.
• The Cannery Kitchen & Tap does breakfast and full-service dining with indoor and outdoor seating on the Paseo.
• Pizza The Bay is upstairs, which is why most first-time visitors miss it. Eater SF praised Pizza The Bay for its creative spins on sourdough pizzas.
• The Night OWL and Oculto are the evening pieces, the reason the Marketplace stays open past dinner.

Two additions matter for how the space actually functions on a weekend. First Fridays were established as a monthly community event back in 2024, produced by the Marketplace management in collaboration with its merchants and curated by Arté's Joanne Tan and Keesa Ocampo, spotlighting small makers, local entrepreneurs, food vendors, artists, musicians, and DJs. That is the difference between a food hall and a gathering place, and it is the pattern the Boulevard now organizes around.

The Saturday Rhythm Is Half A Block Away

A short walk from the Marketplace, the Urban Village Farmers' Market runs every Saturday in the Castro Valley BART parking lot at the corner of Redwood Road and Norbridge Avenue. It is a working market, not a boutique one, and it accepts WIC and EBT with a dollar-for-dollar match up to $15 free to spend on fruits and vegetables. For a family shopping run, the practical geometry now looks like this: park once near the BART lot, do produce at the market, walk down the Boulevard to Baron's for meat and to Natural Grocery for pantry, stop at Seven Hills for bread, and finish with dim sum at H.L. Peninsula or coffee back at the Marketplace Paseo. That loop did not exist as a coherent Saturday plan two years ago.

If you want the shorter version, a family of four can do the market, the Marketplace, and a Cantonese lunch inside three hours without moving the car.

Summer's Standing Date

The June date most residents will already have written down is the Castro Valley Classic Car Show. The 18th Annual Castro Valley Classic Car Show, presented by the Castro Valley Rotary Club, runs Saturday, June 20, 2026, from 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM in Downtown Castro Valley. Admission for spectators is free, with classic cars, food, live entertainment, and community activities across the afternoon.

The show does something a new restaurant cannot: it puts a couple hundred cars along the same stretch of Boulevard where H.L. Peninsula and the Marketplace now sit, which turns the whole corridor into a walkable street for one afternoon a year. If you have out-of-town family visiting the third weekend of June, that is the day to plan around.

A quieter one to keep on the calendar is the Rotary Club of Castro Valley's third annual Whiskey Tasting and Charity Dinner on Saturday, February 28, 2026, at The Breakfast Club at Midtown, which is the kind of small ticketed event that used to require a drive to Livermore or Danville.

What This Means For The Corridor

The most useful way to read all of this together is not as a list of new places, but as a change in how the Boulevard functions on a weekend. A Cantonese banquet room that seats 900 draws people from Fremont, San Leandro, and Hayward, and those visitors do not come and leave in a bubble. They park, they walk, they wander into the Marketplace, they notice the bakery. The Marketplace's First Friday programming does the same thing on evening scale. The farmers' market keeps the Saturday morning traffic pattern intact. The car show anchors June.

Three years ago Castro Valley Boulevard was a place with several good individual businesses that did not compound. In 2026 they compound. The empty Rite Aid was the last visible sign of the old pattern, and it turned into the loudest sign of the new one.

For homeowners who already live here, the practical takeaway is smaller and more immediate: you probably do not need to drive to Alameda for a bakery run anymore, you do not need to drive to Milpitas for a serious dim sum lunch, and you have a walkable Saturday within a mile of your front door. Guests visiting from out of town can now be entertained on the Boulevard itself, which is a claim residents could not honestly make a couple of years ago.

If you are curious how the Boulevard's momentum is showing up in what buyers are willing to pay for homes within walking distance of it, or you are thinking about the timing of a sale in Castro Valley this fall, the team at Refined Real Estate tracks these shifts block by block. Request Your Free Home Valuation to see where your address sits in the current market.