Ask anyone who drives Castro Valley Boulevard on a regular basis what used to sit in the old Rite Aid building, and they'll probably shrug before they answer. For roughly two years after the pharmacy closed in August 2023, the storefront near Redwood Road sat as one long-running local mystery. Neighbors guessed a Sprouts might move in. Someone heard it would become a car wash. Another rumor had it slated for a furniture and appliance store. What actually opened there last October says more about how this stretch of the Boulevard has changed than any list of new coffee shops could.
That answer is H.L. Peninsula, a 28,000-square-foot Cantonese restaurant and banquet hall that had its grand opening on October 16, 2025, and is now marking nearly a year in business. It is not a modest addition to the neighborhood's dining options. Depending on which trade press you trust, it's the largest Cantonese restaurant in the United States, and the numbers back up the claim even before anyone gets around to verifying it with Guinness. The main dining room seats more than 800 people. Add the nine private VIP rooms, including one built around a marble table that fits 30, and total capacity climbs to roughly 1,250, according to the Castro Valley Forum's coverage of the opening. That's larger than the room Kowloon Restaurant in Saugus, Massachusetts, has used to make the same claim on the East Coast for years.
For scale, the San Francisco Chronicle compared the footprint to some of the Bay Area's most recognizable dim sum landmarks. Chinatown's Far East Cafe runs 15,000 square feet with 680 seats. The Daly City location Koi Palace is reportedly planning next to the Jagalchi complex will run about 20,000 square feet. H.L. Peninsula outsizes both, and it did it inside a building that most people driving past had already written off as dead retail.
The path there took longer than the restaurant itself suggests. Alameda County Public Works didn't approve the project until August 2024, a year after Rite Aid closed, and the application came from Castro Valley resident Ming Y Li with an endorsement from the Castro Valley Municipal Advisory Council. This wasn't an out-of-town chain parachuting into an empty box. It was a resident-driven proposal that took roughly two years to clear the building, gut the pharmacy shelving, and turn the space into a Cantonese banquet hall with chandeliers and wall-to-wall televisions in the main hall, sitting next door to the new Mei Mei Market grocery store. As one company spokesperson put it when the location opened, "we found that there are no large spaces for family gatherings in the area." Now there is one, and it's busy. SFGATE reported that weekend dim sum service alone sends out at least 200 orders of har gow, and the waitlist can stretch to 100 people with a 45-minute wait attached.
What Settled In Across the Street
H.L. Peninsula isn't the only anchor that's changed what a trip down the Boulevard actually looks like. Directly across the street, the Castro Valley Marketplace occupies a building with its own long vacancy story. The 39,000-square-foot food hall sits inside the old Daughtrey's department store, which opened in 1965, closed in 1991 after the family sold it to an Ohio chain, and spent most of the following two decades half used, including a stretch as a pool hall. Construction on the current Marketplace started in 2019, and it opened in July 2020 as an essential business during the pandemic.
Six years in, the roster has settled into something closer to a walkable neighborhood grocery run than a food court:
- Castro Valley Natural Grocery, an offshoot of the twenty-year-old Alameda Natural Grocery, anchors the ground floor.
- Baron's Quality Meats & Seafood and Seven Hills Baking Co., run by industry veteran Julien Wagner, cover the butcher and bakery corners.
- Amphora Nueva Olive Oil Works handles specialty oils and vinegars.
- Akemi Sushi, which restaurateur Carol Tan brought over from her original Berkeley location on Solano Avenue, runs the lunch counter.
- Beard Papa's and La Perla, the Puerto Rican kitchen chef-owner Jose "Cheo" Ortiz relocated from Oakland's Dimond District, round out the food side with dishes like slow-roasted pernil and mofongo.
- Cannery Kitchen & Tap, opened by the chefs behind Hayward's now-closed Cannery Cafe, and Cordial Cellar & Lounge, from the owners of San Leandro's Cordial Bottle Shop, cover full-service dining and drinks.
None of this happened overnight, and it isn't finished changing. The bakery, the butcher, the sushi counter, and the grocery store used to be the whole reason to stop. Now a full meal, a glass of wine, and a bag of groceries can happen without moving the car.
A Calendar That Finally Repeats
The two buildings across the street from each other would be a good story on their own. What makes the Boulevard function differently this year is that both now sit inside a calendar that actually repeats, instead of a single annual event surrounded by ordinary Tuesdays.
The Marketplace runs First Fridays, a free monthly gathering from 5 to 8 p.m. built around local vendors, live music, and family activities, according to the Marketplace's own event listings. The series launched in 2024 and has grown enough that this year brought its first real interruption: organizers paused it in July, something that hadn't happened in the two prior summers, and brought it back August 7 with live island music and a season framed less as a routine stop and more as a restart. Vendor applications are now open through the end of the year, which means the monthly cadence should hold through December rather than tapering off after summer.
Layer a weekly Saturday farmers market on top of that, and the Boulevard has a reason to draw people back every single week, not just once a season.
Then there's the one date that's been on the calendar longer than either the Marketplace or H.L. Peninsula. The Castro Valley Light Parade, run by the Castro Valley/Eden Area Chamber of Commerce, closes the Boulevard between Lake Chabot Road and Redwood Road every November for a street fair and evening parade built around floats from local service organizations, churches, and schools, ending, as it always has, with Mr. and Mrs. Claus. Last November's edition drew a crowd big enough that SFGATE described the Marketplace as completely packed that weekend, with parade attendance reported at more than 20,000 people. The parade itself is well into its second decade. What's new is what surrounds it now on an ordinary Saturday the other fifty-one weeks of the year.
What Used to Take a Drive Now Takes a Walk
Put those three threads together and the actual shift on Castro Valley Boulevard isn't any single opening. It's that the things residents used to leave town for now sit inside a half-mile stretch, on a schedule that holds up week after week. A serious dim sum lunch used to mean a drive to one of H.L. Peninsula's existing locations in Milpitas or South San Francisco. A specialty bakery or butcher counter worth the trip used to mean Alameda. Live music and a reason to linger downtown on a Friday used to mean somewhere else entirely, or nowhere at all.
None of that required Castro Valley to add anything flashy. It required two long-vacant buildings to finally get filled, and a handful of small, repeating community events to survive long enough to become habits. That's a quieter kind of change than a grand opening, and it's also the kind that tends to stick.
Dudum Real Estate Group has spent more than a decade working in East Bay communities like this one, watching which storefronts turn into fixtures and which stay empty. If you're curious what a stretch like Castro Valley Boulevard is worth to the people who already live near it, or you're weighing your own next move in this part of the East Bay, Dudum Real Estate Group is a good place to start that conversation.
