Walk the 3700 block of Piedmont Avenue this month and you will pass a restaurant that did not exist here in the spring. Teni East Kitchen, the Burmese spot that spent a decade wedged into a small storefront on Broadway near 40th Street, reopened at 3770 Piedmont Ave in May. The space is not new. It is the same shell that housed Pomella, the California-Israeli restaurant that closed in May 2025 after five years, and sat vacant for roughly a year before Teni East signed on.
That turnover is the actual story here, more than any single opening. Piedmont Avenue does not clear its storefronts and start over. It recycles them, and it recycles them in a specific way that says something about what this stretch of North Oakland actually rewards.
The Room That Was Too Big, Then Just Right
Mica Talmor, who ran Pomella for five years and Ba-Bite before that, told SFGATE the 3,000 square foot space at 3770 Piedmont Ave had stopped making sense for her business model by the time she closed it. "The space is large and doesn't really align with the business model anymore," she said. Pomella was built as an everyday counter-service place, the kind of spot you'd duck into after the pet store or the dry cleaner. A big dining room works against that. It costs more to heat, staff, and fill on a Tuesday than a casual concept can justify when sales are already thin.
Tiyo Shibabaw, who has run Teni East Kitchen since 2016, looked at the same square footage and saw the opposite problem solved. Her Broadway location was, in her own words to the Oakland-based outlet covering the move, too small to add the dishes she wanted on the menu. The relocation to 3770 roughly doubled her kitchen footprint and added 30 to 40 seats, including a patio, enough room to finally install a steamer for whole steamed fish and expand into a modest bar program. "We are still able to stay in the same neighborhood, while we can also grow and improve," she told the Chronicle.
Same walls. Same square footage. Two very different verdicts on whether that footprint works, because the two businesses were solving for different problems. That is the pattern worth watching on Piedmont Avenue this fall: the address is a constant, and the concepts that succeed here tend to be the ones built for the room they land in, not retrofitted to it.
| Pomella (2020 to 2025) | Teni East Kitchen (2026 to present) | |
|---|---|---|
| Concept | Counter-service California-Israeli deli | Full-service Burmese, expanded menu |
| Footprint use | One large room, described by the owner as oversized for the model | Split into dining, patio, and new bar service |
| Kitchen | Original build-out | Expanded for steaming equipment |
| Hours | Daily 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. | Split lunch and dinner service seven days a week |
Down the Block, the Same Test Is Coming Again
A few doors from Teni East, another storefront is waiting on its next verdict. Restaurateur Min Park, known for San Francisco's Itria and Menlo Park's Yeobo, Darling, is partnering with chef Brian Shin, an alum of Benu and the former In Situ at SFMOMA, both led by chef Corey Lee, to open a Korean comfort-food restaurant called Ajae on Piedmont Avenue. As of this writing the exact address has not been announced, and the team is aiming for a late 2026 opening.
Shin is joining a lineage that keeps feeding back into Oakland's dining scene. Fellow Benu alum James Yeun Leong Parry opened the acclaimed Happy Crane last year, and another Benu alum, Alan Hsu, opened Sun Moon Studio in West Oakland with partner Sarah Cooper, earning a Michelin star and a rave that named it the Chronicle's best new restaurant of 2024. Sun Moon Studio sits blocks away in West Oakland, not on this avenue, which makes Ajae the first of this Benu-trained circle to actually claim a Piedmont Avenue address.
Whether Ajae succeeds in whatever storefront it claims will likely come down to the same question that separated Pomella from Teni East: does the concept fit the room, or does it need the room reshaped around it.
The Fixtures That Never Left
Not everything on the avenue is in flux. A handful of businesses have simply stayed put long enough to become the reason people describe Piedmont Avenue as a food destination in the first place.
- Commis, chef James Syhabout's Michelin-starred restaurant, has anchored the block for years and remains one of the only starred kitchens in the East Bay.
- The Wolf occupies the space once held by the longtime neighborhood favorite BayWolf, serving California-American food with a patio that draws a more casual crowd than its predecessor's white-tablecloth reputation might suggest.
- Bistro 4293, which opened as the first Azerbaijani-Mediterranean restaurant in Northern California, has settled into the same stretch of storefronts, serving grilled kebabs and stuffed grape leaves a few doors from Commis.
- Dr. Comics & Mr. Games, in business for more than 25 years, still stocks board games and back issues in a retail category that has vanished from most commercial strips.
These businesses are the counterweight to the churn at 3770. They suggest the avenue is not simply unstable. It is a place where a handful of concepts get the fit right immediately and never have to test the room twice.
The Parade That Doesn't Need Reintroducing
Piedmont Avenue's other constant shows up once a year and requires no explanation from anyone who has lived here more than a season. The Piedmont Avenue Merchants Association, a volunteer-run nonprofit that has organized this stretch of businesses since 1939, runs the neighborhood's Halloween parade every October. This year it lands on Saturday, October 24, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., with trick-or-treating at participating storefronts along the way.
The parade route ends where it always ends, at Mountain View Cemetery, the 226-acre grounds designed by Frederick Law Olmsted at the top of the avenue. The cemetery hosts its own Pumpkin Festival the same day, from noon to 3 p.m., with a free pumpkin for every child, food trucks, and a pumpkin patch set up in the meadow just past the entrance. The pairing is not a coincidence or a scheduling accident. It has run this way long enough that neither event needs to advertise itself as connected to the other. Longtime residents just know to keep walking past the parade's end point into the cemetery gates.
This is worth separating from a different Halloween tradition entirely. The City of Piedmont, a separate municipality east of here, runs its own set of October events on its own calendar. The Piedmont Avenue parade belongs to Oakland, to this specific commercial strip, to PAMA's eighty-plus years of running it. If a search engine or a friend's recommendation points you toward "Piedmont Halloween" without specifying which one, this is the version that starts at the merchants' storefronts and ends among Olmsted's paths.
What This Fall Actually Adds Up To
None of this is a story about Piedmont Avenue reinventing itself. It is a story about the same handful of addresses, and the same nonprofit merchants association, proving out year after year, tenant after tenant, that the avenue rewards fit over flash. A restaurant that outgrows its kitchen moves a few blocks and doubles its footprint. A restaurant built for a smaller room closes when the room stops matching the model. A parade route stays exactly where it has been since before most of the current storefronts existed.
If you live along this stretch, the practical takeaway is simple. Watch which concept claims Ajae's eventual address and how it uses the space. Watch whether Teni East's bar program becomes a regular draw or a quiet addition. And mark October 24 for the parade and the cemetery gates after it, the same way the avenue has for generations.
For anyone thinking further ahead about a home near this corridor, in Oakland, in neighboring Piedmont, or across the border in Berkeley, Anian Tunney and Adrienne Krumins bring the kind of street-level familiarity that comes from actually walking these blocks. Contact us when you are ready to talk specifics.