The long-vacant former Best Buy space at SF’s City Center will finally reopen November 5 as TT Supermarket, the Taiwanese Canadian grocery chain’s second Bay Area store and its first in the US to feature a cafe.The 50,000-square-foot store at 2675 Geary Boulevard will officially open at 9 am on Thursday, November 5, as the Chronicle reports. The store will reportedly include a hot food bar, BBQ station, and a sushi counter.It will also be the first TT Supermarket in the US with a café, where customers can get specialty lattes in flavors including black sesame and ube, along with housemade pastries like the store’s Portuguese egg tarts and prepared foods.According to the Chronicle, the San Francisco location will also reportedly feature a cake modeled after City Hall's distinctive rotunda, much like the San Jose store, which sells a mango mousse cake modeled after its rotunda.The store will also include a beauty section stocked with Korean and Japanese products. The San Francisco TT is part of a rapid Bay Area expansion, following the company’s first local store at San Jose’s Westgate Center, which opened in June and drew 60,000 visitors over its opening weekend, according to the Chronicle. Two more locations are reportedly planned for Newark and Millbrae, although both have been pushed back. The Newark store is now expected to open in winter 2027 in a former Macy’s and will be California’s largest TT at 72,600 square feet, while the Millbrae location, planned for a former Lucky Supermarket, is facing construction delays and is not expected before summer or fall 2027.The San Francisco store fills a space that had been empty since 2017 after Best Buy left the upper portion of the City Center plaza. Whole Foods had previously planned to open there, but that effort stalled after years of permitting problems. As SFist reported last year, Whole Foods and property owner Acadia Realty Trust agreed to terminate the lease, and TT took over the space that March.TT CEO Tina Lee told the Chronicle she was initially wary of bringing the company to San Francisco, particularly after watching Whole Foods struggle to get its project approved. In late 2024, she reached out directly to then Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie to discuss his plans for the city and whether his administration would support the project.“I really need the city on board, because I don’t know if I’m catching a falling knife,” Lee recalled telling Lurie, speaking to the Chronicle.Lee subsequently met with Lurie in San Francisco, who promised that his team would help TT navigate the permitting process. She credits the administration’s new PermitSF platform with helping make the project the fastest permitting process she has experienced in the U.S.“I was very nervous about opening a store in San Francisco,” Lee told the Chronicle. “The brand of San Francisco is you got to jump through a whole bunch of red tape.”Lurie said the supermarket represents a significant investment in the city and pointed to the project as an example of the city’s efforts to make it easier for businesses to open.“Grocery stores are an important part of a thriving city, and TT is making a major investment in San Francisco,” Lurie said in a statement.TT is Canada's largest Asian grocery chain, with 37 stores across the country. Lee’s parents, Cindy and Jack, founded the company in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1993, and it opened its first U.S. store in Bellevue, Washington, in 2024 before expanding to another Washington location, and then to San Jose.The Chronicle notes that unlike some of the newer Asian supermarkets opening around the Bay Area with a focus on one particular cuisine, TT carries products from across China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. The San Francisco store will have specialty ingredients and snacks, along with TT’s own soup dumplings, Taiwanese sausages, green onion pancakes, sushi, dim sum, and other prepared foods.The store will also reportedly carry live seafood and specialty meats, including wagyu beef, while Lee told the Chronicle the produce department is one of the company's biggest draws, with about 200 types of vegetables and 100 types of fruit sourced from around the world. She singled out the selection of Asian greens, including gai lan and yam leaf sprouts, as a particular strength.TT will also reportedly bring some of its more popular prepared foods from San Jose to San Francisco, including Papa Chicken, a whole butterflied chicken that is marinated for 24 hours before being battered and fried, and made-to-order fan tuan, a Taiwanese rice roll that has developed a following at the San Jose store.Previously: Former Best Buy at Geary and Masonic to Become Asian Market TT, After Whole Foods Plan Falls Through ...read more read less