On a Saturday morning along West 25th Avenue, the dim sum carts start rolling before the fog has lifted off the Peninsula, and the queue outside the Cantonese seafood houses runs three families deep. This is the everyday texture of the Chinese in San Mateo, California, a community that has quietly become one of the largest single threads in this affluent commuter city’s fabric, woven from mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwanese roots into a place once built for Gold Rush millionaires.
The Place
San Mateo sits on the San Francisco Peninsula, the county seat in name nowhere but the commercial heart of San Mateo County, twenty minutes south of the city by Caltrain. It is a town of roughly 105,000 people, leafy and prosperous, where Spanish Mediterranean homes in Baywood and Hayward Park sit a short drive from the office parks that house Sony, Roblox and a long roster of Silicon Valley names.
Downtown clusters around B Street and Third Avenue, all restaurants and lantern light. Fifteen blocks south, a second commercial spine forms around 25th Avenue west of El Camino Real, less polished, more useful, and increasingly the place where the city’s Chinese kitchens and grocers have put down roots.
How It Became Chinese
San Mateo was wealthy long before it was Asian. The story begins with a railroad and a few very large fortunes.
The estates and the railroad
The first scheduled train from San Francisco rolled through San Mateo on 17 October 1863, covering the distance in thirty-seven minutes (the San Francisco and San Jose Railroad). The line did what railways always did to the Peninsula: it turned farmland into the playground of the rich. Men who had made fortunes in the Gold Rush bought up the land for country estates, and names like Alvinza Hayward and John Parrott attached themselves to tracts that would later be subdivided into neighbourhoods. Hayward’s holdings became Hayward Park. In 1927, 375 acres of Parrott’s estate, called Baywood, were carved into one of San Mateo’s most coveted housing developments.
For its first century the town was a commuter suburb for prosperous white San Franciscans. The Chinese presence on the Peninsula in those decades was small and largely worked behind the scenes, in the kitchens, laundries and gardens of those same estates, constrained by the exclusion laws that governed Chinese life in California well into the twentieth century.
The post-war opening
The repeal of Chinese exclusion in 1943 and the broader immigration reforms of 1965 reopened the door, and the Bay Area’s established Chinese American families began moving out of San Francisco’s Chinatown and down the Peninsula in search of space and good schools. San Mateo, with its new mid-century high schools, was a natural landing place. Hillsdale High opened in 1955 to architectural acclaim, and Aragon High followed in 1961 to absorb the city’s swelling postwar population. Those schools, and the San Mateo Union High School District that ran them, would become one of the community’s quiet anchors.
The Hong Kong wave
The decisive shift came in the 1980s and 1990s. As the 1997 handover of Hong Kong approached, large numbers of high-skilled Hong Kong families emigrated, and a great many of them chose the San Francisco Bay Area. They settled in a ring of comfortable Peninsula suburbs: Burlingame, South San Francisco, Daly City, Millbrae and San Mateo. These were not the bachelor labourers of the exclusion era. They arrived with capital, professional credentials and the means to buy into San Mateo’s housing market, and they brought Cantonese cooking, family-association networks and a taste for the kind of dense, well-served suburb they had left behind.
The tech decades
The 1990s technology boom added a second current. The H-1B visa programme, expanding through that decade, drew engineers and specialists from mainland China and Taiwan into Silicon Valley firms, and San Mateo’s position at the northern gateway to the Valley made it an obvious home base. Mainland Chinese immigrants in particular concentrated in San Bruno, San Mateo and Millbrae through the 2000s, while many Taiwanese families gravitated further south to Cupertino and Palo Alto.
The result, over a single generation, was a city transformed. Where San Mateo’s Asian population had been under a fifth of the total, by the 2020s it had climbed toward a quarter, with Chinese Americans the single largest Asian group, numbering well over ten thousand residents. The change showed up first, as it usually does, in the food.
The Landmarks
Superstar Dim Sum & Seafood Restaurant, 88 E 4th Ave. A downtown fixture for the cart-pushed Cantonese breakfast, Superstar anchors the Chinese dining scene in the heart of San Mateo’s restaurant district, a few doors from B Street’s lantern-lit bustle. On weekends the wait spills onto the pavement, families three generations deep.
Fortune Star Chinese Restaurant, 173 W 25th Ave. A Mandarin-style kitchen on the city’s second commercial spine, just west of El Camino Real, where the cooking leans north of Canton. Its presence on 25th Avenue helped make that stretch, rather than the polished downtown, the everyday Chinese high street of San Mateo.
The 25th Avenue corridor, west of El Camino Real. Not a single address but a district, this is where San Mateo’s Chinese restaurants, bakeries and small grocers cluster most thickly. The shops change hands and signage, but the function endures: it is where Cantonese, Shanghainese and regional kitchens sit shoulder to shoulder.
Bridgepointe Shopping Center, 3000 Bridgepointe Parkway. The big-box centre on the bay side of the freeway, a regional draw whose tenant mix and nearby restaurants reflect the area’s Asian customer base. For many San Mateo families it is the practical weekend hub, a short hop from the Foster City line.
99 Ranch Market, 1070 Foster City Blvd, Foster City. The nearest branch of the Taiwanese-American supermarket chain sits just over the city line, and it functions as San Mateo’s de facto Chinese grocery. Live tanks, a full Asian produce wall and a bakery counter make it the Saturday provisioning stop for thousands of Peninsula families. We trace the same pull in the Chinese community in Foster City.
Central Park and the Japanese Tea Garden, 50 E 5th Ave. San Mateo’s green heart, with a tea garden designed by Nagao Sakurai of Tokyo’s Imperial Palace, granite pagoda and koi pond among them. Though Japanese in origin, the park is the shared civic living room of the city’s Asian families, the place for cherry blossom photographs and Sunday strolls.
Aragon and Hillsdale High Schools, San Mateo Union High School District. The two big public high schools that draw families to the city as surely as any restaurant. Aragon, opened in 1961, now runs roughly a third Asian and ranks among the top California high schools, the kind of statistic that shapes where Chinese families choose to buy.
Where They Came From
San Mateo’s Chinese community is not one migration but three, layered over forty years. The oldest layer descends from San Francisco’s Chinatown, Cantonese-speaking families moving down the Peninsula after exclusion ended, in search of yards and good schools.
The largest and most defining layer is the Hong Kong wave of the 1980s and 1990s, families who left ahead of the 1997 handover and chose San Mateo for its Peninsula comfort and its proximity to both the city and the Valley. Their Cantonese set the tone of the 25th Avenue kitchens.
The newest layer is mainland and Taiwanese, professionals drawn by the technology economy from the 1990s onward, settling in San Mateo, San Bruno and Millbrae as a launching pad into Silicon Valley careers. Together they make a community that speaks several dialects, shops at the same markets, and sends its children to the same high schools.
San Mateo Today
Today the Chinese in San Mateo are not a neighbourhood you can draw a line around. They are woven through Baywood, Hayward Park, Sunnybrae and the Highlands, present in the PTA and on the city council ballot, visible most plainly in the food and the grocery aisles rather than in any single enclave. The city is roughly a quarter Asian now, and Chinese Americans are its largest Asian group, but they live as San Mateans first.
That dispersal is partly a function of cost. San Mateo is expensive, and the families who arrive now tend to be the ones who can afford a Peninsula mortgage, which keeps the community professional and prosperous and pushes newer or younger arrivals toward Daly City, Millbrae and the East Bay. The 25th Avenue corridor remains the cultural high street, but it shares the city’s Chinese commerce with the bigger Asian supermarkets just across the Foster City and Millbrae lines.
What holds it together is ordinary and durable: the dim sum table on Sunday, the cram-and-comfort of the high schools, the 99 Ranch run, the tea garden in Central Park when the cherry trees bloom. San Mateo did not set out to become a Chinese city. It became one the way the Peninsula does everything, quietly, household by household, until one morning the queue outside the seafood house was the truest picture of the town.
Frequently Asked Questions
How large is the Chinese community in San Mateo?
San Mateo is roughly a quarter Asian, and Chinese Americans are the single largest Asian group in the city, numbering well over ten thousand residents. The Chinese in San Mateo form one of the most significant communities in this Peninsula city of about 105,000 people.
Where do you find Chinese food and groceries in San Mateo?
The densest cluster is along West 25th Avenue, west of El Camino Real, with restaurants such as Fortune Star, while downtown around B Street and Fourth Avenue offers dim sum houses like Superstar. The nearest 99 Ranch Market sits just over the line at 1070 Foster City Blvd in Foster City.
When did the Chinese community in San Mateo grow?
The decisive growth came in the 1980s and 1990s with the Hong Kong emigration ahead of the 1997 handover, followed by mainland and Taiwanese arrivals drawn by the Silicon Valley technology boom from the 1990s onward. Earlier Cantonese families had moved down from San Francisco’s Chinatown after exclusion ended.
Why did Chinese families choose San Mateo specifically?
San Mateo offered the comfortable, well-served Peninsula suburb that Hong Kong and Taiwanese families wanted, with strong public schools and an ideal position between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The Chinese in San Mateo settled here for the same reasons earlier wealthy commuters did: schools, space and the train.
What are the schools like for these families?
The San Mateo Union High School District runs Aragon and Hillsdale High Schools, both highly regarded. Aragon, opened in 1961, is around a third Asian and ranks among the top California high schools, which is a major draw for families deciding where to buy.
How does San Mateo compare to nearby Chinese communities?
San Mateo sits within a ring of Peninsula Chinese communities. It is closely linked to neighbouring Foster City and Millbrae, shares the broader migration story with Cupertino further south, and traces its oldest roots to San Francisco’s Chinatown.
If your family’s story passed through San Mateo, or any of the places Chinese families have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Cantonese kitchen in Hong Kong or a Taipei suburb, to a Saturday morning on West 25th Avenue, to wherever you are now.