Costantini Team | Bay Area, CA Real Estate Experts

"I'm still saying May," Eric Hassett told a customer standing outside his gutted hardware store in January. "It may be closer to May 1 or it may be closer to May 31, but I'm sticking to it."

He was talking about Hassett Ace Hardware, the Woodside Plaza store his family has run since 2014, four months after a driver mistook the gas pedal for the brake and drove straight through the front window. Just down Woodside Road, two other neighborhood fixtures were making their own quiet promises about when they'd be back. All three landed on wildly different timelines. If you've spent the last year reading a "reopening soon" banner somewhere along Woodside Road and wondering whether it meant what it said, the honest answer is that it depended entirely on which storefront you were standing in front of.

Three Years Is Not "A Couple of Months"

Bravo Taqueria opened at 980 Woodside Road in 1991, when Javier and Guadalupe Mendez started serving family recipes out of a hole-in-the-wall storefront. Carlos Rios took over in 2006 at 27, with no restaurant experience and a habit of pretending he was still part of the Mendez family so regulars wouldn't notice the ownership had changed. It worked. By 2023, when ADA compliance issues forced the taqueria to close, Rios had built the kind of following where a customer named Briant Gutierrez had been ordering the same burrito, the Bravito on a green tortilla, since he was five years old, and where cook Rosie Alvarado had been in the kitchen since 1992.

The closure was supposed to last a couple of months, just long enough for a short remodel. It took three years. Rios kept paying Alvarado's rent the entire time. Bravo Taqueria finally reopened on February 13, 2026, to a line of regulars that included the now 21-year-old Gutierrez, and a former cashier named Manuel Porras who came back to work the counter while waiting for a military deployment. The building is now fully ADA compliant, and the menu is unchanged: chile relleno, tamales at $11.95 for two, and the burrito Gutierrez never stopped ordering.

That three-year gap between "a couple months" and reality is the longest overrun of anything that happened on this stretch of road. It's worth holding onto that number, because the other two reopenings didn't come close to it.

The One That Actually Landed on Schedule

On December 15, 2025, at 5:10 p.m., a car drove through the front window of Hassett Ace Hardware in Woodside Plaza and caught fire. No one was injured, but the store, which the Hassett family has operated since opening on Halloween 2014 as part of a Peninsula chain dating back to 1957, was gutted. A month later, the exterior was still boarded up, a "temporarily closed" banner hung next to the sign, and Eric Hassett stood in the empty building and made the promise that opened this piece.

He kept it, almost to the day.

"This rebuild gave us the opportunity not just to repair the store, but to make meaningful improvements. We're excited to welcome everyone back."

The store soft-opened at 8 a.m. on May 13, 2026, with manager Sarah Carr, who joined the Hassett family business in 2010 and helped open the Redwood City location in 2014, running the popcorn machine again for the first time in five months. The rebuild wasn't cosmetic. The entrance was shifted a few feet, cashier stations were moved behind a concrete wall instead of window glass, and concrete bollards now sit between the parking lot and the storefront, all changes made specifically because the crash exposed how exposed the old layout was. A grand opening celebration followed on July 12, 2026, timed to land just about six months after the crash.

Compare that to Bravo's three-year odyssey and the difference is stark: same category of disaster, same neighborhood, same family-business ethos, and one delivered on its own stated timeline while the other blew past it by 34 months.

Business	What They Promised	What Actually Happened
Bravo Taqueria	A couple of months (2023)	Reopened Feb. 13, 2026, nearly 3 years later
Hassett Ace Hardware	"Sticking to May" (Jan. 2026)	Soft opened May 13, grand opening July 12
Bay Burgers	"Early 2026" per storefront banner	Opened in March 2026, about six weeks later

The Newcomer Skipped the Delay Entirely

The third storefront in this stretch never had an old version of itself to compare against, which may be why its timeline slipped the least. Bay Burgers started as a two-day-a-week pop-up, grilling smashburgers on a Blackstone griddle at Hoover Park before Xavier Pereznegron, a Redwood City native with a fine-dining background and training in France, moved the operation to a tent in a Spring Street parking lot in the summer of 2024. It built a near-perfect Yelp record there, and in September 2025 the Pereznegrons closed the pop-up to have their first child and shift focus to a permanent location.

That location turned out to be 976 Woodside Road, the old 5th Quarter Pizza building, remodeled and downsized, sitting directly across the parking lot from Bravo Taqueria. A banner promised an "early 2026" opening. It landed in March, roughly six weeks past the optimistic end of that window, which by the standards of this particular block counts as basically on time.

The menu explains why Pereznegron calls the fries a technique rather than a side dish: they're cooked twice, a method he picked up studying in France, and the burgers are built on Hawaiian bread buns with 100% short-rib patties, grilled onions, banana peppers, and homemade pickles. A quarter-pound burger runs $9.50, the half-pound is $11.50, and rotating weekly specials cover everything from smoked meats to loaded fries. "I'm opening a restaurant because I love food, not because I want to make money," Pereznegron has said, which is either an odd thing to say about a business or the most honest thing anyone on this block has said about theirs.

Bay Burgers now has real competition within a few minutes' walk. Woodside Roadhouse, just across Woodside Road, also does smash burgers alongside chicken tenders and French bread pizzas, and Redwood Grill inside Woodside Plaza itself has quietly served a well-regarded, non-smashed burger with a long list of toppings for years. Three burger options on one stretch of road is not something this neighborhood had a year ago.

What This Actually Means for Your Week

As of this August, all three storefronts have been open at the same time since Hassett's soft opening in May, the first stretch in years this corner of Woodside Road hasn't had at least one boarded window or a for-lease sign in it. The practical version of all this:

Bravo Taqueria, 980 Woodside Road, open Monday through Saturday, noon to 8 p.m., fully ADA compliant now.
Bay Burgers, 976 Woodside Road, next door to Bravo, serving smashburgers and rotating specials.
Hassett Ace Hardware, Woodside Plaza, back to full hours with a rebuilt entrance, protective bollards, and the popcorn machine running on weekends.

None of these businesses changed what made people loyal to them in the first place. What changed was how long each one asked its regulars to wait, and that gap says something about how differently a decades-old taqueria, a third-generation hardware chain, and a one-year-old burger startup each handle the space between a promise and a delivery date. For a neighborhood built on repeat customers who've been walking into the same doors for years, that's not a small thing to get right.

If you're weighing a move to this part of Redwood City, or you already call Woodside Plaza home and you're curious what your own property looks like in a market that's been busy in more ways than one this year, The Costantini Team knows this stretch of road block by block. Schedule a Consultation and we'll walk you through it.