Union Landing Lost Its Taproom Around the Same Stretch Central Plaza Lost a 48-Year Restaurant

Two of Union City's busiest food destinations changed hands within the same eight-month window, and neither closure had anything to do with the other. At Union Landing, the craft beer taproom DNA Tap & Barrelwerks is gone after operating since 2018. Across town at Central Plaza, the Rose Garden Restaurant served its last plate on August 31, 2025, closing out a 48-year run at 33348 Alvarado-Niles Road. Both spaces now belong to chains expanding into the East Bay, and the pattern says something about how Union City eats right now that a single closure never would.

What Left Union Landing

DNA Tap & Barrelwerks operated at 32165 Union Landing Blvd for roughly eight years, built around a rotating tap list and a house brewery that produced its own IPAs alongside imported bottles. It was the kind of spot that drew people specifically for the beer selection rather than as a stop on the way to somewhere else. Yelp's listing for the address now carries a closed tag, current as of this year, though no public announcement laid out an exact final date.

What Replaced It

Kura Revolving Sushi Bar opened at 32170 Dyer St, a few doors down in the same shopping center, with a soft launch on March 20, 2026 and an official grand opening on Friday, April 3. The Union City Chamber organized a ribbon-cutting to mark it, and the restaurant took over a space that had most recently housed FroZone Gelato and Mountain Mike's Pizza. Kura bills itself as the largest revolving sushi chain in the country, and Union City became its sixth Bay Area location and ninth in Northern California, following earlier openings in San Jose in 2023, Berkeley in early 2025, and existing spots in San Francisco, Pleasanton, and Cupertino. Union City wasn't first in line for this chain. It was one of the last East Bay cities on the list.

The format itself is built for repeat visits rather than special occasions: a conveyor belt delivering more than 100 dishes, a robot server named Kur-B, and a prize system that dispenses a small toy after every fifteen plates a diner clears. It's a different kind of draw than a taproom built around beer selection, and it changes what a trip to that stretch of Union Landing looks like on a Tuesday night.

The Rose Garden's Last Day

The Rose Garden's closure carried more weight in the neighborhood than a typical restaurant turnover, mostly because of how long it had been there. The Wong family, who ran the restaurant, posted their own farewell on the business's site:

"Our last day of service was Sunday, August 31, 2025."

Forty-eight years is long enough that most Central Plaza regulars had never known the strip center without it. The closure left a large, well-known storefront empty in a shopping center that has otherwise stayed fairly stable.

Home Eat Is Taking the Space

A liquor license filing points to Home Eat as the next tenant at 33348 Alvarado-Niles Road. Home Eat started in 2015 under the name Fashion Wok and has since grown into a broader Bay Area chain with locations in Cupertino, Fremont, San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, and Milpitas. The menu runs wide: hot pots, barbecue fish, Sichuan and Hunan dishes, Mongolian beef, kung pao chicken, spicy boiled fish, cumin lamb, and a dessert and milk tea lineup. As of the most recent reporting this spring, no opening date had been set. The Central Plaza space Home Eat is stepping into has sat empty since the Rose Garden's closing, and there's still no public timeline for when the doors open again.

Here's the two turnovers side by side.

The difference in pace matters. Union Landing's turnover is already finished and drawing regular foot traffic. Central Plaza's is still an empty storefront, which means that corner of the shopping center has effectively been dark for over a year.

What Didn't Turn Over

Neither of these closures touched the places in Union City that don't depend on a shopping center lease to keep people coming back. Birdhaus Beer Garden, at 3821 Smith Street, has kept its own calendar running independent of what's happening at either mall. This September it hosted the 6th Annual #ProjectBestFriend Pet Adoption & Donation Drive on its patio, the kind of event that builds a return crowd around something other than the food itself.

The Union City Farmers' Market has an even steadier footprint. It runs every Saturday, year-round, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Old Alvarado Park, also known as Cesar Chavez Park, and it's managed by the Pacific Coast Farmers' Market Association. That schedule hasn't shifted with any of the retail changes elsewhere in the city, because it was never tied to a single storefront lease to begin with.

That's the actual distinction worth drawing here. The two spots that changed hands both sat inside large retail developments where a landlord's leasing decision determines what shows up next. The two spots that didn't change are built around a park and a beer garden that draw people for an event or a weekly routine rather than a specific tenant. When a shopping center swaps a taproom for a sushi chain, or a 48-year restaurant for a regional one, the change shows up fast and looks dramatic. When the draw is a Saturday market or a beer garden patio, the routine just keeps running underneath all of it.

Anyone trying to figure out where Union City actually eats right now is really tracking two different clocks. One belongs to Union Landing and Central Plaza, where the tenant list resets every so often based on lease terms and chain expansion plans. The other belongs to Smith Street and Old Alvarado Park, where the calendar has stayed the same for years and isn't waiting on anyone's opening date.

Tracking which corners of a city are mid-turnover and which ones have stayed put for years is the same kind of groundwork that goes into pricing a home correctly or knowing which block still has room to move. If you want that kind of read on Union City, from the retail corners to the residential ones, Let's Connect with Joe Schembri.