Seven years is a long time to wait for a fabulous fresh seafood meal.
But it turns out that diners can bank on the Pleasanton promise made by Cook’s Seafood, a Menlo Park mainstay for almost a century.
The Koll Center restaurant at Bernal Road will finally open to customers, with a soft opening scheduled for next week, according to the updated Cook’s Pleasanton website.
Here’s the backstory:
In February 2018, the restaurant’s 90th birthday year, the Crumrine ownership family announced they would expand for the first time. They selected a space on Bernal Road just off Interstate 680 — the high-visibility route to the Alameda County fairgrounds and the busy downtown.
They had hoped to open in a few months, by spring of that year. We told readers to head to El Camino Real for a taste if they couldn’t wait until then. There, Cook’s combines a restaurant with a fresh fish market. The top seller in the market has been crab. In the restaurant it’s the fish and chips — and it’s a big hit with customers because the battered fish is Alaskan halibut, not the more common cod or haddock.
“That’s what we’re known for. You can’t find that just anywhere,” a manager said at the time.
Meanwhile, the Pleasanton sign went up, and there it stayed, tempting foodies for years. In 2020, an opening appeared imminent. But that didn’t happen during the pandemic year.
In the intervening years, life happened, a member of the management team told us, and the project was put on the back burner.
But Bay Area News Group readers kept inquiring. “Will there ever be a Cook’s Seafood in Pleasanton?” one asked us in 2023, before the questions stopped coming. We’re emailing her right now with the newsy update.
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Details: Hours are evolving at the new Cook’s Seafood, 6654 Koll Center Parkway, Pleasanton. Check https://cooksseafoodpleasanton.com. The Menlo Park flagship restaurant and market opens at 10:30 a.m. Monday-Saturday and serves until 8 or 8:30 p.m., at 751 El Camino Real. The market opens earlier, at 9 a.m.; www.cooksseafood.com.
This is a developing story. Come back for updates.