The Bar on El Camino Real Has Outlasted Every Name Above the Door

Drive past 1748 El Camino Real this month and you'll see a new sign, a full patio, and a bartender named McKenna pouring an espresso martini with chocolate bitters. Zac's Bar & Grill opened September 1, and if you'd told me five years ago that this exact address would still be pouring beer under a third name, I'd have believed you. That's the part worth sitting with. This isn't a new restaurant story so much as a story about an address that refuses to stop being a bar.

What Actually Changed on the Patio

Husband and wife Zaki Massis and Btool Nazerial are the ones behind the counter now. Massis lives in Belmont, has called the Bay Area home for 14 years, and spent time as business operations manager at Waterfront Restaurant in Foster City before deciding he and his wife wanted to run something of their own.

The room seats about 90 people inside and another 100 on the patio, open daily from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sixteen beers rotate on tap, from Stella Artois to Firestone 805, running $8 to $10 a pour. Five signature cocktails split $14 to $16, including a prickly pear margarita and a cosmopolitan twist. Appetizers land between $13 and $19, topped by a $26 sampler platter, and Massis points diners toward the potato skins and the calamari fritti before anything else. The signature burger, a brisket and Angus blend on brioche with bacon and aioli, runs $22.

Massis told Palo Alto Online he wants trivia nights first, karaoke eventually, and a running relationship with local school fundraisers.

"We love people. We love to engage with the community, and we help to give back to the community as well."

That's the pitch. Watch @zacsbarandgrill on Instagram if you want the fundraiser dates as they land.

The Name Before This One

Before Zac's, this was The Office Bar & Grill, and it held that name for 14 years before closing in March 2025. Before that, in 2010, Gateway Properties partners Dave Parks and Steve Hicks converted part of their own real estate office into a restaurant. Two different owners, two different concepts, one address, and neither one built the bar from scratch. According to the White Oaks Blog, the site has functioned as a neighborhood watering hole going back to San Carlos's incorporation. Whatever stood on that corner before The Office was already pouring drinks for the same block of El Camino Real.

That's not a coincidence of zoning or convenience. It's three separate ownership groups, decades apart, independently deciding that this specific footprint on El Camino works as a bar and nothing else has displaced it.

Three Names, One Address

Read that table sideways and the pattern is the point. The names change, the owners change, and the drinks keep flowing from the same address.

Why the Corner Keeps Being a Bar

Part of the answer is zoning. MLSListings describes 1748 El Camino Real as carrying office/retail present use under Mixed Use South zoning, and the property was listed for $4 million. That designation keeps the door open to exactly this kind of turnover: a restaurant closes, a new operator leases or buys in, and the space reopens as another restaurant because the zoning was built to allow it, not to force something bigger.

Compare that to what's happening half a mile down the same corridor. SummerHill Apartment Communities and architecture firm KTGY broke ground in July 2026 on 11 El Camino Real, a 251-unit rental building on a 2.2-acre site between the San Carlos and Belmont Caltrain stations. That's a full redevelopment, ground up, aimed at transit-oriented density the city has been pushing for years. Meanwhile the city is also working through SamTrans's Central El Camino Real Multimodal Plan, which floated three design concepts (transit-priority, pedestrian-priority, and bicycle-priority) to the council in February 2026, with narrowed alternatives due later that year and the preferred option advancing into detailed Caltrans review in 2027, part of a corridor study estimated at roughly $1 billion. San Carlos has also put a half-cent sales tax measure on the November 2026 ballot, projected to generate about $6 million a year for infrastructure, street repairs, and downtown commercial upgrades.

Set those two facts side by side and the contrast is the whole story. El Camino Real is being redrawn at the corridor level, with hundreds of new housing units, bike lane studies, and a tax measure all moving through the pipeline at once. And in the middle of all that motion, 1748 El Camino Real just keeps doing what it's always done: pouring drinks under whatever name is currently on the lease.

What This Means If You Actually Live Near It

If you're used to walking or driving past this corner, the practical update is simple. The hours are 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily. The patio is bigger than the dining room, seating 100 outside against 90 inside, so if you're going for a beer on a warm evening, that's where to sit. Trivia nights are coming first, karaoke later, and if your kid's school has ever run a fundraiser through a local restaurant partnership, keep an eye on Zac's Instagram for that kind of event too.

The bigger context is worth carrying with you the next time this block changes hands again, because it will. Whatever name eventually replaces Zac's on that sign, the smart bet is that it'll still be pouring beer, because that's what this particular stretch of pavement has done since before most of the buildings around it existed in their current form.

If you're weighing what a corner like this says about the rest of El Camino Real, or wondering how corridor-level projects like 11 El Camino Real or the multimodal plan might affect property values nearby, I'm always happy to talk through it. Bob Bredel has been tracking these blocks for years, and a phone call costs you nothing.