Khaar and Zareen's Just Told Us What Murphy Avenue Has Become

Walk into Khaar at 193 S. Murphy Ave. and the first thing you notice isn't the menu. It's the walls: photographs of tea farms in Assam, and Jaapi, the traditional conical hats farmers wear as sunshades, hung like the restaurant wants you to ask about them before you order. Chef Nandana Hazarika, a former software engineer, opened the restaurant on September 22, bringing Bay Area diners something almost nobody else here serves: food from India's Seven Sisters states, the cluster of northeastern territories whose cuisine rarely makes it onto a Bay Area menu at all. The bamboo shoot pork runs $29. The black sesame chicken runs the same. There's an Assam tea spritzer at the bar if you want something that tastes like the place the food comes from.

Two blocks down, Zareen's has been serving Memoni chicken samosas and shami kebabs since earlier this year, chef Zareen Khan's fourth restaurant and her first south of Redwood City. She told a reporter she picked 135 S. Murphy Ave. because she loves the street's old downtown feeling. Khan is a 2026 James Beard semifinalist for Best Chef: California. Her food is Pakistani-Indian, built around small plates and comfort cooking, and it landed on Murphy Avenue after a lease delay that stretched the project past two years.

Neither restaurant is generic. Neither is trying to be everything to everyone. And the fact that both opened on the same two-block stretch of the same street within the same year is the actual story, more than either opening is on its own.

The Street That Used to Play It Safer

Murphy Avenue became a pedestrian mall in 2023, and the city has kept upgrading the walking paths since, wider, cleaner, easier to move through without dodging traffic. What that bought the street wasn't more square footage. It bought minutes: the time people spend standing on the block reading a plaque, waiting for a table, deciding whether to order one more thing before they leave. That kind of dwell time is exactly what lets a restaurant survive on a menu this narrow. A samosa shop or an Assamese kitchen needs people who are already there, already slowing down, already curious enough to try something they can't get anywhere else nearby. A pass-through street can't support that. A street people linger on can.

That's a different claim than "downtown Sunnyvale has more restaurants now." It has always had restaurants. What's new is that two of the most recent arrivals are betting on specificity instead of range, and the bet is paying off enough that Hazarika chose Murphy Avenue for a restaurant she believes is rare in the country for a structural reason. She's said Northeast Indian food isn't common in the United States partly because the community that cooks it professionally is small to begin with. Opening here means she thinks the audience exists to support something this specific, not despite the niche but because of it.

What Else Moved In Around Them

Zareen's and Khaar didn't land on an empty block. The tenant mix around them has shifted fast enough that longtime Peninsula regulars keep recognizing names that used to belong somewhere else:

• Moods Wine Bar & Bistro, a former Palo Alto tenant, reopened on Murphy.
• Meyhouse, a Turkish restaurant, added a second Peninsula location a short walk from Zareen's.
• Bean Scene Cafe, at 186 S. Murphy Ave., runs 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, giving the block a coffee stop that isn't a drive-through chain.
• Home Coffee Roasters, at 200 W. McKinley Ave., opened its first location outside San Francisco just off the strip.

None of that turnover happened by accident. It's what a street looks like once foot traffic gets dense enough that operators stop hedging toward the safest possible concept and start betting on something narrower. The Historic Del Monte building, a relic of the California Packing Company's fruit-canning days that got refurbished and relocated to its current spot on Murphy in 1999, still anchors the block's older identity. The restaurants opening around it are what the newer identity looks like.

Saturday Still Belongs to the Market

None of this replaces the thing that's been anchoring Saturdays here longer than any of these restaurants have existed. The Sunnyvale Farmers Market runs year-round at Murphy and Washington, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., rain or shine, operated by the Urban Village Farmers' Market Association. It's the closest thing the street has to a control group: no menu, no chef, no marketing push, just produce, and it still draws a crowd every week regardless of what's opening around it. If you're weighing whether the new restaurant density has actually changed anything about how the block functions day to day, the market is the honest test. It was busy before Khaar existed. It's still busy now.

What's changed is what happens after the market closes. A morning spent picking up produce increasingly turns into an afternoon that ends at a table that didn't exist a year ago, whether that's a parklet seat at Zareen's or a bar stool at Moods.

The Festival That Closes Out the Season

The next scheduled gathering on the block is the Sunnyvale Mid-Autumn Festival, set for October 3 and 4 at Cityline Sunnyvale, the mixed-use development a block off Murphy at 345 W. McKinley Ave. Both days run 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., free to attend, with food vendors, live performances, and a seasonal marketplace built around the holiday. It's not on Murphy Avenue itself, but it's close enough that the two areas increasingly function as one continuous evening out rather than two separate destinations. Cityline keeps adding buildings a block away, and the festival is one more reason the walk between the two feels shorter than it used to.

What This Actually Means for the Block

The easy version of this story is "downtown Sunnyvale has new restaurants," which is true but tells you nothing you couldn't have guessed. The version worth knowing is narrower: the street has enough sustained foot traffic now that a chef can open a restaurant built around a cuisine most of the country has never tried, in a space that seats 135 people, and reasonably expect it to work. That's not a claim about how good the food is. It's a claim about what the street can support, and it's a different bar than the one Murphy Avenue was clearing even three years ago.

If you live near enough to walk it, the next few Saturdays give you an easy way to see the shift for yourself. Hit the farmers market at 9, browse toward Washington, and end the loop at whichever end of the block has the shorter wait, Khaar's tea farm photographs or Zareen's parklet. Either one tells you more about what this street has become than a list of openings ever could.

Milestone Realty keeps a close eye on the neighborhoods we work in, not just the market data but the daily texture that makes each one different. If you're curious what a specific block or street is actually like to live near, reach out to Milestone Realty and we'll give you the real answer, not the brochure version.