OAKLAND — Dave & Buster’s, a high-profile entertainment and restaurant chain, is eyeing a site near the Oakland waterfront, a potential expansion poised to fill a long-empty space in the East Bay’s largest city.
The potential location for a new Dave & Buster’s is at 55 Harrison St. in Oakland’s Jack London Square, according to documents on file with a state licensing agency.
Dave & Buster’s restaurant and entertainment site at the Great Mall in Milpitas. (Google Maps)
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This empty Oakland space is well known: Over the last several years, entrepreneurs have floated multiple ideas to fill the site, including a public market and food hall.
The five-story mixed-use building totals 187,200 square feet, with four levels of office spaces above the ground-floor market hall space, information posted on the Property Shark website shows.
The market square space that has drawn the interest of Dave & Buster’s totals 40,000 square feet, according to commercial property experts.
While the mixed-use development has been able to attract office occupants over the years, the ground-floor space has yet to achieve success — or land a tenant.
The building broke ground in 2007, the market hall was touted in 2012 and the food hall proposal first emerged in 2019 with several top-notch chefs slated to set up shop in the site.
But by 2022, the chefs began to drop out. Like the other proposals for the ground floor, the plans wilted.
Dave & Buster’s has applied for a license to operate a “general eating place” and “portable bar” at the 55 Harrison location in Oakland, the state Alcoholic Beverage Control documents show.
The application was listed as still pending, according to the state agency’s records.
