Broadway at 40th Now Works Two Shifts, From Morning Smoothies to 2 a.m. French Dips

One Friday this fall, KQED food editor Luke Tsai and illustrator Thien Pham pulled up to a takeout window on Broadway at 11 p.m. Nobody was in line, and nobody was sitting at the sidewalk folding tables. In their KQED Midnight Diners column, they wrote that the stretch near Broadway and 40th felt like a ghost town as midnight got close, and that even the gas station across the street looked closed. Then the woman at the window told them that their quiet night was nothing like the 6 o'clock dinner rush, which had already sold out the electrolyte drinks.

The window belongs to Town Beef, and in daylight the same building sells smoothies. That pattern is spreading at the southern edge of Temescal. Near MacArthur BART, the newest businesses on Broadway don't each get a storefront of their own. They're splitting addresses by hour, so a corner that used to have one kind of day now has two.

One building, two businesses, two different clocks

The old Clove & Hoof building at 4001 Broadway now has two tenants who barely overlap. Oaklandside's Nosh coverage reported that Drink Thicc, the smoothie shop, moved there from Uptown on Sept. 4. Town Beef debuted in the same space the same day.

Drink Thicc's own site lists hours of 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekends. The shop usually rotates four smoothies a week, such as the "blue zone" with blue spirulina, banana and pineapple. Owner Minni Sandhu told Nosh that the bigger space lets the shop keep core smoothies on the menu permanently.

Town Beef takes the other end of the day. As of KQED's Oct. 22 column, chef-owner Craig Smith's window was selling sandwiches until 2 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights. At the time, the menu had exactly three items: a house "Oakland-style" French dip, a vegan mushroom version, and an electrolyte drink. The beef sandwich uses grilled ribeye with caramelized onions and a garlicky aioli on Acme bread, and it comes already dipped in the jus. The vegan version uses four kinds of mushrooms, oyster, cremini, maitake and baby bella, with a coconut yogurt aioli. You can also add mushrooms to the beef sandwich.

Put the two schedules side by side and the building's day looks like this:

The shared building also has an end date built in. Sandhu told Nosh that Drink Thicc plans to stay at 4001 Broadway for about a year while a flagship location is built. So the daytime half of this arrangement is temporary by design.

Next door, the split shift is the whole plan

Around the corner, Mother Tongue Cafe & Bar at 308 41st St. serves coffee, pastries, small plates and a full bar from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day. It has also been the home base for the next business planned for this block.

Brack DeFries and Chris Morgan run Egg Pals, the breakfast-sandwich pop-up whose lines have stretched down sidewalks. Oaklandside reported that they are turning the former TrueBurger space at 4101 Broadway into their first restaurant, Egg Palace. The name came from customers mishearing "Egg Pals." DeFries told Nosh that the pair were doing pop-ups at Mother Tongue twice a month and that about 70 percent of their pop-ups had been in that neighborhood, "so we have a kind of built-in regular crowd already there."

The plan described in that article splits the day the same way 4001 Broadway does, but under one roof and one owner. Mornings would bring the familiar sandwiches, such as the Egg Pal at $13 with bacon, egg, cheese, pickled onions and herby mayo, along with the Vegg Pal and the Pickle Pal at $12 each. Coffee would come from Mother Tongue and teas from Molly's Refresher. The restaurant would close in the afternoon and reopen in the evening with the Pal Burger, a thick medium-rare patty on a potato roll, plus fried chicken sandwiches, tater tots, a pimento cheese plate and cocktails such as a frozen piña colada and a carbonated margarita. "We're just going to have casual breakfast in the morning, and then more like a bar with food in the evening time," DeFries told Nosh. The owners ran a Kickstarter with a $50,000 goal to help remodel the dining room and kitchen.

Between Mother Tongue's 7 a.m. opening and Town Beef's 2 a.m. close on Fridays and Saturdays, the corner already covers most of the clock on those nights, and Egg Palace's plan would add a fourth operator within about a block.

Up Telegraph, the same storefronts are turning over instead

The split-shift model on Broadway stands out against what has happened to one address up Telegraph. At 4869 Telegraph Ave., Korean gastropub Tuum replaced Hanshin Pocha in July, then closed after a few months. The space was quickly turned into Oh Crab!, a seafood boil restaurant. Nosh called seafood boil, "along with smashburgers," "the restaurant concept of the moment." Oh Crab!'s own site set its grand opening for Nov. 9. That's three concepts at one address in under half a year, each trying to own the whole day.

On Shattuck, another daytime operation now shares a building. Upstairs, the restaurant above Snail Bar at 4935 Shattuck Ave., announced a Sept. 4 soft reopening with Friday through Sunday hours of 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. It had first opened in March 2025 and, as Oaklandside reported, shut down just days later. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that a city cease-and-desist that March said the business was operating without proper permits. By July 2025, the proposed fixes included a three-compartment sink, stainless steel counters in place of tile, and a wall dividing the unit.

In each case, a small operator gets into a building by taking only the hours or the floor it needs. On Broadway at 40th, that approach has added hours to a corner KQED described as nearly empty close to midnight.

The evening spot a few blocks west is closing

While Broadway adds hours, the area is losing a familiar evening anchor. Arthur Mac's Tap and Snack, the beer garden and pizza place at 4006 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, is named after the MacArthur BART station. It opened in 2017 with local craft beer, pizza, wings, salads and soft serve. Nosh reported that its last day of service in Oakland is Dec. 20. The Bay Street location in Emeryville stays open, and the owners plan a new location in Hayward.

Arthur Mac's handled the beer-garden evening on its own for nearly a decade. The businesses on Broadway split that job into pieces. Town Beef has the late window on two nights a week, Mother Tongue's bar closes at 7, and Egg Palace's evening plan adds burgers and cocktails at 4101.

Planning around the clock this season

Here's how this corner lines up between now and the end of December, using the most recent posted hours:

1. Weekday mornings from 7 a.m.: Mother Tongue opens first, and Drink Thicc follows at 8.
2. Weekend mid-afternoon: Drink Thicc stays open until 4 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays, an hour later than on weekdays.
3. Friday and Saturday at 6 p.m.: Town Beef's window opens, and staff told KQED this is the busy hour.
4. Friday and Saturday after 11 p.m.: In KQED's account this is the quiet stretch at the window, open until 2 a.m.
5. Saturday, Dec. 19, 6 to 9 p.m.: A short walk from 40th, Beebe Memorial Cathedral at 3900 Telegraph hosts Christmas at the Cathedral with Jamal Roberts, comedian J-Red and the cathedral's music department, according to the Temescal Telegraph Business Improvement District.
6. Sunday, Dec. 20: Last day of service at Arthur Mac's on MLK Jr. Way.

Small businesses change their hours often, so check each one's own page before you walk over at 1:45 a.m.

If you're near Broadway and 40th and wondering how that shows up in your home's value, Anne McKereghan follows North Oakland block by block, closings and openings both, and is glad to walk you through it. Request a Free Home Valuation and we'll start with your street.