Restaurants in San Mateo, CA

San Mateo has 586 places in this guide: 477 restaurants, 17 quick-service spots, 46 cafes and 28 bars. Japanese leads the category counts at 58, with coffee shops and cafes at 51, Chinese at 45, Mexican at 42 and pizza at 35.

75 percent of listings in this guide are independent. Those pages give a quick look at how each town's listings differ.

439 listings are independent; the chains that show up most are Starbucks (11), Round Table Pizza (7), Subway (6) and Nick The Greek (4).

In the Servestack Independent Restaurant Index, San Mateo ranks #58 of 332 large US cities for the share of places that are independent.

Food in San Mateo by cuisine

Own a restaurant in San Mateo?

524 of the 586 places here (89%) list a website. When a guest searches for food in San Mateo and lands on a delivery app instead of your site, the app takes a commission on the order and shows them your competitors. Servestack gives you your own ordering site with zero commission, POS sync and loyalty, and Studio makes the menus, flyers and posts to promote it. See what you would keep with the commission savings calculator, or browse the restaurant marketing guides.

Place data from the Overture Maps Foundation (overturemaps.org), which includes data from Meta, Microsoft and Foursquare, used under the CDLA Permissive 2.0 and Apache 2.0 licenses. Restaurants open, close and move; check with the restaurant before you go. Data refreshed 2026-10-11.