The Canadian-based Asian grocery chain opened its doors Thursday morning at Westgate Center in San Jose, taking over a former Walmart space that had been dark since 2019.

T&T Supermarket opened its first California location Thursday morning at 9 a.m. at 1600 Saratoga Ave., Suite 501, in San Jose's Westgate Center — a roughly 50,000-square-foot space that sat empty for seven years after Walmart vacated in 2019. The Canada-based Asian grocery chain is owned by Loblaw Companies and is best known to Bay Area shoppers who've visited Vancouver or Toronto, where T&T has been a fixture for decades.

This is T&T's third U.S. location and its westernmost outpost yet. The store carries a full prepared-foods program — a BBQ counter, noodle station, dim sum and street-food section, hot food bar, made-to-order Chinese crepe station, and an in-store bakery — alongside the produce, live seafood, and Asian specialty grocery the brand is built on. T&T also held two pop-up events at Santana Row in early June to seed interest before Thursday's opening.

"San Jose is a long-anticipated store," CEO Tina Lee said in the company's official press release. "We're bringing more than just exciting, high-quality foods."

The landlord is Federal Realty Investment Trust, which owns Westgate Center — a roughly 640,000-square-foot shopping center anchored by Target and Ross. For Federal Realty, T&T fills a hard-to-lease big-box hole that had been sitting vacant since the Walmart era. The chain expects to create approximately 300 jobs at the San Jose location.

The South Bay has long supported one of the country's densest concentrations of Asian-American households, and T&T's bet on Westgate — a suburban strip rather than a Japantown or a Chinatown — reflects a chain confident it can draw its own traffic.