Search "restaurants near me" from most addresses in north Penfield and the map does something strange. The pin sits inside the Town of Penfield. The results say Webster.
That's not a glitch. It's a mailing address problem that's been baked into this stretch of Empire Boulevard for decades, and it means a real cluster of newer restaurants at BayTowne Plaza never quite registers as Penfield's own, even to people who live three minutes away. If you've eaten there and filed it under "Webster" in your head, you're not wrong exactly. You're just working from an address that was never meant to describe where the food actually is.
Why your own zip code doesn't know you live in Penfield
BayTowne Plaza sits on Empire Boulevard, fully inside Penfield town lines. But the plaza carries a Webster mailing address, 14580, and its property owners pay Webster school taxes rather than Penfield's. The Town of Penfield's own planning documents call this out directly, describing the surrounding business district as having an identity problem: it gets mistaken for Webster because of the mailing address, even though the geography says otherwise.
This isn't a new complaint. The area, officially the Bay Road/Empire Boulevard/Creek Street corridor, was rebranded North Penfield after the town's 2000 Comprehensive Plan Update specifically to reinforce that this is Penfield ground. At 196 acres, it's the largest business district in town, built from a mix of general business, limited business, and non-retail zoning. The town has since started requiring new plaza signage to display "Town of Penfield" alongside the plaza name, an attempt to correct a confusion that mailing addresses and search engines keep reintroducing.
The practical effect is that a Penfield resident's own search habits work against them. Google Maps, delivery apps, and review sites key off the mailing address, not the municipal boundary. So the newest kitchen two miles from your driveway can look, on a screen, like it belongs to a different town entirely.
What's actually opened at BayTowne Plaza this year
The restaurant turnover at 1900 Empire Boulevard has been real. Here's what's landed recently, based on local restaurant coverage from the past several months.
| Restaurant | Cuisine | What's notable |
|---|---|---|
| Get Thai'd Up | Thai and Lao | Family-run, made-to-order curries and noodles, claw machines in the dining room |
| Sendu | Asian fusion | Full bar, crispy sushi tacos built on fried nori shells |
| Old Pueblo Grill Cantina | Sonoran-style Mexican | Third location of the brand, first with full table service and a liquor license, still runs its original food truck as the kitchen |
| Mamitas Mexican Cuisine | Mexican | Opened at 1778 Penfield Road in the former Guacamole Tacos and Margaritas space, known for taco Tuesdays made with a traditional nixtamalization process |
Old Pueblo Grill Cantina is worth a second look because of how it got there. The restaurant's chef, who grew up around Tucson's Sonoran-style Mexican food, brought the concept to Rochester by way of a food truck first. When the brick-and-mortar space opened in BayTowne Plaza, the truck didn't retire. It stayed on as the main kitchen, feeding the dining room from the parking lot while the new interior filled in around it. It's currently closed Sundays and only serves dinner Monday through Thursday, expanding to seven days during football season.
None of these four are far from any Penfield subdivision east of the creek. All four are, geographically, Penfield restaurants. Search results just won't tell you that.
The playground that just got the green light
The clearest sign that BayTowne Plaza is still actively changing, not just quietly filling old storefronts, came through Penfield's own Zoning Board of Appeals this summer. On June 18, 2026, the board approved a conditional use permit for Chuck E. Cheese to build an Adventure World location inside the plaza, taking over an existing 13,398-square-foot storefront.
Adventure World is a different format from the arcade-and-pizza Chuck E. Cheese most Rochester-area parents grew up with. It's built around a two-story climbing structure, an obstacle course, a snack bar, a toddler room, and event space, with the food itself playing a smaller role than in the original concept. Right now there's only one other Adventure World location in the country, in Arlington, Texas, which makes the Penfield approval an early move for the format outside its home market.
There's a piece of local memory tucked into this approval too. Penfield used to have a traditional Chuck E. Cheese near Panorama Plaza. That location closed, and for a while the closest one for Penfield families was the West Ridge Road location in Greece, the only Chuck E. Cheese left in the Rochester area. The BayTowne approval brings the brand back inside town lines, just in a different building and a different format than the one that closed.
No opening date has been set yet, but the permit is through, and the zoning file is public on the town's own site if you want to track the build-out yourself.
Reading the plaza like a resident
BayTowne Plaza is anchored by a Walmart Supercenter on roughly 34 acres, developed by the DiMarco Group, with Starbucks, McDonald's, Burlington, CVS, KeyBank, DiBella's, and a Habitat for Humanity ReStore rounding out the retail mix. A Wegmans and an AMC theater sit on adjacent parcels. It's a big, ordinary-looking suburban shopping center from the road. What's easy to miss from the parking lot is that the restaurant row tucked into it has turned over meaningfully in the past year, and that turnover is happening inside Penfield's borders even when the paperwork says otherwise.
For a resident, the useful move is simple: stop trusting the map pin to tell you what town you're eating in. The mailing address on a plaza doesn't move a property line. If you live in north Penfield and you've been driving past BayTowne assuming the new spots belong to Webster, they're on your own town's tax rolls and inside your own town's zoning authority, the same authority that just spent a June evening deciding whether Chuck E. Cheese gets to build a two-story playground a few miles from Four Corners.
Local identity here isn't really about pride in a name. It's about knowing which town's board meetings actually shape the building you're driving past, and knowing that the newest place to grab dinner might be closer, and more yours, than your phone is telling you.
If you're getting to know Penfield's neighborhoods, whether you've lived here for years or you're weighing a move into town, Lalla Fitzpatrick is happy to talk through how specific streets and pockets of Penfield sit relative to the parts of town you already know well.
