Teriyaki Time opens in Clovis, draws early rave reviews

Teriyaki Time has opened at one of Clovis’ busiest corners, bringing a fast-casual Asian-fusion menu to the southwest corner of Shaw Avenue and Clovis Avenue, next to Planet Fitness. The new storefront, at 634 Shaw Ave., arrived with a simple pitch: quick service, familiar flavors and the kind of homemade detail that owner Mai Thao says can pull in both busy lunch customers and families looking for an easy dinner stop.

The menu is built around teriyaki chicken, fried chicken, beef teriyaki, orange chicken, shrimp teriyaki and tofu teriyaki, with potstickers among the appetizers. Thao said the chicken is marinated 48 hours in advance and cooked on a fire grill, a detail that helps separate Teriyaki Time from the standard strip-mall lunch counter. That home-cooked angle, paired with the pace of fast-casual service, has already helped the restaurant draw early praise from kids and adults alike.

Teriyaki Time is not starting from scratch. Thao has operated the business for more than 10 years in pop-up, food-tent and trailer form, building a following before settling into a fixed location in Clovis. A grand opening is still about a month away, but the restaurant is already using the storefront to turn a long-running mobile operation into a more permanent neighborhood stop.

The location gives Teriyaki Time a built-in advantage. The City of Clovis identifies Shaw Avenue as a two-and-a-half-mile corridor targeted for long-term planning and reinvestment, and recent market material describes the Shaw and Clovis intersection as one of the city’s main retail and restaurant corridors. That same material says the 10-minute drive-time trade area tops 340,000 residents, with more than 372,000 daytime people, placing the restaurant in a dense stretch of potential lunch traffic and evening traffic.

The corner is also surrounded by established retail draw. Sierra Vista Mall, Sierra Pavilions and Bonanza Shopping Center all sit nearby, adding to the flow of shoppers and workers moving through the area each day. The move also fits a broader Clovis food-business pipeline that has been shaped by the Clovis Culinary Center, a nonprofit incubator that has helped hundreds of local food businesses over the past five years with support from the City of Clovis, USDA, Northern California Community Loan Fund, California Fresh Works, JD Food, the California Restaurant Association and the Fresno/Clovis Convention and Visitors Bureau. Teriyaki Time’s storefront marks the next step for a local operator that has spent years building its name, and now has a prominent corner to match.