If you have lived on or near San Anselmo Avenue for any stretch of years, the summer of 2026 will feel familiar in one way and completely reshuffled in another. The street closures still start at 4:30 on Friday evenings. The redwoods at Creek Park still catch the last of the light around 7. What changed is who is cooking on the block, whose name is above the door at a sixty-year-old counter, and which team keeps quietly showing up as the connective tissue between all of it.
The through-line most people are missing
The easy read on the Avenue this season is a list of openings. The more interesting read is that one local operator, Creekside Pizza & Taproom, is doing double duty as both a food-scene steward and the presenting sponsor of the summer's marquee community event. Hilda's Coffee Shop, a San Anselmo staple for more than sixty years, closed in late 2025 and is set to reopen in 2026 under new ownership from the team behind Creekside Pizza, keeping the heart intact while sharpening the menu around breakfast, brunch, and burgers. At the same time, Creekside Pizza & Taproom is the concert sponsor supporting Live on the Avenue. Two of the biggest reasons to be downtown this summer trace back to the same local table. That is a story about continuity, not churn.
Around that spine, two operators from outside town are betting on San Anselmo as a primary address, not a satellite. Here is how the pieces fit.
Kientz Hall is now Tu Tap
The corner at 625 San Anselmo Avenue has been waiting for its next chapter for a while. Tu Tap is moving into the former Kientz Hall space, led by chef Justine Kelly, who spent 18 years at The Slanted Door, alongside Bill Upson of the Real Restaurants group, offering elevated Vietnamese and Asian fusion with a redesigned open kitchen and a rooftop bar looking straight at Mount Tam.
Two things worth flagging for locals. First, the opening date has moved. The project originally aimed for a March 2026 opening, and by early July a Marin real estate colleague reported Tu Tap opening in July with rooftop views. Second, the pedigree matters. A Slanted Door alum choosing a permanent address on the Avenue, not a second-location experiment, is the kind of hire a downtown lands once a decade. The team behind Tu Tap blends traditional Vietnamese flavors with French influence and Northern California ingredients, brought to life through wok cooking and claypot preparations, which is a longer sentence than most restaurant openings deserve but matches what is actually being built inside the space.
Hilda's, brought back
For a certain group of longtime residents, the closure of Hilda's in late 2025 hit harder than any of the newer openings landed. A counter that had been pouring coffee since the Kennedy administration does not get replaced by a concept. It gets replaced or it stays gone.
The choice to hand the keys to the Creekside Pizza team, rather than a chef from out of county, is the tell. This is a revival written for people who ate breakfast at Hilda's for thirty years, not for a food blog audience.
"This one matters because it's about continuity, not reinvention for the sake of it." — The House, February 2026 preview of Marin openings
If you want to understand the emotional temperature of the Avenue this summer, that sentence is the whole map.
Past the downtown core: Pretti Platters near Red Hill
Not everything new is on the Avenue itself. Pretti Platters opened on May 19, 2026 in the one-story freestanding building near Red Hill Shopping Center in San Anselmo that previously housed Auryn Thai Cuisine. The founders are four longtime friends who bonded over their Thai heritage nearly two decades ago and wanted a casual daytime restaurant that featured brunch staples along with substantial, dinner-worthy fare.
The menu reads more ambitious than the format suggests. Lunch-leaning options include a little gems and watermelon radish salad with grilled chicken thigh or Bodega Bay smoked salmon, toasts with whipped truffle ricotta and roasted wild mushrooms, and a Parisian-style croque monsieur, while the kitchen also pushes into Monterey Bay charbroiled branzino with Meyer lemon beurre blanc, steak frites au poivre, a 16-ounce bone-in heritage pork chop, and Kaluga Reserve caviar with warm housemade roti. Pretti Platters is open from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. daily at 810 Sir Francis Drake Blvd. in San Anselmo, with parking in the adjacent lot; more information at prettiplatters.com or 415-455-8300.
Read against the downtown openings, the geography tells a small story. The Avenue is drawing the destination projects. Red Hill is drawing the everyday ones. Both stretches are getting stronger at the same time, which has not been true for a while.
Live on the Avenue: how to actually use the schedule
The concert series is the reason the sidewalks are full on Friday and Saturday nights, and there is more to it than the free bands. Live on the Avenue runs Friday and Saturday evenings from June 20 through September 12, 2026, with no event on July 4, free music and programming from 6:00 to 8:30 p.m., and the Avenue street closure from 4:30 to 9:30 p.m. Two stages carry the lineup: Creek Park Amphitheater offers a scenic redwood grove setting with lawn seating and picnic space, while Town Hall Plaza brings live music directly into the pedestrian-friendly downtown atmosphere.
A few dates worth putting on the fridge:
| Date | Creek Park | Town Hall Plaza |
|---|---|---|
| Sat, Jul 18 | Movie Night (The Little Mermaid + Hairspray) | Savannah Bluegrass Band |
| Sat, Aug 1 | Shana Morrison & Caledonia | Koi |
| Fri, Aug 7 | Soul Ska | The Mad Maggies |
| Sat, Aug 8 | Hall Pass | Sunhunter Band |
Beyond the music, the series has folded in the kind of programming that gives parents a reason to stay past 8 and gives grandparents a reason to show up in the first place. The season includes Movie Nights on June 27, July 18, and August 29; It's a Vibe Dance Parties on June 20 and July 31; bowling in Imagination Park on June 26 and July 10; Sterling the Bubble Man on July 17 and August 22; and Comedy in the Park on September 5, with themed nights that include Public Safety Night on August 7, Grandparents' Night on August 15, and Star Wars Night on August 29.
The full lineup and any weather updates live on the town's Live on the Avenue page.
Two storefronts worth a browse between sets
Concert nights and Saturday errands are running into each other more often this summer because a couple of new shops have joined the retail mix on the Avenue.
- The San Anselmo Rose — a flower and gift shop that locals have already started using as their default gift stop before dinner reservations.
- Shorthand — a stationery store stocked for actual desk work, not just greeting cards.
Neither is a category the Avenue was missing in a critical way. Both are the kind of small addition that quietly deepens the reason to walk five blocks instead of driving to a shopping center.
A working template for a summer Saturday
If you want a low-effort plan that uses what is actually new, it looks something like this:
- Late brunch at Pretti Platters before the 2:30 p.m. close, ideally on the way back from a Red Hill errand.
- A stop at Shorthand or The San Anselmo Rose while the Avenue closure goes up around 4:30.
- Early dinner on Tu Tap's rooftop once it opens, timed so you catch the light on Mount Tam.
- Walk down to Creek Park for the 6 p.m. set under the redwoods, or park yourself at Town Hall Plaza if you want to be closer to the food.
- End at Creekside Pizza & Taproom, which is both the sponsor of the whole series and the team behind the coming Hilda's revival, so you are essentially closing the loop on the summer's biggest storylines in one room.
Why it adds up
The reason this summer feels different is not that a lot of restaurants opened at once. Marin has had bigger opening waves. It is that the mix of new arrivals and returning names is being curated, in part, by operators who already live and work on the street. A Slanted Door veteran choosing 625 San Anselmo Avenue as a permanent address, a sixty-year counter coming back under a neighbor's ownership, and a free music series running twelve straight weekends under the redwoods add up to a downtown that is investing in itself in public.
If you are thinking about how any of this shapes what your block, your home, or your next move looks like in San Anselmo, reach out to Daniel Flores. Available 24/7, and always happy to talk about the neighborhood before the transaction.
