If you read anything about San Anselmo's restaurant scene this spring, you got a tidy story: three storefronts on the Avenue, all turning over at once, all reopening by summer. It made for a good headline. It's also no longer accurate, and if you've been waiting for a specific breakfast counter to reappear, the gap between what got reported and what's actually true right now is worth knowing before you plan a Saturday morning around it.
Two of the three are open. The third, the one most people actually asked about, is not, and the reason has less to do with a menu and more to do with what it takes to bring a building that opened the same year as "Psycho" up to code in 2026.
What's Actually Open
Start with the good news, because there's real good news. Tụ Tập opened July 29 at 625 San Anselmo Avenue, in the space that used to be Kientz Hall. The pedigree is real: chef Justine Kelly grew up in San Anselmo and spent 17 years working under Charles Phan at the Slanted Door before coming home to run her own kitchen. Her partner in the project is Bill Upson of Real Restaurants, the group behind Bix and Buckeye Roadhouse, and co-owner Adam Block, who lives in town, called the opening "kind of a homecoming." The rooftop bar looks straight at Mount Tamalpais, which is the detail most people bring up first, but the raw bar and the high-ceilinged dining room are doing the actual work most nights.
A few blocks away near Red Hill Shopping Center, Pretti Platters opened May 19 in the freestanding building that used to house Auryn Thai. Four friends who bonded over their Thai heritage nearly two decades ago built a daytime menu that runs from a Dutch pancake to a 16-ounce bone-in heritage pork chop with celery root puree, with Kaluga Reserve caviar and housemade roti sitting on the same menu as a croque monsieur. Co-owner Fah Intapura and her partners brought in a chef with fine-dining credentials to shape it, and the space near Red Hill finally has a tenant again after sitting empty.
So that's two doors, both open, both worth the walk. The third is where the timeline everyone reported back in the spring stopped matching reality.
The One That Isn't Open Yet
Hilda's Coffee Shop closed in September 2025 after running continuously since 1960, most of that time under one family. Darleen and Brian Young bought it in 1978, and their daughter Sue Kirton took over in 2006 and ran it until she retired the business last fall. The building at 639 San Anselmo Avenue was, by the new owner's own account, not in shape to keep going. Pat Townsley, who owns Creekside Pizza & Taproom directly across the street, bought the business and has been open about why the old diner couldn't simply reopen as-is.
Townsley has been blunt about the building itself, calling it "substandard in every way" and doubtful it ever would have passed a modern inspection. Bringing it up to code meant new HVAC, all-new electrical and plumbing, and enough structural work to satisfy the Health Department, the Town of San Anselmo, and Central Marin Sanitary District all at once. When the project was first announced, the plan called for a spring build-out with the new concept open by early summer, timed to land right around when Live on the Avenue kicked off in June.
That didn't happen. As of the past few days, Townsley's own team has been posting that PG&E only just connected power to the space, now branded Tasty Delicious, and that the crew expects to open "before the end of this month." The German-style pancakes are staying. The hours are extending into evening service with a hot chicken sandwich and a new burger on the menu. But if you walked past 639 San Anselmo Avenue this week expecting a diner, you'd have found a job site instead, roughly three months past the date most coverage promised.
Why the Gap Is the Actual Story
Tụ Tập took over an available commercial space and built out a new restaurant inside it. Pretti Platters moved into a building that simply needed new tenants and new paint. Hilda's needed to be gutted to the studs before anyone could put a griddle back in, because the building underneath a 65-year-old diner never had to meet a modern code until someone tried to sell it as a business again.
That's the part worth sitting with if you live near downtown and have wondered why some storefronts turn over in a season while others sit dark for a year. San Anselmo Avenue's commercial buildings are old enough that the ones with the deepest local history are often the ones that take longest to reopen, not because nobody wants them, but because the walls, wiring, and plumbing were grandfathered in decades before ADA compliance and current fire code existed. A new operator moving into a newer space can be serving dinner in a few months. A new operator taking on a 1960 diner is signing up for a full infrastructure rebuild first.
The Avenue Closes for the Last Weekend of the Year
None of this touches Live on the Avenue, which is still running its final weekend of 2026 this Friday and Saturday, September 11 and 12. The Avenue closes to traffic from 4:30 to 9:30 p.m. both nights, with free live music on two stages, Creek Park and Town Hall Plaza, from 6 to 8:30. It's the same setup that's run every Friday and Saturday since June 20, and this weekend is the last chance to catch it before it goes quiet until next summer. If you've been meaning to get down there for one of these nights and haven't yet, this is the one.
Next Saturday, a New Pocket Park a Few Blocks Off the Avenue
The following Saturday, September 19, the town is holding a 10:30 a.m. ribbon-cutting for Hilldale Pocket Park in the Sequoia Parks neighborhood, with light refreshments and a craft table for kids. It's a small park, tucked behind United Market, built with direct input from the neighbors who live around it. It won't draw the crowd Live on the Avenue does, but it's the kind of small civic addition that quietly changes a daily walk for the people nearby, and it's opening the same month the Avenue's bigger restaurant story is still working itself out.
Between the two new restaurants already serving, the one still finishing its build-out, the last weekend of summer's music series, and a new pocket park a short walk from downtown, San Anselmo's fall is shaping up around a handful of specific, dated changes rather than one clean seasonal turn. That's usually how it actually happens here. Worth knowing which parts are done and which parts are still a few weeks out before you plan around any of it.
If you're watching how a town like this one changes, block by block and storefront by storefront, that's exactly the kind of read The Brody Team keeps close. Reach out any time you want a longtime local's take on what's actually happening in San Anselmo or anywhere else in Marin.
