The last set of San Anselmo's 2026 concert season played Town Hall Plaza on September 12, when F.A.T. Betty closed things out while El Cajon and Le Minivans took the Creek Park stage a few blocks away. By 8:30pm the amps were being packed into vans and the town's street closure permit, which had held San Anselmo Avenue car-free from 4:30 to 9:30 most Friday and Saturday nights since June 20, had about an hour left to run. That's the tidy part of the story: a free, town-sponsored series with a start date, an end date, and a printed schedule for who plays which stage.
The less tidy part is what didn't stop when the folding chairs came down. A few doors up the Avenue, the rooftop bar at Tụ Tập was just getting into its Friday rhythm, and it will be there in October, too, long after the concert series folds its tent for the year. That gap between what's scheduled and what's permanent is the real story of downtown San Anselmo this fall, and it says something about the town that no single concert lineup could.
A Concert Series Runs on a Calendar. A Restaurant Runs on a Lease
Live on the Avenue is, by design, temporary. It's a summer program, funded by donors and sponsors including Creekside Pizza & Taproom, that turns San Anselmo Avenue into a pedestrian block party for roughly three months a year and then hands the street back to cars. That's exactly what a well-run civic event should do. It has a season because it's supposed to have a season.
What's happened over the past several months is different in kind. Three separate operators have made decisions that only make sense if they're betting on San Anselmo as a year-round address, not a summer stop. None of them are hedging with a pop-up or a seasonal menu. They're signing leases, pulling permits, and in one case gutting a building down to the studs.
The Résumé Behind the Rooftop
The clearest example sits at 625 San Anselmo Avenue, in the space that used to be Kientz Hall. Tụ Tập opened its doors on July 29, and the chef leading the kitchen is Justine Kelly, who grew up in San Anselmo and spent more than 17 years working for the late Charles Phan at the Slanted Door before leaving in 2014 to co-found the meal kit company Sun Basket. She's joined by Bill Upson of the Real Restaurants group, whose portfolio includes Bix in San Francisco and Buckeye Roadhouse in Mill Valley, and by co-owner Adam Block, who lives in town and has called the project a homecoming.
The restaurant seats up to 160 people across two floors and a rooftop that looks out toward Mount Tamalpais, with a menu built around clay-pot dishes, live-fire and mesquite grilling, a raw bar, and a dim sum-inspired weekend brunch. For the first three weeks it was walk-ins only. After August 17, reservations opened on OpenTable. That's not the trajectory of a business hedging its bets on a small town. It's the trajectory of a business that expects to need a reservation system.
Thai Comfort Food Took the Other End of the Block
Up near Red Hill Shopping Center, a different kind of bet opened first. On May 19, four longtime friends who bonded over their shared Thai heritage debuted Pretti Platters in the one-story freestanding building that used to house Auryn Thai Cuisine. Co-owner Fah Intapura has said the group enlisted a chef with fine-dining credentials to build out a menu that runs from Dutch pancakes and little gem salads to Monterey Bay branzino, steak frites, and a bone-in heritage pork chop. It's a brunch-forward concept with dinner ambitions, occupying a spot in town that had cycled through prior tenants without quite sticking.
Two openings on opposite ends of San Anselmo Avenue, at different price points and with different kitchens, both landing in the same six-month window, isn't a coincidence worth shrugging off. It's a signal that the people deciding where to open a restaurant this year looked at San Anselmo and saw more upside than risk.
The Building That's Taking Longer Than the Concerts Did
Not every bet moves at the same speed, and that's the part of the story worth sitting with. Hilda's Coffee Shop served breakfast at 639 San Anselmo Avenue for 65 years before longtime owner Sue Kirton closed it in September 2025. The building's plumbing, electrical, flooring, and windows had fallen out of code, and Pat Townsley, who owns Creekside Pizza & Taproom down the block, bought the business with plans to bring it current while keeping the diner's chef and its German-style pancakes on the menu.
That renovation has taken longer than anyone's early timeline suggested. Bringing a building that had operated for decades under grandfathered conditions up to Environmental Health, ADA, and Town code standards is not a job with a fixed end date the way a concert series is. Permits move at the pace permits move. As of this writing, the space is still working through that process rather than serving pancakes again.
That's not a knock on the project. It's the difference between the two kinds of investment happening downtown right now. A free concert series can promise a start date and an end date because the town controls the calendar. A full building renovation can't promise a date because the building, and the permitting process behind it, sets its own pace. The restaurants opening on schedule are the easy version of a town betting on itself. The one still under construction is the harder, more durable version.
What Town Hall Actually Approved in August
The public side of that same bet moved forward on August 11, when the San Anselmo Town Council voted unanimously to proceed with the design, planning, and execution of Creek Park Plaza, a redevelopment of the amphitheater space that hosts one half of Live on the Avenue's two stages every summer. The project had been through years of community input, public design contests, and delayed timelines before getting a final green light this year. It means the same plaza where bands played this September is scheduled for a capital upgrade, which is the town putting its own money behind the same block the private restaurant openings are betting on.
The Quieter Calendar for the Next Six Weeks
Not everything happening downtown this fall needs a reservation or a construction permit. A few smaller dates worth having on the calendar:
- September 16 — The San Anselmo Library and Chabad of West Marin are hosting a Community Challah Bake at 3:30pm, open to all ages, with registration through the library's event page.
- September 19 — The town is marking new play and seating features at Hilldale Pocket Park in the Sequoia Parks neighborhood at 10:30am. The park itself has been open since 2023, but this event celebrates additional amenities the town was able to fund without a fundraising campaign.
- September 24 — The San Anselmo Business Community Breakfast Meet-Up returns, an informal gathering open to anyone who wants to talk shop with the people running the town's shops and restaurants.
- October 10 — The next docent-led Historical Hub walking tour, led by members of the San Anselmo Historical Commission, departs from Creek Park at 9am and covers the railroad's role in the town's development along with the changing architecture of San Anselmo Avenue.
None of this requires the Avenue to be closed to cars. It's the version of downtown that exists on a random Wednesday, not just during a scheduled block party.
What Actually Changed This Year
The easy read on San Anselmo every September is that the music stops and the town quiets down until next June. That read misses what's actually happened in 2026. A concert series that was always designed to end on schedule did exactly that. Meanwhile, two restaurants opened by people with real reasons to bet on this specific address, a third is working through a harder renovation precisely because it's built to last past one season, and the town council approved public money for the plaza that hosts half the summer program. Those aren't four unrelated updates. They're four versions of the same decision, made by different people, at different speeds, all pointing the same direction.
If you're the kind of resident who tracks these things because you're curious about where your town is headed, or because you're weighing what a stronger downtown means for a place you already call home, Jennifer Bowes has spent her career paying attention to exactly this kind of detail across Marin County. If a conversation about San Anselmo, or where it fits into your own plans, would be useful, you can schedule a consultation any time.
