Walk San Anselmo Avenue this month and you will pass at least two storefronts wrapped in construction paper and a rooftop somebody keeps promising will have the best view of Mount Tamalpais in town. It looks, from the sidewalk, like outside money discovered San Anselmo all at once. It did not. Read the names behind the leases and a different story shows up: most of the people opening restaurants here this year already had a life in this town before they had a lease in it.
That distinction matters if you live here, because it tells you something about what these places will actually be like once the paper comes off the windows.
The Corner That Used To Be Kientz Hall
The address everyone is watching is 625 San Anselmo Avenue, the former home of Kientz Hall, now becoming Tụ Tập. The name means "gathering" in Vietnamese, and the kitchen belongs to Justine Kelly, who spent eighteen years cooking at San Francisco's The Slanted Door before coming back to open her own place in the town she grew up in. Owner Adam Block, who has spent decades brokering restaurant deals around the world, including for Thomas Keller's Per Se, lives in San Anselmo himself.
"It's kind of a homecoming," Block told the San Francisco Chronicle.
The plan includes a mesquite grill, a raw bar, and a rooftop patio looking straight at Mount Tam. Bill Upson of Real Restaurants, the group behind Bix in San Francisco and Buckeye Roadhouse and Picco here in Marin, is a partner too, which means the restaurant math is coming from people who already know how a dining room performs on this side of the bridge.
The timeline has moved. Early reporting in February pointed to a March opening. By May, the target had shifted to July. If that held, Tụ Tập should already be seating people by the time you read this. If it slipped again, you'll know because the same fencing that's been up all summer is still up.
A Few Doors Down, Hilda's Comes Back As Itself
Just down the block, the former Hilda's Coffee Shop space is mid-rebuild after more than sixty years as a San Anselmo staple. It closed in late 2025, and the team taking it over is not new to the avenue. Pat Townsley, who runs Creekside Pizza & Taproom, is overseeing construction, with interior design from Ann Lowengart Interiors and a menu built around breakfast, brunch, and burgers by Townsley and Creekside's Jackson Palmer. Demolition is finished and the project has moved into design and build-out, with an earlier target of a January reopening.
This is worth sitting with for a second. Hilda's is not being replaced by a chain testing the Marin market. It is being rebuilt by the people who already run one of downtown's anchor restaurants, using a local design firm, for a menu aimed at the same breakfast crowd Hilda's served for decades. The continuity is the point.
The One Restaurant That Never Left
If you want proof this pattern predates the current wave, look at Madcap, at 198 Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. Chef Ron Siegel opened it in 2017 in his hometown, where he and his family had already lived for twenty-five years, after a career that included the French Laundry, Michael Mina, and the Ritz-Carlton. Madcap has held a Michelin star every year since 2019. It is the closest thing San Anselmo has to proof that a chef with real roots in town, cooking for people who already know his name, can build something that lasts.
Tụ Tập and Hilda's are betting on the same idea. So, in its way, is Creekside, which has sponsored the town's summer concert series for years before taking on a second kitchen.
Not Everyone Making This Bet Grew Up Here
The wave is not purely a hometown story, and it would be dishonest to pretend it was. The most talked-about counterexample is Maison Nico, the French bakery and épicerie chef Nicolas Delaroque has run in San Francisco's Jackson Square since 2020. Delaroque is opening a second location in San Anselmo, targeted for late spring or early summer 2026, with more room than the San Francisco original allows for additions like bread and housemade ice cream. This is a proven San Francisco concept, backed by a Michelin-recognized chef, choosing Marin as its next market rather than a local returning home.
Even here the story is not a clean outsider narrative. Early in his career, before Jackson Square or his Michelin-starred years, Delaroque cooked at Le Garage in Sausalito. It does not make him a San Anselmo native, but it means the one entrant in this wave without deep town roots still cut his teeth on this side of the bridge.
So the honest version of the story is that two different forces are hitting the same few blocks in the same year. One is local talent building the restaurant they always wanted in their own town. The other is a proven San Francisco name using Marin as its next market. Both are true at once, and that tension is part of what the avenue is going to feel like once the dust settles.
All Of This Is Happening While The Avenue Is Already Full
None of this construction is happening in a quiet town. Live on the Avenue runs Fridays and Saturdays from June 20 through September 12, 2026, with the street closed from 4:30 to 9:30 p.m. and free music from 6 to 8:30 across two stages, Creek Park Amphitheater and Town Hall Plaza. Layer the rest of the summer on top of that and the calendar gets crowded fast:
- August 8: the San Anselmo Chamber of Commerce's Vintage Car Show at Red Hill Shopping Center, free and family-friendly
- August 8: the Historical Commission's walking tour, led by Dick Miner, covering the railroad's role in the town's development and the changing character of businesses on San Anselmo Avenue
- August 29: a Star Wars-themed double feature at Creek Park, the third summer CAFilm has partnered with the town on movie nights
- September 5: Comedy Night in Creek Park, hosted by Johnny Steele, back for a second year
The Historical Commission's tour is the detail that ties the whole thing together. It exists specifically to explain how the businesses and architecture on this avenue have changed over time, and this year it happens to be running at the exact moment the avenue is changing again. If you take the August 8 tour, you'll hear about the railroad era while walking past the same construction fencing wrapped around Kientz Hall and Hilda's.
What This Means If You're Just Trying To Get Dinner
For now, Madcap is open and still holding its star, so it remains the one sure thing on this stretch of the avenue. Tụ Tập and Maison Nico are the two to watch for an actual opening date, and Hilda's is far enough into construction that a fall or winter return feels more realistic than a summer one. None of that is a complaint. A town this size rebuilding this much of its dining scene in a single year, with most of the people behind it already living here or having grown up here, is a specific kind of luck, and you get to watch it happen from your own sidewalk.
If you're weighing what a home near this stretch of San Anselmo Avenue is actually worth, given everything reshaping it this year, Stephanie Lamarre has spent her career tracking exactly this kind of neighborhood-level change across Marin. Reach out for a private consultation and confidential home valuation when you're ready to talk specifics.
