If you have lived in Santa Rosa for more than a few years, you already know the rhythm. Something opens on Fourth Street, everyone tries it in the first month, and by fall the conversation has moved on. What is different this year is that the openings are not landing where you would expect them to.
The east side got loud
Sonoma Magazine counted more than twenty restaurants opening across the county in 2026 and quoted operators pointing to a softer commercial real estate market as part of the reason. In Santa Rosa specifically, the clearest pattern is geographic. The two most anticipated openings of the year, plus a Mediterranean spot everyone has been asking about, all sit east of Highway 101 along or near Montgomery Drive. Downtown got a bakery and Railroad Square got a full year of press for restaurants that were already there. The east side got the new ones.
Here is the short version, in case you are just looking for the address:
Place | Address | Opened / Opening | What to order |
|---|---|---|---|
Parkside Eats | 4323 Montgomery Drive | April 2026 | Birria hash, poke nachos, fish tacos |
The Junction | 3901 Montgomery Drive | May 2026 | Blistered large-format pies, 30 taps |
Olives and Agave | 909 Village Court | 2026 | Spanish and Levantine tapas |
Redwood Gospel Baking Company | Downtown Santa Rosa | April 2026 | Kouign-amann, almond croissants, espresso |
Seoul to Tokyo | 3082 Marlow Road, Suite B3 | 2026 | Bulgogi, ramen, tteok-bokki, katsu |
Now the parts worth knowing.
Parkside Eats, and why the corner filled up so fast
The Lepe's space at 4323 Montgomery Drive did not sit empty long. Parkside Eats opened in early April in the former Lepe's space from Hayley Cutri and Efrain Balmes, who recently closed their Sonoma Eats restaurant in Agua Caliente after the building was put up for sale. The move was less a pivot than a relocation, which is part of why the place had a built-in following on day one.
The menu reads like they are covering three meals a day without any of them feeling like an afterthought. The restaurant is already packed and open for breakfast, lunch, dinner and weekend brunch, with birria hash, juicy burgers, poke nachos, roasted chicken and fish tacos as standouts. If you go once, go for the birria hash. If you go twice, the fish tacos are the answer on a warm evening when you do not want to think.
The important local read here is not the food. It is that a neighborhood corner most residents thought of as a taquería stop is now a full-day operation, which changes how the surrounding blocks feel on a Sunday morning.
The Villa reopens, and it is not really the Villa
Everyone has a story about the Villa. It closed, sat, and the assumption around town was that the site would eventually be scraped for housing. That is not what happened.
The hilltop restaurant first opened in 1962 as the Hilltopper, then became The Villa when Gaspare Bernardo took over in 1976, and he ran it until he retired in 2022 when he closed it, after which the building sat empty for roughly three years before the Fiedlers bought the 3.5-acre property. The new name is The Junction, and the operators come from a Mill Valley original. The Santa Rosa project comes from Liz and Dez Fiedler and Jeff Krupman of Pizza Hacker, the trio behind the original Junction that opened in Mill Valley in 2020.
The scale is the story. The new Junction will feature a 4,000-square-foot beer garden with a play area and live-music stage, a 150-seat dining room, a 30-tap draft program, and an on-site bottle shop, and unlike the Mill Valley location, the Santa Rosa outpost will include a full bar. A game room with shuffleboard and vintage arcade machines is planned. If you have kids and you have spent the last three years driving past that hillside wondering when the lights would come back on, May is the month.
One practical note. The old Villa was a special-occasion room with a view. The Junction is being built as a Wednesday-night room with a view, which is a different animal for the neighborhood. Expect the parking lot to look nothing like it did in 2019.
Montgomery Village finally gets its tapas bar
The Cascabel closure last spring was one of those Santa Rosa food-scene events that everyone in Montgomery Village noticed but nobody talked about publicly for a while. The space did not sit empty for long. Olives and Agave, tapas and Mediterranean plates inspired by Spain and the Middle East, will replace Montgomery Village's Cascabel, which quietly closed last May, at 909 Village Court.
If you are already in the habit of walking Montgomery Village for a Saturday errand loop, this is the addition that most changes the loop. The center has restaurants. It has not, until now, had a small-plates room where two people can sit at the bar for an hour without committing to a full dinner.
Downtown's quieter moves
Not everything is on the east side. Two openings worth knowing about landed elsewhere.
Redwood Gospel Baking Company opened downtown in April 2026 as a cafe extension of the Redwood Gospel Mission. Sonoma Magazine's coverage noted a pastry program built around plain croissants, kouign-amann and almond croissants, with espresso drinks pulled to order. It is the kind of place a resident can walk into on a weekday morning without a plan and leave with a sense of the neighborhood being in slightly better shape than the day before. That is worth something.
Seoul to Tokyo is the one that snuck in without much fanfare. Seoul to Tokyo serves Korean, Japanese and Pacific Rim dishes, with standouts including bulgogi, ramen, tteok-bokki and katsu, at 3082 Marlow Road, Suite B3. Marlow Road is not where you would go looking for a new opening. That is the point. If you live on the west side and you have been driving to Petaluma for good bulgogi, stop.
Why 2026 looks the way it does
The pattern is not random. In one of the busiest opening seasons in recent years, more than twenty restaurants have opened or are slated to debut in 2026 across the county, and despite a challenging economic outlook, some restaurateurs point to a softening real estate market and easing rents as one reason behind the surge; for many of the newcomers, though, the explanation is simpler: optimism, a quality the restaurant world has rarely lacked.
Read the Santa Rosa version of that county-wide story and something specific comes into focus. The three biggest openings of the year, Parkside Eats, The Junction, and Olives and Agave, all took over spaces where the previous tenant left in the 2022 to 2025 stretch. The Villa closed in 2022. Cascabel closed in May 2025. Lepe's cleared out ahead of Parkside. In each case, an operator with an existing following was able to inherit a room that would have been priced out of reach three or four years ago.
For a current resident, what this means practically is that your mental map of where to eat is out of date, and it is out of date in a specific direction. The east side is doing more this year than it has done in a decade. Downtown and Railroad Square are still the places you take your parents when they visit. The Junction is where you go on a Thursday because you finally can again.
Two things to try this month
If you have not been in a while, here are the two low-risk moves worth making before the summer slides out.
- A Tuesday breakfast at Parkside Eats. The weekend brunch crowd is real. Tuesday morning at 8:30 is the version of the room the neighbors actually get to enjoy.
- A slow drink at The Junction's beer garden once it opens. Thirty taps is a lot of taps. Pick one, sit outside, and see who you run into. You will run into someone.
Santa Rosa is having a year. If a move within the neighborhood is on your mind, or you are trying to decide whether the east side or the west is the better fit for the way you actually spend a weekend, Aspira Realty would be glad to walk it with you. Book a consultation and we will talk about it over coffee, ideally at whichever new place you have been meaning to try.
