On the Saturday night in August when Creek Park Amphitheater screened a movie under the trees and Swami 3 played Town Hall Plaza, the newest kitchen in town had already logged a month of dinner service. Tụ Tập opened July 29 at 625 San Anselmo Ave, in the space that used to be Kientz Hall, and its arrival had been previewed to half the town before a single plate went out. During renovation, the Avenue closed to traffic every Friday and Saturday evening for the free concert series that runs downtown all summer, and hundreds of people wandered through the construction to see what was taking shape behind the scaffolding.
That overlap is not a coincidence worth a shrug. It is the mechanism behind everything happening on San Anselmo Avenue this year: a downtown built almost entirely by people who grew up here, left for San Francisco kitchens, and are now bringing that training home instead of opening a second location somewhere convenient.
One More Weekend of Closed Streets
Live on the Avenue runs every Friday and Saturday from June 20 through September 12, 2026, on two stages at once, Creek Park Amphitheater and Town Hall Plaza. The town closes the street to cars from 4:30 to 9:30 p.m. so the music, which runs 6 to 8:30, can spill into the sidewalks along with the restaurants and shops. Creekside Pizza & Taproom sponsors the series, a detail that matters more than it sounds like it should, because the same business is also the reason a 60-year-old coffee shop is coming back at all.
For residents who have watched the schedule fill a summer weeknight calendar for years, the closing date is the real news. After September 12, the Avenue goes back to normal traffic patterns, and the storefronts that used those closed evenings as a soft launch have to stand on their own.
The Chef Who Came Home
Justine Kelly grew up in San Anselmo. She spent more than 17 years working under Charles Phan at the Slanted Door, the restaurant that helped define modern Vietnamese cooking in San Francisco before its Ferry Building location closed. For most of that career, when people asked if she would ever open her own place, she said no, and meant it, with the kind of language that does not print cleanly. The one exception she carried in the back of her mind was her hometown.
That exception became Tụ Tập, a two-story restaurant with a rooftop bar that looks straight at Mount Tamalpais. Co-owner Adam Block has described the concept as an attempt to bring an urban dining experience to a town full of people who are spending less time in San Francisco than they used to. Kelly built the menu around the techniques she learned from the cooks she calls the aunties, the relatives and friends of the Phan family who made the stocks and mother sauces from scratch. On what Phan taught her about balancing a dish:
"Understanding it was literally everything to me for the cuisine."
The restaurant did not need a marketing campaign to fill a room. It needed a hometown and a rooftop with a view most people in San Anselmo already know by heart.
Sixty Years, New Owners, Same Order
Hilda's Coffee Shop closed in late 2025 after more than six decades as a fixture of downtown San Anselmo. The team taking it over is the same one behind Creekside Pizza, the business that already underwrites the summer concert series. The plan preserves the identity of the place rather than reinventing it: an updated menu built around breakfast, brunch, and burgers, the categories Hilda's was known for in the first place.
It is worth noticing how much of downtown's continuity traces back to one operator. The same business that keeps the Avenue closed off for music two nights a week is also the one making sure the town's oldest breakfast counter reopens as itself instead of as something else wearing its name.
The Bakery That Waited for the Music to Stop
Maison Nico is a Michelin-pedigreed French bakery and café that chef Nicolas Delaroque built out of Jackson Square in San Francisco, known for laminated croissants and a pistachio Paris-Brest that has a following of its own. The Delaroques have kept the exact San Anselmo address to themselves, but the timeline has already moved once. Early reporting in the spring pointed to a summer opening. By mid-July, the projection had shifted to October, after the concert series has already wrapped for the year.
The San Anselmo shop will do things the Jackson Square location cannot, according to co-owner Andrea Delaroque: naturally leavened baguettes and sourdough loaves, plus housemade ice cream Nico had reportedly been thinking about for a decade. Delaroque's own career has already touched Marin once before, at Le Garage in Sausalito, long before this expansion was on paper. It is not an outside brand parachuting into a suburb for foot traffic. It is a chef whose training has already run through this county once, coming back for a second pass.
The Plaza Still Waiting Its Turn
Not everything downtown is reopening on schedule. Creek Park Plaza has been closed since 2022, when the county determined that structural issues needed to be resolved before the space could safely reopen. On August 11, 2026, the Town Council indicated unanimous support for a specific design option, referred to in town documents as the Curvilinear Concept, for the plaza portion of the larger Creek Park project. Residents were invited to weigh in on design options earlier that same month.
A vote on a concept is not a ribbon cutting. But it is the first concrete marker in years that this particular stretch of downtown has a path forward, and it lands in the same season as everything else changing on the Avenue.
What the Overlap Actually Means
None of this fits the usual story about a small town discovering fine dining. The usual story involves outside capital and a chef opening a second location because the rent penciled out. This one runs the other direction. Kelly built her restaurant in the town she grew up in because she said she would, eventually, if the place was right. The Creekside Pizza team took on Hilda's because the alternative was letting a 60-year institution disappear rather than change hands. Delaroque, whose resume already includes a stop in Sausalito, is bringing his bakery to the same downtown blocks without needing to say exactly where yet.
The music stops on September 12. The bakery opens in October. In between, the Avenue goes quiet for a few weeks, and what is left standing on either side of that gap is a downtown being rebuilt by people who already knew the way home.
If you already live in San Anselmo, none of this changes your address. But it is worth knowing what the town looks like right now, before the next chapter opens, because a place this specific rarely stays the same for long. For anyone thinking further ahead about a move within Marin, or curious what a neighborhood like this actually offers beyond the listing photos, Wynne + Morgensen knows the towns behind the county line as well as the houses in them. Request a private consultation whenever the timing is right.