Two Fridays this month, you can walk from a checkered tablecloth at Perry's back patio to a bedsheet-sized screen at Marin Country Mart in under fifteen minutes. That short walk is the whole point of August here. Larkspur runs on two clocks in summer, the family-anchored cadence of the Mart and the after-five cadence of Magnolia Avenue, and they only fully overlap once, on the last Saturday of the month.
If you already live here, you know the beats. What follows is the specific shape of them this August, plus a few things worth noticing that weren't on the calendar last summer.
The Mart's Friday-to-Sunday Shape
Marin Country Mart programs its weekends like a small resort. Movies on Friday, market on Saturday, food trucks and pony rides on Sunday. This year the movie tent runs every Friday at 6 PM from June 19 through October 30, the longest window the Mart has committed to in a while.
The August lineup skews classic and unashamedly family-oriented:
| Friday | Feature |
|---|---|
| August 7 | Cinderella (1950) |
| August 14 | Peter Pan (1953) |
| August 21 | 101 Dalmatians (1961) |
| August 28 | A Bug's Life |
The schedule above pulls from the Marin Mommies roundup, which tracks the Mart's weekly picks alongside other outdoor screenings across the county. If you have older kids or none at all, the tent is still an easy place to eat outside on a warm night. Food and drink for movie nights come from the Mart's own tenants: El Huarache Loco, Farmshop, Hog Island Oyster Co., Sushi-Ko, Tha Siam, Rustic Bakery, Johnny's Doughnuts, and Miette, and Miette runs a dollar-macaron special until 5 on screening days.
Saturdays belong to the farmers market, 9 to 2, rain or shine, with children's programming and live music built in. The lineup of producers is what makes it worth walking past your usual grocery run: Alexandre Family Farm, Anna's Seafood, Country Line Harvest, Frog Hollow Farm, Ramini Mozzarella, Stepladder Creamery, Iacopi Farms, Hidden Star Orchids, and the Casablanca and Wafflemania food trucks parked along the edge.
Sundays trade the vendors for a slower shape. Sunday Lunch at the Food Trucks runs 11 to 3 through August 30, with live music while you eat, and pony rides tuck in behind Rustic Bakery from 11 to 3 the same afternoons.
Two dates on the Mart's own August calendar are worth pulling out of the routine:
- Saturday, August 22, 4 to 7 PM. A golden-hour apéro at a tenant that's been open since December, with oysters, bites, wine, and an all-vinyl set through the early evening. It's the closest thing the Mart has to an adult social this summer.
- Sunday, August 16, 3 to 4 PM. A Back to Ballet celebration with treats, ballet storytime, and a royal guest, timed to the back-to-school pivot.
If your household is in the school-year handover, that Sunday afternoon is the emotional inflection point of the month.
Magnolia After Five
The other Larkspur clock starts when the ferry commuters get home. Magnolia Avenue is a five-block restaurant row on the National Register, and the addresses are close enough that you can decide where to eat on the walk over.
The current shape of the strip, north to south:
- Perry's on Magnolia, 234 Magnolia. An outpost of the Union Street original from 1969, doing the same all-American menu and comfortable service. The back patio under the redwoods is what most regulars come for.
- Tavola Rustica, 286 Magnolia. In the space where Roma Antica and then Locanda served Italian, now Mediterranean-inflected with handmade pastas, Spanish octopus, and a wine list run by an owner who spent years as wine director at Chez Panisse.
- Restaurant Picco, 320 Magnolia. Still doing the market-driven, share-plates Italian-California format after two decades. Corkage sits at $30 for the first 750mL bottle and $40 for each additional, with a three-bottle maximum, which is worth knowing if you're bringing something from the cellar.
- Emporio Rulli for the pastry-and-espresso mornings, and Farmshop, Left Bank, Hog Island Larkspur, and R'noh Thai filling in the rest of the row.
That's the walkable inventory as of this summer. It matters because Magnolia is one of the few places in southern Marin where a resident can plausibly not drive on a Friday night, and August is when that idea is easiest to test.
The Night Both Clocks Meet
The two rhythms only genuinely converge once this month, on Saturday, August 29, 4 to 7 PM, when Magnolia Avenue closes to become one long tasting room. The 14th Annual Downtown Larkspur Wine Stroll runs on Magnolia that afternoon, put on by the Larkspur Chamber of Commerce.
The mechanic is the one you already know if you've done it before. A tasting glass gets you unlimited pours at the participating merchants along the historic strip, food comes out of the restaurants that already live there, and the event has quietly grown a Wine Stroll Kid Zone in its second year for households that don't want to split the evening.
Two things are worth flagging about this year's edition specifically. First, it lands the same weekend as the Mart's A Bug's Life screening the night before and the last Sunday food-truck lunch of the season, which means the last weekend of August is the densest three-day stretch on the local calendar. Second, the Chamber has been steadily raising the merchant count and moving the event further into the "neighborhood block party" register and away from the "wine trade tasting" register it started as. If you have out-of-town family staying for the last weekend before school starts in earnest, this is the event to build the visit around.
What's Coming to Magnolia Next
A few changes on the street are worth watching, because they'll shape the fall rather than August itself.
The larger one is at 455 Magnolia, where a new restaurant called Feerma is coming from the operator behind the now-closed San Francisco Moroccan cabaret Berber. Coverage from the San Francisco Business Times, via What Now San Francisco, places Feerma near Donut Alley, Emporio Rulli, and Silver Peso. The owner, Borhen Hammami, declined to give details before publication, and Berber previously described itself as a venue for live music, dancers, and aerialists. An opening date hasn't been announced. Whether that entertainment format transplants to Larkspur is the interesting question. The strip has never had a room quite like it.
The second is smaller and easier to miss. Tavola Rustica's brunch runs Friday through Sunday, and the menu now leans into daytime formats the block didn't previously carry, including a breakfast pizza with wild mushrooms and a poutine. If your Saturday-morning walk usually ends at Rulli or the farmers market, there's now a third option on the same three blocks.
A Note for the Regulars
The one piece of practical rhythm-planning that matters this month: Music in the Park at Piper Park wrapped in June. The city's series ran Fridays May 22 through June 19, so if you're waiting for the next Piper Park concert, that particular anchor doesn't return until next summer. The Mart's Friday-night tent is the closest working substitute in August.
The other item, if you're new-ish to the block: the Mart sits between the Larkspur Ferry Terminal and the SMART station, which means the parking lot fills earliest on Saturday between the market and the ferry crowds. Arriving before 10 or after 1 is the local move.
August in Larkspur isn't a destination month. It's a resident month. The Wine Stroll on the 29th is the one date that pulls the two halves of town, the Mart and Magnolia, into the same evening. Everything else is the ordinary shape of a summer weekend here, which happens to be one of the better ordinary shapes in the county.
If you're thinking through a move within Larkspur this fall, or you have friends asking what the block actually feels like on a Friday night, the McArthur Love Team is happy to walk it with you. Contact Us whenever the timing is right.
