For twelve weekends this summer, San Anselmo Avenue closed to cars every Friday and Saturday from 4:30 to 9:30 in the evening, and for two and a half hours in the middle of that window, Creek Park Amphitheater and Town Hall Plaza filled with music. Live on the Avenue ran June 20 through September 12, missing only the Fourth of July weekend, and it turned the town's main commercial strip into something closer to a block party than a shopping district. Restaurants spilled tables onto the sidewalk. People who'd normally drive through town on a Saturday night parked and walked instead.
That run ended on September 12. The street reopened to cars the following week, and for the first time all summer, two of the town's newest restaurants are finding out what a normal Tuesday looks like.
That timing matters more than it sounds like it should. Both Tụ Tập and Pretti Platters opened during the concert season, which means both spent their first weeks or months in business with an artificial boost built into the calendar. Now that boost is gone, and what happens next says something real about whether San Anselmo's summer energy was a season or a shift.
A Restaurant That Toured Before It Opened
Tụ Tập opened July 29 at 625 San Anselmo Avenue, in the space that used to be Kientz Hall. The kitchen is led by Justine Kelly, who grew up in San Anselmo and spent close to two decades working under the late Charles Phan at Slanted Door before coming home to run her own dining room. The restaurant has a rooftop patio with a view toward Mount Tamalpais, a raw bar, and a menu built around her take on Vietnamese classics.
Here's the detail that ties directly to Live on the Avenue: while Tụ Tập was still under construction, its owners opened the unfinished space for public tours during the very weekends the avenue was closed for concerts. Hundreds of people walked through before the restaurant served a single plate. That's not typical restaurant marketing. It's a business that got to introduce itself to its future customer base inside a pedestrian crowd that was already there for something else, on a street that was already closed to traffic, on nights when people were already primed to wander into an open door.
Pretti Platters had a different path. It opened May 19, ahead of the concert season, in the freestanding building near Red Hill Shopping Center that used to house Auryn Thai Cuisine. Four longtime friends who bonded over their Thai heritage put together a menu that runs from little gem salads and croque monsieur at lunch to charbroiled branzino, steak frites, and a bone-in pork chop at dinner, with a chef friend from the fine-dining side helping shape the execution. Red Hill isn't on the closed stretch of the avenue, so Pretti Platters never had a captive concert crowd walking past its door. It opened cold, in the ordinary way, and it's been operating steadily since.
That's the real comparison worth making. One restaurant built its early audience inside a temporary tailwind. The other built its audience the way restaurants have always had to, one regular dinner service at a time. Now that the avenue is open to cars again, both are competing on the same footing for the first time. If Tụ Tập's rooftop stays full on a rainy Wednesday in October, that tells you something the July opening crowds couldn't.
The Comeback That Missed the Whole Season
Not every reopening got to ride the wave. Hilda's Coffee Shop closed in September 2025 after more than sixty years as the town's breakfast diner, when longtime owner Sue Kirton retired amid an aging building that needed more work than it could keep taking. Pat Townsley, who owns Creekside Pizza & Taproom, bought the business and set out to rebuild it with a new name and an extended menu while keeping the German-style pancakes that made the original a fixture.
The original target was a soft opening in April and a ribbon cutting in May, positioned to reopen about a week before Live on the Avenue kicked off on June 20. That would have put a rebuilt local diner right at the start of the town's busiest walking season. It didn't happen. Permitting delays with the health department, the town, and the sanitary district pushed the timeline back, and the most recent word from the ownership team is that demolition is complete but the build-out is now targeted for January.
That's not a small slip. It's the difference between reopening into twelve weekends of foot traffic and reopening into the quietest stretch of the year. Whatever Hilda's becomes, it will introduce itself to San Anselmo without any of the built-in audience that Tụ Tập got by accident. It will have to earn its regulars the same way Pretti Platters did, from a standing start.
The Park Itself Is About to Change
One more piece of this fits the same pattern of things moving on their own schedule regardless of the calendar everyone else is watching. On August 11, the San Anselmo Town Council voted unanimously to move forward with the design and construction of Creek Park Plaza, a redevelopment of the park space that includes Creek Park Amphitheater, one of the two stages Live on the Avenue uses every summer. The vote came after years of community input, planning, and delay.
Nothing about that changes this September. But it means the version of Creek Park that hosted Wreckless Strangers and Zydeco Flames this summer is not the version that will host next year's lineup. Whatever the design ultimately looks like, the stage residents are used to walking past on any given evening is set to look different by the time Live on the Avenue returns.
What This Means for a Tuesday Night in September
None of this requires a plan or a season pass. It just means the town's dining scene has quietly separated into two categories this month, and it's worth knowing which is which.
Tụ Tập, at 625 San Anselmo Avenue, is now operating without the concert crowd that carried its opening weeks, and its rooftop is worth checking on a regular weeknight rather than only a Friday when the avenue used to be closed. Pretti Platters, near Red Hill Shopping Center, has already spent four months proving it can draw a crowd without any help from street closures, which is its own kind of answer. And Hilda's, whatever it ends up being called, isn't part of this fall's rotation at all. The building is still a shell, and the earliest realistic date is a January build-out.
If you're looking for a low-key way to mark the change of season, San Anselmo's Recreation Department is hosting a Community Volunteer Fall Clean-up at Town Hall Plaza on Saturday, October 17, from 9 a.m. to noon. No registration, just show up. It's a fitting bookend to a summer that was defined by a closed street and a packed calendar. The street's open again. What stays busy on it now is the actual signal.
If you're weighing a move to San Anselmo or trying to understand how a neighborhood's rhythm holds up once the seasonal noise fades, that's exactly the kind of read the McArthur Love Team brings to every corner of Marin. Contact us when you're ready to talk about what a place is really like to live in, not just visit.
