San Anselmo Avenue Placed Two Very Different Bets This Year. September Is When We Find Out Which One Holds.

Ask anyone who's eaten breakfast at the counter at Hilda's Coffee Shop long enough, and they'll tell you George Lucas used to sit a few tables over, working through drafts of what became Star Wars and Indiana Jones with Steven Spielberg and John Williams. The diner never had a website. It barely answered its phone. For sixty-five years, that was the point.

This year, the building at 639 San Anselmo Ave got gutted down to its studs. A few blocks away, a chef who spent nearly two decades at the Slanted Door opened a restaurant with a rooftop bar and a direct sightline to Mount Tamalpais. Both things happened on the same three blocks of San Anselmo Avenue in the same twelve months, and they were not the same bet.

Two Bets, Three Blocks

One bet says the Avenue's value is in staying exactly what it was, just brought up to code. The other says San Anselmo can now support the kind of restaurant that used to require a drive into the city. Both bets needed customers who weren't already going to be there on a random Tuesday, which is why they both leaned on the same twelve weekends of engineered foot traffic that just ended.

The Bet on Staying the Same

Hilda's opened in 1960 under founder Tor Nielsen, who named it after his wife. Darleen and Brian Young bought it in 1978 and ran it until their daughter, Sue Kirton, took over in 2006. Kirton kept it going until September 2025, when the building's plumbing, electrical, flooring, and windows had all deteriorated past the point of quiet fixes.

Pat Townsley, who owns Creekside Pizza & Taproom a few doors down, bought the business and the lease with a plan to reopen it as close to the original as the health code would allow. That turned out to be a bigger job than a fresh coat of paint. The building needed to meet current Environmental Health Services standards, ADA compliance, and Town of San Anselmo code that the original structure had never been held to.

Townsley put it plainly: "This building was substandard in every way. I don't even know if it passed code 50 years ago, but there is no way it would have ever passed today. It's a health and safety concern."

The plan kept what regulars would notice missing if it disappeared. Same chef. Same German-style pancakes. What changed is the clock. Hilda's used to close at 2 p.m. The new version is built to stay open until 10, with a nighttime menu that adds a hot chicken item to the burger lineup. The target was to reopen with about a week to spare before Live on the Avenue's first Friday show on June 20, which means the diner's whole reboot was timed to land right as the Avenue's busiest stretch of the year began.

The Bet on Being Worth the Drive

Tụ Tập opened July 29 at 625 San Anselmo Ave, in the space that used to be Kientz Hall. The chef, Justine Kelly, grew up in San Anselmo and spent more than seventeen years working under the late Charles Phan at the Slanted Door before Phan's Ferry Building location closed. Her partner in the project is Bill Upson of the Real Restaurants group, which has run Bix in San Francisco and Buckeye Roadhouse and Picco in Marin for decades. Co-owner Adam Block lives in San Anselmo too, and when a Chronicle reporter asked why he'd open there after working on restaurant projects around the world, he said, "It's kind of a homecoming."

What makes Tụ Tập a different kind of bet than Hilda's is that nobody forced it back into a shape it already had. It's a two-story space with a copper-topped raw bar downstairs and a rooftop patio upstairs that looks straight at Mount Tamalpais, built around a Vietnamese menu with French influence and a wood-fired grill, the kind of concept that could have opened in the Mission or Hayes Valley and probably drawn a bigger initial crowd. It chose San Anselmo instead. During construction, the Chronicle reported that Block gave tours of the unfinished space to hundreds of curious residents on the same Friday and Saturday nights that San Anselmo Avenue was already closed to cars for Live on the Avenue. The restaurant's opening buzz didn't need to be built from nothing. It rode the crowd the town was already generating.

A short walk from there, Maison Nico, a French bakery and café from Michelin-starred chef Nicolas Delaroque, aimed for an early-summer opening on the same stretch. Pair that with Tụ Tập and the signal is the same: two operators with reputations built elsewhere chose to spend them in San Anselmo rather than open a second location somewhere with a bigger built-in audience.

The Bet in Between

Not every new name on the Avenue fits neatly into either category. Pretti Platters opened May 19 in a freestanding building near Red Hill Shopping Center, in the space that used to house Auryn Thai Cuisine. It was started by four longtime friends who bonded over their shared Thai heritage nearly two decades ago and decided, finally, to open something together.

Co-owner Fah Intapura told the Marin IJ that the group brought in a chef friend with fine-dining credentials to build the menu, and it shows. This isn't a casual brunch spot with a few upsells. The menu runs from a watermelon radish salad through a Monterey Bay charbroiled branzino with Meyer lemon beurre blanc to a 16-ounce bone-in heritage pork chop, with Kaluga Reserve caviar and housemade roti on the side for anyone who wants it.

Pretti Platters isn't trying to preserve something the way Hilda's is, and it isn't importing outside pedigree the way Tụ Tập and Maison Nico are. It's four people who already lived the neighborhood's food scene from the inside, betting their own money that San Anselmo would support a menu this ambitious without anyone needing to import the idea from the city.

The Twelve Weekends That Covered for Everyone

None of this happened in a vacuum. Live on the Avenue ran every Friday and Saturday evening from June 20 through September 12, with one break on July 4, closing San Anselmo Avenue to cars from 4:30 to 9:30 p.m. so that free live music could fill Creek Park Amphitheater and Town Hall Plaza. The Town of San Anselmo's own event page lists Creekside Pizza & Taproom, the same business behind the Hilda's rebuild, as a lead sponsor.

For twelve weekends, the Avenue had a guaranteed crowd that didn't depend on any single restaurant's reputation. A diner rebuilding its identity and a rooftop bar introducing itself to the neighborhood both got to open their doors into foot traffic that the town itself had engineered. That is not a knock on either business. It is just the honest version of the timeline: the busiest, most forgiving season to open a restaurant on San Anselmo Avenue this year lined up exactly with when both bets went live.

What September Actually Tests

The last Live on the Avenue show played on September 12. The street reopened to cars. The crowd that used to show up because the town was hosting a party now has to show up because a restaurant gave them a reason to.

That's the actual test underway on the Avenue right now, and it's a different question for each business. For Hilda's, the question is whether sixty-five years of loyalty carries a rebuilt diner through a normal Tuesday dinner rush it never used to serve. For Tụ Tập and Maison Nico, it's whether a rooftop view and a pastry case built on outside reputation can hold a weeknight crowd without a concert down the block. For Pretti Platters, it's whether a menu this ambitious can sustain itself on regulars rather than novelty.

Nobody outside these businesses knows the answer yet, and it's genuinely too early to guess. What's worth noticing, walking the Avenue this fall, is which storefronts still have a line without the music playing.

If you already call San Anselmo home, you've probably formed an opinion on all of this just from walking past. If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this looks like as a place to actually put down roots, that's a longer conversation, and it's one The Golden Gate Group has been having with Marin families for a long time. Reach out when you're ready to talk it through.