"My goal in life is to own my local so I always have a restaurant to go to." That's what Rick Mitchell told Oaklandside this July, standing behind the bar of his new restaurant on Grand Avenue, across from the pergola he's walked past for years. If you've been anywhere near Lake Merritt this summer, you've noticed the storefronts changing. A seafood spot where a cocktail bar used to be. A coffee shop with a different name on the awning. A restaurant in Chinatown you don't recognize. Add it up and it looks like a neighborhood in flux.
Look at who's actually running these places and a different picture shows up. The people opening them already lived here. They already knew the space, the landlord, the regulars. What reads as turnover on Yelp is closer to a small group of hospitality veterans trading addresses they already understood, and the one long-standing name that actually left the neighborhood is the exception that proves it.
The Storefront That Keeps Finding Its Way Back to the Same People
Oaklandside reported that the space at 542 Grand Ave, across from the Lake Merritt pergola, was Sidebar, a well-liked post-work cocktail spot, until early 2024. Before Sidebar, it was Trio Bistro and Grill. This July, it became Bar Skula, a seafood and raw bar concept built around ceviche, oysters, and a cocktail list leaning into Spanish and Latin American ingredients.
The owners aren't newcomers to Grand Avenue. Maria Alderete and Rick Mitchell spent the better part of two decades running Luka's Taproom & Lounge at Broadway and West Grand, which closed in January 2022 after the landlord wouldn't renew the lease. Mitchell told the Oaklandside that the Grand Avenue storefront had been his dream location for years, dating back to before either Sidebar or Luka's existed there. He and Alderete live within walking distance and were regulars at Sidebar themselves.
The staffing tells the same story from a different angle. Chef Wilson Mendez, Luka's very first hire, stayed for the entire run and now runs Bar Skula's kitchen. Jacob Alioto, Luka's founding chef, is consulting on the menu. And the bar program comes from Jared Hirsch, who was Sidebar's bar manager before Sidebar closed. Hiring him didn't just fill a role. It moved the prior tenant's institutional knowledge directly into the new one, cocktail recipes and all. One of Bar Skula's drinks, the Caged Heat, is a direct remix of a Sidebar original, built around the same syrup you can still buy next door at Oaktown Spice Shop.
That's not a new business arriving. That's five people with ties to Grand Avenue coming together in a building one of them has wanted for over a decade.
A Few Blocks Down, the Same Pattern in Miniature
Walk south along Lakeshore Avenue and you'll find a smaller version of the same story. Mazar Cafe soft opened on July 25 at 2834 Lakeshore Ave, in the space that used to be Cafe Lakeview. It serves Yemeni coffee, handcrafted drinks, and pastries. The name changed, the menu changed, but the function of the building didn't. It was a neighborhood coffee stop before and it's a neighborhood coffee stop now, just with a different specialty behind the counter.
Chinatown Throws the New Tenant a Welcome Party
The clearest sign that this is recirculation rather than churn showed up in Chinatown. King Kitchen soft opened on July 29 at 366 8th St, serving Toisanese food in the space that used to house Lounge Chinatown, a night-market style restaurant with karaoke that had been run by Johnny Chang, the former owner of Dragon Gate near Jack London Square. When King Kitchen opened its doors, the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce didn't treat it as a loss to mourn. They threw a mixer for it, open to the public for ten dollars, framed explicitly as welcoming a new business into the neighborhood.
That's a business community that has seen enough storefronts change hands to know the difference between a restaurant closing and a restaurant becoming a different restaurant. They're treating this summer's changes as continuity, not decline.
A quick rundown of what actually moved this summer:
- Bar Skula, 542 Grand Ave — seafood and cocktails, in the former Sidebar space, from the team behind Luka's Taproom & Lounge
- Mazar Cafe, 2834 Lakeshore Ave — Yemeni coffee and pastries, in the former Cafe Lakeview space
- King Kitchen, 366 8th St — Toisanese food in Chinatown, in the former Lounge Chinatown space
- Enssaro, formerly on Grand Avenue near the lake, now at 5897 College Ave in Rockridge
The One That Actually Left
That last one is the exception, and it's worth sitting with. Enssaro, an Ethiopian restaurant that had operated on Grand Avenue near Lake Merritt for roughly two decades, didn't recirculate. It left the neighborhood entirely, relocating to Rockridge with a new opening on July 31. The business is still family run by the same mother, daughter, and son team, and their new space was designed by Kalu Gebreyohannes-Royster of Liyu Designs, who also designed Meski in San Francisco and Oakland's Lucy Blue. It's a real business decision by a real family, not a failure story.
But it's also the only genuine subtraction from Grand Avenue's restaurant row this summer, and it stands out precisely because everything else this season was a name change, not a departure. When the neighborhood's longest-tenured restaurant is the one exception to a pattern of insiders trading buildings, that tells you something about how tightly held this stretch of Grand Avenue actually is. New operators aren't discovering it. They're returning to it.
What This Means If You Live Near the Lake
If you've eaten at Grand Lake Kitchen, walked past Bardo's mid-century dining room, or grabbed a slice at Sister near the theater, you already know this stretch runs on familiar faces more than fresh concepts. This summer's openings confirm it rather than contradict it. The service quality, the relationships between owners and regulars, the specific cocktail syrup you can still buy at the spice shop next door, none of that reset when the sign changed. It moved with the people who already knew how to run it.
That matters if you're deciding where to eat this month, and it matters in a quieter way if you've ever wondered why this particular stretch feels more stable than its Yelp page suggests. A neighborhood where four storefronts changed hands and only one business actually left the neighborhood is not a neighborhood losing its character. It's one where the character is durable enough that the people who built it keep finding their way back to it.
On the Calendar This Fall
If you want to see both halves of this story in the same weekend, the Grand Lake Farmers Market runs every Saturday, year round, rain or shine, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Splash Pad Park in front of the historic Grand Lake Theater, the same institution that's been anchoring Saturday mornings here for years. Walk it, then head to Grand Avenue for dinner at Bar Skula or coffee at Mazar Cafe to see the new tenants in the old buildings.
Down at the water, the Lake Chalet Seafood Bar & Grill has two wine dinners on the books this fall: a JUSTIN Vineyards pairing dinner on Friday, September 18, and a four course Rombauer dinner on Thursday, October 8, both starting at 6:30 p.m. Neither requires you to be new to the neighborhood to enjoy them. That's sort of the point.
If you're the kind of person who tracks a neighborhood by who's cooking in it rather than who's building in it, Grand Avenue just gave you a pretty clear answer this summer. The same people are still cooking. They just moved next door.
If you ever want to talk about what a neighborhood like this looks like from the real estate side, not just the dinner reservation side, Raymond Rosales is happy to walk through it with you. Schedule a confidential Bay Area consult and we'll map out timing, neighborhoods, and strategy based on what's actually happening on the ground, not just what the median price says.
