The Summer San Anselmo Stopped Being Temporary

What do you call a downtown gathering space that's been "temporary" for six years?

That's not a rhetorical question in San Anselmo. The plaza at the foot of Creek Park has operated as a stopgap since the spring of 2020, when the town and Marin County turned a demolished building site into an outdoor gathering spot during the shelter-in-place shutdown. It became the backdrop for Friday night dinners on the Avenue, then closed again in 2022 when engineers flagged structural problems with the platform underneath it. For four years, San Anselmo's most visible public space has existed in a kind of holding pattern: not quite gone, not quite finished, not quite anything permanent.

This August, that changed. And it changed within two weeks of a serious restaurant opening its doors nearby, betting real money on a version of San Anselmo that doesn't just show up for the weekend.

Four Years on Borrowed Ground

The plaza's backstory matters here, because it explains why the decision made on August 11 landed the way it did. San Anselmo has been trying to reimagine Creek Park since 2019, when the town formed a Community Advisory Committee, gathered more than 500 survey responses, and ran a design competition that Mill Valley firm RHAA eventually won. Then came a pandemic, a county flood control project, and a structural review of the Building Bridge 2 platform that sits over the creek. That platform, closed to the public since September 2022, is the same one that briefly hosted outdoor dining during Covid and gave residents a taste of what a permanent version might feel like.

In February 2026, the county and town agreed to let the town use the platform again in a limited way while engineers kept assessing it. Then, at a special Town Council meeting on August 11, the council voted unanimously to move forward with the Curvilinear Concept 60% Design, known as Option A, for the Creek Park Plaza portion of the project. It followed a public comment period that included a design display during a Live on the Avenue night and a now-closed community survey.

Mayor Steve Burdo put it plainly in the county's announcement of the vote: Creek Park Plaza, he said, "represents exactly what makes San Anselmo special." The structural repair costs on Building Bridge 2 still aren't finalized, and a funding agreement between the town and the county's Flood Control District isn't expected until early 2027. But for the first time since the temporary plaza went up, San Anselmo has a picked design, not just a placeholder.

A Restaurant That Isn't Waiting Around

While the town was finalizing a plan for its public square, a private bet on downtown's future was already open for business a few blocks up the Avenue.

Tụ Tập opened July 29 at 625 San Anselmo Ave, in a two-story space with a rooftop patio that looks out toward Mount Tamalpais. The restaurant is the work of chef Justine Kelly, who grew up in San Anselmo and spent more than 17 years working under the late Charles Phan at San Francisco's Slanted Door before taking this project on. Her business partners include Adam Block, who lives in town, and Bill Upson of Real Restaurants, the group behind Bix in San Francisco and Buckeye Roadhouse and Picco in Marin. As of mid-August, the restaurant was still in soft-open mode, taking tables first-come, first-served while the kitchen broke in new equipment, with a reservation system reportedly set to launch around August 17.

The scale of what they built is the tell. A copper-topped raw bar, a high-ceilinged dining room, a rooftop lounge with fireside seating, a menu built around Kelly's own take on Vietnamese classics rather than a scaled-down version of something else. During construction, so many people wanted to see the space that Block started offering informal tours on weekends when the Avenue closed for Live on the Avenue concerts.

That kind of investment reads differently against what's happening elsewhere in Marin's restaurant scene right now. Vine Hospitality, the multi-decade group behind Larkspur's Left Bank, terminated operations across all of its restaurants this summer, a casualty of the same rent, labor, and food cost pressures squeezing full-service dining rooms countywide. Against that backdrop, a rooftop restaurant with an oyster bar and a private events space opening in San Anselmo isn't a small wager. It's a statement that this particular downtown is worth building for the long term, not just staffing for a season.

It's also not the town's first proof of concept. Madcap, chef Ron Siegel's tasting-menu restaurant at 198 Sir Francis Drake Blvd, has held a Michelin star since 2019 and kept it again in the 2026 Guide. Siegel, whose résumé runs through the French Laundry, the Ritz-Carlton, and Michael Mina's kitchens, built something intimate and small, and it's worked for going on eight years. San Anselmo has always been able to support serious food. What's new is a second, much larger bet arriving at the same moment the town is finally settling its own long-term plans.

What's Ending, and What Isn't

Here's the split worth keeping straight this month, because the two tracks are easy to blur if you're only half paying attention to the town calendar.

Live on the Avenue still has three more Friday and Saturday nights left before it wraps for the year. This past weekend brought Blackcat Zydeco and Zydeco Flames on August 21, followed by a Youth Bands Showcase Night and Wreckless Strangers the next evening. The series carries into September with acts including Momotombo SF and Jon Chi & the Pacific Syndicate on September 4, a Comedy in the Park set paired with Jinx Jones & the King Tones on September 5, and closing acts El Cajon/Le Minivans and F.A.T. Betty on the final night, September 12. If you're driving through downtown on a Friday or Saturday evening before then, plan around the Avenue closure between Tamalpais and Tunstead, which starts at 4:30 p.m. and holds until 9:30.

Even the town's history programming this month points at the same idea. The San Anselmo Historical Commission runs a free, docent-led walking tour of the historic Hub, led by longtime volunteer Dick Miner, with the next two dates set for September 12 and October 10. The tour covers how the railroad shaped downtown and how its businesses and buildings have shifted over generations. It's a useful frame for this particular August: San Anselmo has reinvented its downtown identity before, slowly and through plenty of false starts, and what's happening on the Avenue right now is another version of that same process, just compressed into a few weeks instead of a few decades.

Why This Matters If You Already Live Here

None of this changes what San Anselmo is. It changes what you can count on. For four years, the town's civic and social center has been provisional, a plaza that might close again, a downtown scene that leaned on a summer concert series to feel busy. That's no longer entirely true. The plaza has a real design. The Avenue has a restaurant that built for permanence instead of a pop-up season. The tasting-menu spot that's been quietly excellent since 2019 is still exactly that.

If you're already grabbing dinner on the Avenue most weekends, the practical difference this fall might just be a longer wait at Tụ Tập's bar and a construction fence around Creek Park that finally has an end date attached to it. But the shift underneath those details is real. San Anselmo spent years operating on borrowed ground. This August, it started building on its own.

If you're curious how these kinds of neighborhood shifts tend to show up in home values and buyer interest over time, or if you just want a straightforward read on how downtown San Anselmo's momentum compares to nearby Ross Valley towns, Janey Kaplan has been tracking Marin's neighborhoods closely for over two decades. Let's Connect.