On a Friday evening in San Carlos, the smell of wood smoke drifts out of Pazzo's open kitchen at 1179 Laurel Street, four blocks up someone is tuning a guitar for Beer Friday at Devil's Canyon, and two retirees are setting up a chess game at Frank D. Harrington Park like they do most weeks the weather cooperates. None of this is new information if you've lived here the past couple of years. What's easy to miss, because it happened in pieces over roughly two years instead of all at once, is that the street doing all this isn't the same street it was before the shakeup started in 2024.
The businesses that closed on Laurel Street between 2024 and 2025 and the businesses that replaced them were not the same kind of business. That distinction matters more than any single opening or closing, and it's the actual story behind why Laurel feels different to walk down now than it did two years ago.
What Actually Left the Block
The closures that hit hardest weren't restaurants. After 33 years in the same storefront, the shoe repair shop's owner, known around town simply as Dave, retired. His next-door neighbor Jimmy, who ran Guy's Barbershop, closed around the same time. The UPS Store beside them shut its doors too, with word that the space would become a small grocery store. On the restaurant side, Blind Tasting and Paxti's Pizza both closed quietly, freeing up two more storefronts on a block that was suddenly down a barber, a cobbler, a shipping counter, and two places to eat.
Read in sequence, that's the kind of run that makes longtime residents nervous. A downtown doesn't usually lose five services in a compressed window without something structural going on underneath it.
What Actually Replaced Them Wasn't Random
What filled those spaces over the following months wasn't a scramble of temporary tenants. It was a specific type of operator, and the pattern is worth naming because it explains why the street held together instead of hollowing out.
Andy Gambardella, who previously ran Gambardella's, opened Pazzo at 1179 Laurel with a focused menu built around Neapolitan-style wood-fired pizza and housemade pasta. Christian Conte, who already owned Drakes on the same street, took over the former Sneakers American Grill and opened Highlands Sports Bar & Grill, naming it after one of San Carlos's own parks and building it around 36 taps and a booth full of screens. Fatih Ulas, who already ran Elia locations in Pleasanton and Walnut Creek and has since grown the group to four Bay Area locations with an addition in Campbell, brought Elia into the former Taurus space, putting Greek fine dining on a stretch that had previously skewed Italian. Esnaf opened Turkish food in the former Cuisinett space. Bistro Mitte brought German fare into the mix, with Frankfurter and Bratwurst on a menu built around the name.
None of these people were testing the neighborhood. Every one of them already had a stake in the Peninsula before signing a Laurel Street lease.
| Former Storefront | What Closed | What's There Now |
|---|---|---|
| Former Sneakers American Grill | Sneakers American Grill | Highlands Sports Bar & Grill (Christian Conte) |
| Former Taurus | Taurus | Elia Greek Restaurant (Fatih Ulas) |
| Former Cuisinett | Cuisinett | Esnaf Turkish Restaurant |
| 1179 Laurel St | vacant / prior tenant | Pazzo (Andy Gambardella) |
| Various closures | Blind Tasting, Paxti's Pizza | Bistro Mitte and other new arrivals |
That table only tracks the restaurant churn. The barber chair and the shoe repair bench are still gone, and nothing on Laurel has replaced that specific kind of service business. What the street gained instead is depth on the dining side: German, Greek, Turkish, and Neapolitan Italian now sit within a few storefronts of established anchors like Pranzi, TOWN in the historic Tivoli building, and 888 Ristorante. The range of reasons to walk down that block on a given night has genuinely expanded, even if the range of errands you can run there has narrowed.
The Street Now Runs on Two Clocks
Once you start paying attention to the calendar instead of just the storefronts, Laurel Street reveals a rhythm that has nothing to do with any single opening. It runs on a weekly clock and a monthly clock, layered on top of each other, and most of it costs nothing to show up for.
- Sundays, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., the farmers market runs on Laurel between San Carlos Avenue and Cherry Street: produce, flowers, bread, and local vendors setting the morning tone before the restaurants take over by afternoon.
- Fridays, 4 to 10 p.m., Devil's Canyon Brewing Company opens to the public for Beer Friday, its only public day of the week, with live music and rotating food trucks in the beer garden. The brewery is marking its 25th anniversary this year, having opened in 2001 and picked up more than 35 awards along the way.
- Second Saturdays, Molly O's hosts a traditional Irish session with Fret & Fiddle.
- Third Saturdays, it's Ivor Collins on the same stage, a different flavor of Irish trad music in the same room.
- Most days, Domenico Winery's Osteria is open for tastings in a space built to feel like 1950s Milan, with burnished concrete walls and a marble bar that has nothing to do with the wood-and-string aesthetic everywhere else on the block.
None of these are festival-scale draws. That's the point. They're the difference between a street that only comes alive for its one big weekend a year and one that has something happening most nights of the week.
The Block That Isn't About Eating
Not everything that makes Laurel Street work involves a menu. At 733 Laurel, Laurel Street Arts has run a pottery, glass fusing, and mosaic studio under owner Sheena for years, the kind of drop-in creative space where a family can walk in on a slow Tuesday and leave a week later with a fired piece. The studio's popularity eventually spun off a second location, The Clay Lounge, built specifically for people who wanted to move from painting pottery to throwing it on a wheel, serving San Carlos alongside Belmont and Redwood City.
A few doors down, Frank D. Harrington Park occupies a small footprint in the 700 block, named for a longtime local volunteer who was known for greeting everyone in town by name. The chessboards there don't generate reviews or foot traffic data, but they're occupied often enough that regulars know which afternoons to expect a game already in progress.
These are the parts of Laurel Street that don't show up in a restaurant roundup, and they're also the parts that keep the block feeling like a neighborhood rather than a strip of restaurants that happens to share a sidewalk.
October 10 and 11 Isn't the Point. It's the Proof.
This year's San Carlos Art & Wine Faire runs October 10 and 11, its 34th annual staging, with more than 200 artists spread across three stages, food and drink vendors, and a crowd that typically runs into the tens of thousands over the two days. It's free, it closes down Laurel Street and San Carlos Avenue, and it's the single event every longtime resident already has circled.
The Faire isn't the reason Laurel Street works. It's the stress test that proves it already does. A block that can absorb 200 artist booths and a weekend's worth of visitors without losing its footing is a block that already has the density to support it, the density built one Pazzo and one Highlands and one Elia at a time over the previous two years. The Faire is loud proof of something the Friday Beer Fridays and the Sunday market have been demonstrating quietly all along.
For anyone who's walked Laurel Street for years, the shift is already visible without needing an event to confirm it. For anyone who wrote the block off after 2024 took its barber, its cobbler, and two restaurants in the same stretch, it's worth another look before the Faire crowds show up in October.
If you've got questions about what's changing in San Carlos beyond the storefronts, that's exactly the kind of local detail the team at Gevertz Group tracks year-round, not just when a festival brings the cameras out.
