Novato's New Openings Are Skipping Grant Avenue This Summer

Every Tuesday since May 5, Sherman Avenue between Grant and De Long has filled with folding tables, produce crates, and the smell of something on a grill, right in front of City Hall. If you've called Novato home for more than a season, you already know the Downtown Novato Community Farmers' Market runs 4 to 8 p.m. through September 29, then shifts to a 4 to 7 p.m. window for its final October Tuesdays. You've probably built a dinner or two around it already this year.

What's easy to miss, even if you live here, is that this same summer has quietly built a second Novato you have to drive to find. Nearly everything genuinely new this year, the new bar, the new pizzeria, the new steakhouse, and the town's second concert series, has skipped Grant Avenue entirely. It landed on Redwood Boulevard, on Entrada Drive, on Alameda del Prado, and on a stage on the far side of town that most downtown regulars have never had a reason to visit.

Two Concert Series, Two Different Parts of Town

Novato runs two free outdoor concert series every summer, and they don't share a location. Concerts on the Green happens on select Fridays at the Novato Civic Green, 901 Sherman Avenue, the same block as the farmers market. Hot Amphitheater Nights happens on select Saturdays across town at the Hamilton Amphitheater, 601 N. Hamilton Parkway, with parking at the Hamilton Community Center lot and the Old Hamilton Gym lot.

If your summer has revolved around the Civic Green because it's the one you pass on market night, you've only been catching half the music the city is putting on. Hamilton has its own crowd, its own parking lot, and its own lineup, and the two series run on different days so a resident could theoretically catch both most weeks without either one canceling the other out.

None of This Summer's New Openings Chose Grant Avenue

Three new food and drink spots have moved through Novato's permit pipeline this year, and the pattern holds. None of them picked the strip everyone still calls downtown.

• Greystone Lounge, Redwood Boulevard: taking over the former home of the Viking Cocktail Lounge, this one comes from Ryan Blanchard, a San Francisco bartender with more than 30 years behind the bar. Blanchard and his wife, both artists, moved to Novato more than five years ago, and the name honors the town in Ireland where his grandparents lived. The concept is built around live music from local and regional acts, with a mid-June to early-July opening window.
• Fox Pizza, 528 Alameda del Prado: a new pizza concept from owners Anna and Jeff Fox, who are building out the space with a mid-2026 target.
• Black Steer Steakhouse, 250 Entrada Drive: an Oregon-based steakhouse concept taking over the former Rickey's Restaurant space, landing near Five Points Fitness and Red Boy Pizza. No opening date has been announced yet, but the permit application is filed and the address is set.

Line those three addresses up against Grant Avenue and none of them touch it. That's not an accident of where cheap leases happened to be sitting. It's a small but real signal about which corridors in Novato are absorbing new investment right now, and it isn't the one with the farmers market and the Civic Green.

Grant Avenue Isn't Losing Anything, It's Just Not Where the New Stuff Is

None of this means Old Town is fading. Old Town Sports has run out of 871 Grant Avenue since 1978, when Roger Goodwin opened it, and it's still the place families go for bikes, skis, and snowboards decades later. Copperfield's Books, Rustic Bakery, and Masa Sushi anchor the same stretch, and they're not going anywhere just because the new liquor licenses are being filed on the other side of town.

Grant Avenue also still owns the one day that pulls the entire city back to it. The Downtown Novato Business Association hosts a classic car show every second Saturday in October where more than 300 cars line ten blocks of Grant Avenue, one of the longest-running shows of its kind in the Bay Area, with live music and vendors filling the street for the day. That event doesn't need new restaurants to draw a crowd. It's the crowd.

The honest read is a split calendar. Grant Avenue keeps the rituals that don't need reinventing: the Tuesday market, the October car show, the bakery you've been going to for years. The new investment, the bars, the second stage, the steakhouse, is testing itself in the parts of town that don't already have a built-in audience.

What's Left This Season

If you're checking this against today's date, here's what's still ahead. Concerts on the Green closes out its 2026 run on August 21 with Anthony Arya. Hot Amphitheater Nights has one date left, August 29, with Club 90 playing dance music spanning the 1960s to today. The farmers market continues every Tuesday through September 29 before its shorter October schedule begins. And if you want to see whether Greystone Lounge, Fox Pizza, or Black Steer have actually opened their doors by the time the car show rolls around in October, Redwood Boulevard, Alameda del Prado, and Entrada Drive are the three addresses worth a drive-by.

None of this changes what Novato is. It changes where the newest parts of it are showing up. A town that's been organized around Grant Avenue for decades is currently testing three new bets somewhere else, and the second concert series has been running in Hamilton the whole time whether downtown regulars noticed or not.

If you're the kind of Novato resident who's started paying attention to which side of town is actually changing, that instinct is worth more than it seems. Understanding how a town's center of gravity shifts, block by block and lease by lease, is the same skill that matters when the question eventually turns from where to grab dinner to where to buy. When that day comes, Emily Schaffer has spent a career reading Marin County at exactly this level of detail. Request a Private Consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what Novato's next chapter might mean for you.