"Every corner on the intersection of San Pablo and Solano was vacant," Ariane Owens has said, recalling the year she and her husband, chef Scott Eastman, opened Juanita & Maude in 2017. Reservations there now book out weeks in advance.
Walk that same corner today and you won't find an empty storefront anywhere near it. What you will find, if you pay attention to addresses instead of menus, is that almost nothing at this intersection is actually new. It's old buildings, and in one case an old restaurant, wearing new names.
Start with the wine bar on the northeast corner. Best Friends opened at 901 San Pablo in late 2024 in a space that had spent years as a furniture store. Co-owner Katie Plack has described the building honestly: "It was definitely not screaming wine bar, but we could really see the potential." She and her partners, Sean Danzeiser and Dan Polsby, gutted the interior and left it open and sunlit, the kind of room where a glass turns into three.
A block up Solano, the address at 1501 spent years as Fonda before closing. In its place, Anahuac held its grand opening on January 31, 2026, with a menu built around fajitas, enchiladas and a full seafood list. Same storefront, same foot traffic pattern, a different kitchen behind the window.
Around the corner at 1106 Solano, Lulu spent its first run serving Palestinian-inspired brunch and dinner. On January 31, 2026, the same day Anahuac opened three blocks away, Lulu closed to retool. It reopened February 14 as Lulu's Little Kitchen, with a counter-service format and a reworked menu, still in the same room.
The most recent reinvention belongs to a business that didn't need a new address at all. O2 Eatery has run breakfast and lunch on Solano Avenue in Berkeley for years. Rather than open a second full restaurant from nothing, the owners moved their dinner service six blocks south into Albany, opening O2 Sushi at 977 San Pablo Avenue with a grand opening on September 23, 2026. The daytime menu stayed put in Berkeley. The dinner menu just changed zip codes.
None of this reads like a neighborhood attracting outside money. It reads like a neighborhood that keeps recycling what it already has, on a timeline most places never get the chance to run.
Why this corner keeps turning over
Part of the answer is simple math. Albany has roughly 20,000 residents, which means its planning, zoning and fire departments are handling a fraction of the permit volume that Berkeley or Oakland processes in a given month. Kyle Itani, who runs Yonsei Handrolls near Brezo and Lulu on San Pablo and has operated several restaurants across the bay in Oakland, put it plainly to the San Francisco Chronicle: "There's like a never-ending stream of cars on San Pablo." He's also noted that city staff remember a project by name because there aren't hundreds of others competing for attention at once. That kind of attentiveness shortens the gap between a lease signing and an opening night, which matters when a business is trying to reuse a space instead of building one from scratch.
The other part of the answer is money the city puts on the table directly. Albany runs a Business Attraction Grant program that has awarded qualifying new businesses up to $20,000 for choosing Albany over a neighboring city, according to reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle. Best Friends, Hella Bagels, Yonsei Handrolls and Kitava have all been named as recipients. That's not a subsidy for construction. It's a subsidy for exactly the kind of reuse this corner keeps demonstrating: taking on a vacant or underperforming lease and making it work.
Brennen Brown, assistant to the Albany city manager, has pointed to that grant program as the reason empty storefronts have kept filling in. By mid-2025, city officials counted around 50 restaurants and cafes in Albany, a figure Brown said matched pre-pandemic levels. That citywide number matters less than where the density actually sits. Most of that growth isn't spread evenly across town. It's stacked into a few blocks around Solano and San Pablo.
The owners were already customers
There's a pattern in how these operators talk about choosing Albany that shows up almost every time, and it isn't about market research. Sean Danzeiser, one of the three owners behind Best Friends, has said the decision wasn't really a decision at all: "It was already part of our rhythm." He and his partners lived nearby, ate on that corner, brought their kids to the parks around it, long before they signed a lease. Dan Polsby has traced his own connection back further, to when he first went looking for wine bar space in the East Bay and ended up in what's now the Juanita & Maude building instead, working with a different partner. That's how he learned, in his words, how the city operates, and it's part of why he calls himself pro-Albany ever since.
That familiarity is worth noting because it's different from a developer scouting a market from the outside. The people opening these restaurants were regulars first. They knew which storefronts sat empty and which buildings might work before they ever called a landlord.
What hasn't changed
The churn is real, but it's not total. A few blocks from all this reinvention, Sam's Log Cabin still serves the same sunny-patio breakfast it always has, and Al's Big Burger still runs a simple, old-school burger stand that predates almost everything else on this list. Schmidt's Pub has been a fixture long enough that newer restaurateurs cite it as the neighborhood's baseline, the kind of place nobody's trying to replace. The corner isn't erasing Albany's older identity. It's specifically the underused and vacant spaces, the old furniture store, the shuttered Fonda, the slow stretch of a brunch spot's dinner hours, that keep getting picked up and run again.
A quick reference if you haven't walked by lately
- Anahuac, 1501 Solano Ave, opened January 31, 2026, in the former Fonda space
- Lulu's Little Kitchen, 1106 Solano Ave, reopened February 14, 2026, with a new counter-service format after closing as Lulu
- O2 Sushi, 977 San Pablo Ave, held its grand opening September 23, 2026, taking over dinner service that used to run out of O2 Eatery on Solano Avenue in Berkeley
Three storefronts, three reinventions, all within a single calendar year, on a corner that was fully vacant less than a decade ago. That's not a coincidence of good timing. It's what happens when a small city makes reuse the path of least resistance and the people filling the space were already spending their evenings there.
If you've ever wondered what makes a specific block hold its value while the rest of a corridor changes around it, that's a conversation worth having in person. Souza & Niroomand Team sits down with East Bay neighbors all the time to talk through exactly this kind of local detail. Let's Sit Down and Talk.
