Why An Oakland Restaurant Skipped The Suburbs For 24th Street
Until last October, May Seto and Dave Wasem were not thinking about a third location for Grand Lake Kitchen. Their two restaurants, one in Adams Point and one in the Dimond District, were doing well enough that people kept suggesting the obvious next move: take the concept out to Lafayette or Walnut Creek, where rent is a fraction of the city and parking comes free. That is the standard playbook for a successful East Bay comfort-food restaurant looking to expand. Lower cost, easier build-out, a built-in commuter crowd.
They didn't take it. Instead, a broker who had eaten at their Oakland locations messaged them about a space on the other side of the bay, in the former Mr. Digby's Bar and Restaurant spot at 24th and Church, thinking it would "be a good fit." Grand Lake Kitchen opened its third location in Noe Valley this year, on a corner with neither the cheap rent nor the free parking that made the 680 corridor the safe bet.
If you live near 24th Street, you've probably noticed the block feels busier than it did last summer. This is why. Operators who could go cheaper are choosing to pay more for a specific kind of corner, and the reason tells you something about the street you walk every day.
A restaurant expanding into a Lafayette strip mall has to build its customer base from scratch, usually through paid advertising and a slow word-of-mouth climb. A restaurant opening on 24th Street inherits a walking pattern that already exists. The Noe Valley Town Square anchors a Saturday morning farmers market from 8 a.m. to noon, and it hosts a monthly Night Market that turns the block into a closed-street event with live music and food vendors. The Wine Walk, which sends ticket holders down 24th and the surrounding streets to sample pours from local vintners, is back again this summer after past runs proved popular enough to repeat.
None of that is decoration. It's the reason an operator can choose an urban corner over a suburb and expect to come out ahead. A restaurant in Walnut Creek has to buy attention. A restaurant on 24th Street rents into attention that the block already generates on its own calendar, several times a month, without spending a dollar on marketing.
The retail turnover on this street isn't only about outside operators moving in. Some of it is homegrown, and the pattern is worth knowing if you've wondered how a shop like Noe Cafe ended up on Sanchez Street. It started as a corner of Maricar Lagura's laundromat, Spin City. The coffee counter was meant to be a side offering, but it turned out to be more profitable than the washing machines, and after Lagura met co-owner Christian Ritter, the coffee side became its own full cafe.
That's a different growth story than a restaurant group scouting a new market. It's a small business finding its real business inside a business it already had, then expanding into the space the neighborhood gave it. Both stories are happening on the same three or four blocks right now, which says something about how much slack this corridor still has for new ideas to take root.
Jonathan and David Kim opened the first brick-and-mortar location for their bone broth company, Trad, in 2021, after walking the neighborhood from their home in the Mission. What they noticed wasn't a gap in the market. It was the opposite: a packed Whole Foods, a busy farmers market, and enough Pilates studios to signal a customer base already primed for what they were selling.
"We're like, 'Wow, this is such a lovely, lovely neighborhood.'"
They also liked that the storefronts on 24th Street were small. A modest footprint is a lower-risk proving ground for a business that hasn't scaled yet, and it's part of why the corridor keeps attracting first-time operators rather than only established chains. The Immunity Broth, a mix of chicken bone broth, ginger, turmeric, black pepper, garlic, and ginseng, sells for $26 a quart and has become one of the shop's best sellers, according to reporting from the SF Standard.
Here's the practical version of all this, if you're planning a weekend on your own street:
Watch the Noe Valley Merchants Association's calendar for exact dates as they're confirmed, since some events shift slightly from year to year.
The interesting part isn't any single opening. It's that Grand Lake Kitchen, Trad Bone Broth, and Noe Cafe arrived on this street through three completely different paths, an outside operator's calculated bet, a scouting walk by founders looking for an underserved but supportive customer base, and an organic pivot from an existing local business, and all three decisions point back to the same thing: a corridor with enough recurring foot traffic that operators would rather buy into it than build their own somewhere cheaper.
That's not something you'd know from driving down 24th Street once. It's something you notice if you've lived here long enough to remember which storefronts sat empty and which ones filled in fast, and to recognize that the fill-in isn't random. The next time you're walking to the farmers market or timing a reservation around the Night Market crowd, you're participating in the exact pattern that made a broker in Oakland pick up the phone.
If you're a longtime Noe Valley resident, none of this changes your Saturday plans much. But it's worth knowing that the block feels different this summer for a reason, and that reason is written into who chose to open here, and why they didn't choose somewhere easier.
If you ever find yourself thinking about what a neighborhood like this means for a move, a sale, or a home you're weighing against another part of the city, I'm always happy to talk through what I'm seeing on the ground. Let's Connect.
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