A year ago, a Friday in San Carlos meant picking one thing. Trail time at Pulgas Ridge in the morning, then a separate errand downtown later, because Laurel Street didn't have enough going on to make the trip feel like part of the same day. The two halves of the city ran on their own clocks.
That's no longer true, and the shift didn't come from a ribbon-cutting or a city plan. It came from a wave of Laurel Street closures in 2024 and 2025 that looked, at the time, like the street was thinning out. It wasn't. It was resetting, and the operators who filled the gaps happened to be the kind who already had something to lose if San Carlos didn't work out for them.
The Street That Looked Like It Was Dying
For anyone who walked Laurel Street through 2024 and into early 2025, the news kept landing the same way. A cobbler who had been resoling shoes on the block for 33 years retired. His next-door neighbor, Jimmy of Guy's Barbershop, closed up not long after. Blind Tasting shut its doors. So did Paxti's Pizza and Sneakers American Grill. None of these were chain outposts. They were fixtures, the kind of businesses where the owner knew your name, and losing four or five of them in close succession is the sort of thing that makes a street feel like it's contracting rather than turning over.
The instinct, watching that many storefronts go dark on one block, is to assume the street is in trouble. That instinct was wrong here, and the reason it was wrong is worth sitting with, because it changes how you read the next round of closures whenever they come.
What Actually Moved In
The vacancies didn't sit empty for long, and they didn't get filled with whatever was willing to sign a lease. They went to operators who were already established elsewhere on the Peninsula and chose to add San Carlos rather than start there cold.
| Left | Replaced by | Backed by |
|---|---|---|
| Sneakers American Grill | Highlands Sports Bar & Grill | Christian Conte, who already owns Drakes a few doors down |
| Former Taurus space | Elia Restaurant | Fatih Ulas, who runs three other Elia locations across the Bay Area |
| Former Cuisinett | Esnaf | Turkish menu, new category for a street that skews Italian and Greek |
| Blind Tasting | Bistro Mitte | German kitchen, full dinner service |
| Paxti's Pizza | Impasto Pizzeria | Wood-fired, opened summer 2025 |
Christian Conte didn't need a second bar. He already had Drakes running three blocks away, and taking the old Sneakers space and naming the new one Highlands, after one of San Carlos's own parks, was a bet that the same street could support more of what he was already doing well. Highlands now runs Trivia Mondays at 7 p.m., hosted by a regular who goes by Dangit, alongside Taco Tuesdays and 36 beers on tap.
Fatih Ulas made a similar calculation from a different direction. He told the Mercury News in January 2026 that he already owned Elia locations in Pleasanton and Walnut Creek before adding San Carlos, meaning this wasn't a test run in an unproven market. It was an operator with three working locations deciding a fourth belonged here.
That's the pattern across nearly every name on the list above. The people who moved into the vacancies weren't chasing a cheap lease on a struggling block. They were extending something that already worked, which is a different signal than a street simply refilling itself.
The Morning Half Nobody Files Under Downtown
None of that Laurel Street story touches the other half of a San Carlos weekend, and that's the part residents tend to undercount. Pulgas Ridge Open Space Preserve sits in the hills above the city, 366 acres managed by the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, with six miles of trails threading through oak woodland, chaparral, and cool canyon bottoms.
The trail names are worth knowing if you've only ever done the same out-and-back. The Cordilleras Trail follows the creek at the bottom of the preserve. The Polly Geraci Trail climbs to meet the paved Hassler Trail near the 650-foot high point, where the hills open up toward the bay on a clear morning. The Blue Oak Trail starts near the private Redwood Center and works its way up through oak cover to the same ridge. Newer additions, the Dusky-Footed Woodrat Trail and the Dick Bishop Trail, give the loop more variety than it had a few years back.
The preserve also holds a 17.5-acre off-leash area at its center, reachable from the Cordilleras, Polly Geraci, Hassler, and Blue Oak trails, which makes it one of the few open space sites on this stretch of the Peninsula where a dog can actually run rather than heel the whole way. If your weekend involves a dog and you've been sticking to sidewalks, this is the piece you've been missing.
The Hinge: Devil's Canyon at 4 PM
What connects the trail morning to the Laurel Street evening is a ritual that's been running since long before either half of this loop made sense as a pair. Devil's Canyon Brewing Company opened in 2001, founded by Chris Garrett, and relocated to its current spot on Washington Street in San Carlos in 2013. Every Friday at 4 p.m., the taproom and beer garden open to a family-and-pet-friendly crowd with live music and food trucks, which turns a weekday close into the start of a weekend rather than the end of a week.
It's a short walk from there to trivia at Hapa's Brewing Company, which runs its own Brainstormer Trivia nights on a separate rotation, or over to Highlands for the Monday version if the week got away from you. None of this is new information to anyone who's lived here a while. What's changed is what happens after, because a Friday that used to end at whichever bar was open now has somewhere specific to go for dinner depending on what you're in the mood for.
Why the Loop Matters More Than It Did Two Summers Ago
None of these pieces are new on their own. Pulgas Ridge has been open for decades. Devil's Canyon has run its Friday ritual for years. Laurel Street has always had restaurants. What's different is that they now function as one continuous circuit rather than three separate reasons to leave the house.
The city's 2026 Music in the Park series makes the connection literal. Eight Friday evenings from late June through late August at Burton Park, free and sponsored by the Parks and Recreation Foundation of San Carlos, with beer and wine sold on site. Two dates remain on the calendar as of this week: August 21 with E-Ticket Band, and August 28 with Heartless closing out the series. Both nights end at 8 p.m., which is exactly when the newer Laurel Street kitchens are hitting their dinner rush, so the concert crowd doesn't scatter home. It walks a few blocks and keeps the night going.
The Family Campout at Burton Park just wrapped on August 7 and 8, tents on Flanagan Field, s'mores, a movie at dusk, the kind of overnight event where the walk home is measured in blocks rather than a drive. The Sunday Farmers Market on Laurel Street between San Carlos Avenue and Cherry Street runs year round from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., which means the morning-to-evening loop doesn't even pause on the one day most towns treat as a rest day.
Stack a Saturday morning at Pulgas Ridge against a Friday evening at Devil's Canyon and a dinner reservation on Laurel Street, and you get something that wasn't available two summers ago. Not because any single piece changed dramatically, but because the street finally has enough depth to be the third stop rather than an afterthought. The reversal is worth remembering the next time a familiar storefront goes dark. It might be exactly what happened here.
If you already call San Carlos home and you're ever curious how the city's shifting downtown and its quiet open space edges are showing up in what buyers ask about, The ReSolve Group has spent years reading these kinds of signals across the Peninsula. Work With Us whenever the timing feels right.