As The Almanac reported, Sema Tosun said of Rouge Lounge, "We always wanted a place like this to exist." It's the wine bar she and her husband Huseyin opened at 890 Laurel Street. It sounds like the kind of quote every new restaurant owner gives a reporter. But it explains more about downtown San Carlos in 2026 than a full restaurant review would.
Rouge wasn't an outsider's bet on a recovering street. Huseyin Tosun had already spent years as a restaurateur before he and Sema went looking for a small space with a patio and an existing bar setup. His experience is one example of a broader pattern among high-profile openings on Laurel Street over the past two years.
What Actually Left
If you stopped paying close attention to Laurel Street sometime in 2024, here's what you missed. Dave's shoe repair, a fixture on the block for 33 years, closed when its owner retired. Guy's Barbershop, next door and run the same way for just as long, closed around the same time. The UPS Store beside them shut its doors. Blind Tasting closed. So did Paxti's Pizza. Five storefronts, all with actual histories, gone within a matter of months.
That kind of clustering reads like decline while it's happening. A shoe repair shop that knows its customers by name doesn't get replaced by anything comparable overnight, and a street that loses a barbershop, a wine bar, and a pizza place in the same season looks like it's hollowing out from the middle.
The Detail That Explains What Came Back
Here's what actually filled those spaces. Christian Conte, who already owned Drakes further down the block, took over the former Sneakers space and opened Highlands Sports Bar & Grill, a sports bar with 36 taps and a screen in every booth, named after one of the city's own parks. Andy Gambardella, whose family had run a San Carlos restaurant for decades before this, opened Pazzo at the south end of Laurel near Brittan Avenue, doing Neapolitan-style pizza and housemade pasta. Fatih Ulas brought Elia into the former Taurus space with a Greek fine-dining menu built around a wine cellar and a raw bar. Ulas told the Mercury News in January 2026 that his San Carlos location came before his Campbell expansion, meaning this street wasn't where he tested the concept. It was where he'd already proven it could work.
Add Rouge Lounge to that list and a pattern holds across four of the most visible new leases on the block. None of these were first-time operators rolling the dice on a shaky street. Several of the operators had prior restaurant experience or ties to San Carlos. That's a different mechanism than the one you'd expect after a wave of closures. Struggling streets usually get filled by short-term concepts or a chain testing the market. The new openings span the same three blocks.
A Street That Stopped Duplicating Itself
Before 2024, the criticism of Laurel Street was fair: a lot of good Italian food, not much else. Pranzi and 888 Ristorante Italiano had loyal followings, and neither was going anywhere. What the new wave did wasn't compete with them. It filled categories that simply didn't exist on the block before.
Esnaf opened Turkish food in the former Cuisinett space, the first restaurant of its kind on the street. Bistro Mitte brought German food, bratwurst included, into a lineup that had never had it. Elia added Greek fine dining at a scale the block hadn't seen. Pazzo's Neapolitan focus sits next to, not on top of, the red-sauce Italian at Pranzi and 888. Layer in Rangoon Ruby's Burmese menu, CreoLa's Cajun kitchen, and TOWN's regional American cooking inside the historic Tivoli building, and the stretch from Brittan Avenue to San Carlos Avenue now covers German, Greek, Turkish, Burmese, Cajun, regional American, and multiple distinct takes on Italian without much overlap. A resident who wants a casual pizza night, a dressed-up anniversary dinner, and a sports bar Sunday can get all three without leaving a six-block walk.
Why the Street Itself Makes This Work
None of that variety would matter if the street didn't function as a place to actually walk. Laurel Street's downtown stretch is closed to cars, which means restaurants can push tables into what would otherwise be a traffic lane and foot traffic stays continuous instead of stopping at a curb. That physical setup is part of why seven independent kitchens could open in roughly the same window without the block feeling saturated. A pedestrian street absorbs density in a way a street full of parking spots and curb cuts doesn't.
The Weekend That Tests All of It
The real test of whether this new mix has staying power arrives October 10 and 11, when the San Carlos Art & Wine Faire returns for its 34th year. The Faire fills both Laurel Street and San Carlos Avenue with more than 200 artist booths across three entertainment stages, plus beer, wine, and food vendors, and it typically draws over 40,000 people across the weekend. It's free to attend and easy to reach by Caltrain or SamTrans, which means a meaningful share of that crowd isn't local.
That's a lot of foot traffic passing directly in front of Highlands, Elia, Pazzo, Rouge, Esnaf, and Bistro Mitte at once, on a weekend explicitly built around wandering the block rather than driving to one destination and leaving. The Faire has run for over three decades, so the format isn't new. What's new is the range of what a wandering visitor finds when they duck off the festival path and into an actual restaurant.
The Faire isn't the only fixed point on the calendar. The Sunday Farmers Market runs every week from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Laurel Street between San Carlos Avenue and Cherry Street, giving the block a weekly rhythm independent of any single festival. Devil's Canyon Brewing Company runs its own year-round calendar of comedy nights and tastings, and Domenico Winery, a family-owned operation producing Cal-Italia wines for more than two decades, does the same with events like its Annual Orphan Barrel Tasting. Hometown Days already ran its three-day run at Burton Park back in May. None of this programming changed in the last two years. What changed is what's open around it when the crowds show up.
What to Actually Do With This
If the last clear memory you have of Laurel Street is a shuttered shoe shop and a barbershop with a "closed" sign, that memory is roughly two years out of date. The block that replaced it reflects a mix of operators, several with prior restaurant experience or ties to San Carlos. The Faire on October 10 and 11 is as good a reason as any to walk the full stretch from Brittan to San Carlos Avenue and see which of the new rooms you haven't tried yet.
If you're already living in San Carlos and keeping an eye on how the neighborhood around you keeps changing, that's exactly the kind of texture worth knowing before you ever think about a next move. Sharlyne Murphy works this stretch of the Peninsula block by block, and if a question about the San Carlos market comes up before Laurel Street's next round of openings does, that's a conversation worth having early.
