Cole Valley New Restaurants and Shops in 2026: What's Coming

Peet's Coffee closed at 919 Cole St. in January after 12 years. The building owner first planned to replace it with another coffee shop. Two groups wrote to the owner before that lease happened. One was the Cole Valley Merchants Association. The other was the Cole Valley Improvement Association, a resident group. According to Dan Serot, owner of Finnegans Wake and a founding member of the merchants group, the letter said one thing.

"Please, we don't need any more coffee. We need food."

The space is now going to Pasta Supply Co. Its owner-chef has lived a few blocks away for 12 years, and he is paying for the buildout with money from people who already buy his pasta.

The coffee letter is one example of something broader on the block and a half of Cole Street between Carl and Parnassus. In 2026, neighbors are deciding a good share of what moves in. They write letters to landlords and pay for buildouts in advance. In several cases the new owners are neighbors themselves. The Standard's September roundup puts the scale in perspective. That stretch holds nearly a dozen eateries, two coffee shops, a dry cleaner, a shipping store, a hardware store, an upscale grocer, a pet shop, a gym and an urgent care center. On a corridor that small, every vacant storefront matters.

The Storefront That Sat Empty for Five Years

At first, the neighborhood didn't get its way at 925 Cole St. The old Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy building sat empty for about five years. Gazetteer SF reported that members of the active Cole Valley neighborhood Facebook group wanted a daycare or a new restaurant there. In 2025 the space went to Yardsale instead. Yardsale is an outdoor equipment and apparel brand, and its main product is a modular ski pole with built-in magnets.

Co-founder Cristina Ashbaugh told Gazetteer what people said when the plan first went public: "People were like, 'I don't get it,' or 'I wish it was something else.'"

Yardsale was not an outside chain, though. Ashbaugh and her friend Kelly McGee started the brand in their Cole Valley garage in 2023. McGee wanted the half-store, half-cafe to become the "living room of Cole Valley." After more than six months of construction and permitting delays, the shop and its in-house cafe, Double Black, soft-opened in mid-July 2026. Ashbaugh announced the opening in the same Facebook group. In her words, the replies ran along the lines of "I was prepared to be a hater, but it's actually really good."

By early September, Double Black had lines almost every day. People wait for iced hojicha lattes topped with black-sesame cold foam. The owners also added free refills on drip coffee. They told The Standard the goal is to serve two groups at once: people who find the shop on TikTok, and locals who might assume a hojicha latte place isn't for them. According to Yardsale's own page, the cafe is open 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily.

At 925 Cole, the neighborhood responded once Yardsale began sharing its plans. At 919 Cole, next door but one, residents and merchants spoke up while the landlord was still planning the next tenant.

How the Letter Changed the Next Tenant

A coffee shop in the old Peet's would have been the easy choice. The space had served coffee for 12 years. Serot told The Standard the landlord's first plan was another coffee shop. The merchants association and the resident group wrote to the owner together, and the space is now going to a restaurant.

That restaurant is Pasta Supply Co., a combination restaurant and shop. Chef Anthony Strong opened the first location on Clement Street in the Richmond in 2023 and the second on 22nd Street in the Mission in 2024. Cole Valley will be the third. Strong said he "got a chill" when he saw the Peet's space was available, a few blocks from his apartment. As at the other two locations, pappardelle and mafaldine will be made in the window. Fresh pasta and sauces will be sold to go, with seating inside and at a few sidewalk tables. Serot named what neighbors can expect: fusilli in spicy tomato vodka sauce and hot meatball parmesan sandwiches.

The new tenant was chosen with neighborhood input, and neighbors are also helping pay for it.

A Buildout Paid For in Pasta

Strong is raising $400,000 for the Cole Valley buildout. He is not using bank loans, private equity or a third-party crowdfunding site. Eater SF reported that he has used crowdfunding sites before, "where for $50 you might get a t-shirt in a year if we get open." This time he is selling pasta in advance through his own website. The Cole Valley page lists the offers:

1. Pasta for a Year, $550. One box of take-home pasta each week for a year.
2. Pasta for Life, $4,000. The same weekly box, with no end date.
3. Business purchases. For every ten subscriptions a company buys, Pasta Supply Co. donates one to a San Francisco public school.

According to Eater, the weekly box can include fresh and filled pasta but not the ready-to-bake lasagnas. Buyers can start picking up right away at the Mission or Richmond shops, or wait for Cole Valley to open. They can skip a week, but they can't collect a month of boxes in one visit. Strong said someone has already asked.

Selling directly means no crowdfunding platform takes a cut. Strong told Eater he used forecasting tools to set the prices against his costs. He told The Standard he would "rather pay all of them back in pasta than hit up banks for loans." The campaign started on Wednesday, Aug. 12. By Eater's Aug. 20 report, he said it was "well past halfway" to the goal.

The opening date is also unsettled. In August, Strong was aiming for October. As of Oct. 8, the Cole Valley page still says "COMING SOON TO COLE VALLEY!"

Many of the New Owners Live Here

Much of the new business on the block comes from people who already live in Cole Valley, as The Standard's reporting shows.

• Jim Angelus has lived in the area since 2009. He became an owner of Cole Valley Tavern, at Cole and Carl, in 2018 and renamed it from Kezar Bar & Restaurant in 2022.
• Abbe Hoenscheid opened the zero-waste store Simple SF on Carl Street in 2022 and moved it onto Cole last year. She says sales are growing 40% to 50% year over year, partly because it is the only zero-waste refill store in the city right now.
• Cristina Ashbaugh and Kelly McGee went from a garage brand to the storefront at 925 Cole.
• Anthony Strong is the 12-year resident behind the incoming Pasta Supply Co.

Three of those businesses will soon sit next to each other. Simple SF and Double Black are one storefront apart, and Pasta Supply Co. is moving into the space between them. All three are run by people who live in the neighborhood.

The Group Behind the Changes

The letter worked because there was already a group to send it. The Cole Valley Merchants Association started in 2023. Since then it has worked with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency to move loading zones off the main street and shorten commercial loading hours, which frees up parking for customers. Serot says the group has also raised money for streetlights and night markets.

The 2026 street calendar shows that work. SFMTA closed Cole Street between Parnassus and Frederick from noon to 11:59 p.m. for Cole Valley Nights on Aug. 20, and rerouted the 37 and 43. For the Sept. 27 street fair, Cole and part of Parnassus were closed from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. Carl stayed open, and SFMTA warned of minor N Judah delays.

Newcomers are joining the group, too. Katie Humphries, who is opening the antique shop Schatzgarten on Parnassus, doesn't live in Cole Valley. She went to her first merchants association meeting in late August and told The Standard: "Everyone's so supportive, they're so organized." Luke Spray, executive director of the nonprofit Civic Joy Fund, compared the change to West Portal's recent revival. In both places, he said, local merchants asked, "Why aren't we doing something in our own backyard?"

Open, Coming and Unconfirmed on Cole Street

This is the latest public status of each storefront, with the date of the report behind it.

The longtime businesses are still there alongside the newcomers. Say Cheese has been open for 50 years. Finnegans Wake marked its 50th anniversary in September. Val de Cole, a Legacy Business, has operated since the 1930s, and Cole Hardware opened in 1920. The newer wave started around early 2024, when Woods Beer and Wine Co. opened in the former Reverie space a few months after Blue Barn arrived. Rising Star Laundry followed. Angelus expects Cole Valley Tavern may lose some business when Lin's restaurant and Pasta Supply Co. open. "It's a long game," he told The Standard. "Ultimately, I think this is going to be great for all of us."

The ground-floor tenant on a corridor like Cole Street affects more than the block. It also shapes the building it sits in. Owners of mixed-use buildings in San Francisco who want to understand how a commercial lease and its tenant play into value can talk with The Bonn Webb Team. Request a complimentary, confidential property valuation.