Best Things to Do in Sebastopol This Week

Walk down Bodega Avenue this month and you'll pass a restaurant that has worn three different names since most current Sebastopol residents moved in. It was the French Garden. Then it was Gravenstein Grill. This spring it became Mansoor. Two blocks away, the building that used to be Flavor Bistro is about to become something called Campanella. Over at The Barlow, a shuttered brewery just got a second life as a café. Three of the biggest restaurant stories in town this year are not new restaurants at all. They're new operators moving into buildings that already know how to be a restaurant.

That's not a coincidence worth shrugging off. It's a pattern, and it tells you something about how this town actually works that a scroll through a menu app won't.

The Corner That Keeps Getting Renamed

The building at 8050 Bodega Ave has been serving dinner under one name or another for years. It closed as Gravenstein Grill in December 2023 and sat dark until this spring, when Walnut Creek developer Matt Sadati reopened it as Mansoor, a "flambé house" built around tableside fire, bananas Foster, crêpes Suzette, and saganaki. Sadati put it plainly when the news broke: he wanted to bring something to Sebastopol that wasn't already there.

There's a small irony worth sitting with. The space spent years named after the Gravenstein apple, the fruit this town has built an entire summer identity around. This past weekend, Ragle Ranch Park hosted the Gravenstein Apple Fair, the annual celebration of that same apple, while two miles away the building that once carried its name was already months into its second life as a restaurant that has nothing to do with apples at all. The address didn't need the name to keep doing its job. It just needed someone willing to try again.

Two More Reopenings, Both Walking Distance

Mansoor isn't an isolated case. The former Flavor Bistro space is becoming Campanella Kitchen & Garden Patio, expected to open late this summer. Chef Anthony Paone, who moved to Sonoma County in 2013 for the Kenwood Restaurant relaunch (now Salt & Stone), is running the kitchen. Co-owner Tom Rutledge has described the project as a tribute to the food he grew up eating, built around chicken Parmesan, spaghetti and meatballs, and pizza from a custom Mugnaini oven. General manager Gillian Tyrnauer brings a résumé that includes Healdsburg SHED, Sebastopol's own Ramen Gaijin, Zuni, and Quince, which is a lot of serious kitchen pedigree landing in a building that most recently served bistro fare under a different name.

Then there's The Barlow, where the long-vacant Woodfour Brewing space reopened this summer as the second Wild Poppy Cafe. The original Wild Poppy, known for its creekside patio on the Bodega Highway, has been a west Sebastopol fixture since chef Martin Maigaard and his wife Danielle opened it in 2024. The Barlow location adds dinner service and a heavier seafood lean to the plant-forward menu, and Maigaard is installing an on-site tofu production facility inside the old brewing room, capable of turning out up to 3,000 pounds a week for a retail counter and wholesale accounts. That's not a small side project. That's a second business quietly operating inside a restaurant expansion, in a building that used to make beer.

None of this is unusual for the county this year. Sonoma Magazine has counted more than twenty restaurants opening or slated to open across Sonoma County in 2026, calling it one of the busiest opening seasons in recent memory. What's specific to Sebastopol is where that energy is landing: not in new construction, but in three buildings that already had a full restaurant history before the current operators signed a lease.

What Doesn't Turn Over: Wednesday Nights at Ives Park

While the restaurant scene reshuffles, one part of the summer calendar hasn't moved at all. Every Wednesday evening in June, July, and August, Peacetown sets up at Ives Park on Willow Street with free live music, food trucks, beer and wine, and a lawn full of chairs. It runs simultaneously at HopMonk Tavern, with original Americana on one stage and dance music at the park.

The final stretch of this year's season has a real lineup behind it. Spike Sikes & the Get Real Gone open August 19 with jazz and folk, followed by The Pulsators doing what the schedule calls California gumbo and rockin' R&B. The next Wednesday, August 26, pairs Back pOrchEstra's roots rock and Americana with a set from Bill Kirchen and Nina Gerber. The season closes out September 2 with Sol Horizon playing reggae from five to eight. It's pet-friendly, kid-friendly, and it costs nothing to show up.

Earlier this month, HopMonk's own stage hosted Caltucky, Hoss Farm, and Charlie Torch for a night of progressive bluegrass and jamgrass, the kind of bill that would be a destination show in a bigger city and is just a Thursday in Sebastopol. The venue didn't change. The night didn't change. Only the acts did.

The Monthly Constant: First Fridays at Chimera

A few blocks over, Chimera Arts on Sebastopol Avenue runs its First Fridays open house on the first Friday of every month, a showcase for the town's maker community with live music, food, and hands-on demonstrations. The most recent one, on August 7, featured sets from Callie Watts and Kris Dilbeck. Like Peacetown, it's a fixture that doesn't depend on which restaurant happens to be occupying which storefront that season. It just happens, on schedule, month after month.

If you want an art stop before dinner, the Sebastopol Center for the Arts is currently running a retrospective of conceptual artist Kate Haug through September 6, the kind of exhibit that gives a Wednesday or First Friday a reason to start an hour earlier.

Reading the Two Calendars Together

Put these two threads side by side and the shape of the town gets clearer. The restaurant scene here churns hard, sometimes generationally, inside a small number of well-located buildings that keep getting handed to the next operator with a strong enough concept to fill them. Meanwhile the social calendar, the free concert on Wednesday, the maker showcase on the first Friday, the gallery show that runs for a month, holds its shape regardless of who's plating dinner nearby. One is entrepreneurial risk. The other is civic muscle memory. Both are true at once, and neither explains the town without the other.

If you're heading to Ives Park this Wednesday, Mansoor and the new Wild Poppy location are both close enough to make a full evening of it. If you're waiting on Campanella's late-summer opening, First Fridays at Chimera is a reasonable way to fill a Friday until then. Either way, the buildings will keep changing hands long after this particular restaurant wave settles, and the Wednesday crowd at Ives Park will probably still be there when it does.

That kind of steady local rhythm underneath constant small-business turnover is exactly the texture that's easy to miss from the outside and obvious once you've lived here a season or two. It's also the kind of detail Wine Country Equestrian Real Estate pays attention to when we talk with people about this corner of Sonoma County, whether they're already home on a Wednesday night or just starting to think about what home here might look like. If that day comes, Request Private Access and join the invitation list.