San Marcos Restaurant Row Gets Its Park Before It Gets Its Food

Drive West San Marcos Boulevard past Via Vera Cruz and the green mesh fence is still there, wrapped around the stretch between the Regal Cinema and the Buffalo Wild Wings that went up in 2016. It has been the one constant on that block for years while everything behind it emptied out. If you have lived here long enough to remember Friday nights when the parking lot filled up and you circled twice before finding a spot, you already know what used to be back there. If you moved to San Marcos more recently, you have probably only known Old California Restaurant Row as a fence.

This year that finally started to change. Grading equipment showed up. Underground utility work began. And if you assumed the next thing you would see is a new restaurant, the actual sequence on this project runs the opposite direction.

The Fence Finally Has an Owner and a Plan

Old California Restaurant Row opened in the 1970s under developer Jim Eubank and grew into a North County dining destination with as many as 15 to 19 restaurants operating at once, depending on the year. The Eubank family sold the land at the end of 2020 to an entity called San Marcos Restaurant Row LLC, and by mid-2022 the new owner had teamed with Lennar Homes on a mixed-use redevelopment plan for the roughly 11-acre core of the site.

The project has grown since that first filing. City planning records originally described 202 residential condominium units alongside 10,400 square feet of commercial space and a neighborhood park. Lennar has since folded in the long-vacant former Sears building next door at 1100 West San Marcos Boulevard, empty since the store closed in 2009, adding 71 townhomes and roughly 3,000 more square feet of commercial space to the same construction timeline. That brings the total to about 261 homes across both parcels.

The architecture firm KTGY is designing the project to lean into the original strip's look rather than erase it, with plans calling for aged stucco, clay tile roofs, and salvaged timbers pulled from the original buildings. As of this spring, Lennar had crews grading the site and installing underground utilities, with vertical construction targeted to start in spring 2026 and townhome sales beginning that same season. Reported timelines put the first residents moving into finished units as early as late 2026 or early 2027, with the full project, Restaurant Row parcel and former Sears lot together, expected to wrap around mid-2028.

Green Space Shows Up First

Here is the part that catches most people off guard. The neighborhood park built into the plan is expected to open in 2027. Restaurant space is running on a slower track entirely: tenant improvement work for the actual dining side of the project is not slated to go out to bid until 2027 into 2028.

In practical terms, if you are hoping to walk down to a new restaurant on this site, you will likely get somewhere to sit outside and somewhere for your dog to run first, by a year or more. The housing arrives, then the park, and the food comes last.

One more thing worth clearing up now, before it causes confusion later. There is a separate, unrelated project called Sky View Park going up near other Lennar and Shea Homes construction in North City. It is expected to open sooner, in 2026. If a headline about a new San Marcos park crosses your feed this year, check which one it is talking about before you assume Restaurant Row's park has arrived early. It has not.

Who's Still Standing, Who Isn't

The restaurant roster at this site did not disappear all at once. It thinned out over several years, some of it well before Lennar ever got involved.

Still part of the plan or actively working toward a spot in San Marcos:

• Old California Mining Co. secured a place inside the new project, though owner Nick Ceko has described the process as a longer fight than he expected before the deal came together.
• Old California Coffee Company, the shop long associated with cyclists and regulars stopping in for shade and a cup before or after a ride, has continued operating under the name Ascend Coffee Roasters while working on where it lands next in San Marcos.

Gone for good, in roughly the order they closed:

• San Marcos Brewery and Grill closed in 2020.
• Sublime Alehouse closed in 2021.
• Katsu Seafood and Steakhouse closed in early 2022, before any redevelopment plan was even public.
• Landon's East Meets West, a global fusion restaurant, closed in March 2023.
• The 55 Yardline Sports Bar and Grill shut down on August 18, 2023, after 18 years on the site.
• Fish House Vera Cruz, a mesquite-grilled seafood restaurant that had operated since 1979, closed in June 2025 after 46 years, following a settlement with the developer over an access easement.

A handful of other names, including The King & I of San Marcos and an IHOP location, were still operating on the property as recently as the developer's 2022 application. Their current status was not part of what surfaced in the most recent reporting on the project, which is its own reminder that a site this size does not change on one clean schedule. Different leases end on different clocks.

From a Friday Night Crowd to a Hard Hat Zone

The visual shift is as telling as the paperwork. Restaurant Row went from a place locals remember as packed every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to, by spring 2023, a stretch of dirty windows and a sign reading Hard Hat Zone on one of the buildings. Local reporting at the time counted fewer than 10 restaurants remaining out of the original 19, and a public hearing on the redevelopment was expected that fall, with demolition anticipated to begin the following year.

That rough sequence, decline through the early 2020s, hearings and demolition prep through 2023 and 2024, grading and vertical construction starting in 2026, tracks with what residents have actually watched happen on the ground. The project moving forward now is bigger than what the city originally signed off on, and it took roughly six years from the initial sale of the land to the first cranes showing up.

What This Means If You Live Here Now

If you drive this stretch of San Marcos Boulevard regularly, expect construction activity to be part of the scenery through at least 2027, with the first residents likely arriving in finished townhomes sometime around late 2026 or early 2027. The park comes next, not the restaurants. If you are hoping for a new sit-down option on this specific site, 2027 into 2028 is the realistic window before tenant improvements even go out to bid, let alone open their doors.

In the meantime, Old California Mining Co. and Ascend Coffee Roasters are the two names most likely to still be familiar faces in the new development once it is finished, assuming their current plans hold. Everything else that made Restaurant Row what it was for four decades has already closed, mostly well before the fence went up.

For a neighborhood that has spent years defined by what used to be there, the next two years are going to be defined by what shows up in an order nobody expected. Housing first, green space second, food last.

If you are curious how a shift like this ripples through daily life and property values in San Marcos, the team at Ken Follis & Sharon Robinson Group has spent years tracking exactly this kind of change across North County San Diego. Reach out anytime you want a straightforward, local read on what's happening in your part of town.