Bridgeway's Six-Year Vacancy Just Ended, and It Wasn't the Only One

"It's been a long, long process," Jody Harris said. "But we're very excited with the results."

Harris was talking about the three years and more than $4 million it took him and his sister, Gingy Harris Gable, to turn a gutted commercial shell at 690 Bridgeway into Cultivar Sausalito, which opened its doors on February 17, 2026. The building itself dates to 1915, when it went up as the Hotel Sausalito. Its most recent restaurant tenant, Caffè Tutti, closed in 2020 as the pandemic hollowed out foot traffic along the waterfront. That means the space directly across the street from the ferry terminal, arguably the most visible commercial address in town, sat dark for six years before anyone reopened it.

That single fact reframes what's actually happening on Bridgeway this year. Two of the street's most recognizable dining spaces changed hands in 2026, and neither happened fast. If you've noticed the construction fencing, the new signage, the sudden reappearance of lit windows where there used to be paper over glass, you're watching something slower and more deliberate than a typical restaurant turnover. Filling ground-floor space on Bridgeway isn't a matter of finding a new tenant. It's a multi-year capital project, and the people taking it on are betting on continuity with what came before rather than starting over.

The Building That Sat Dark Since the Pandemic

Cultivar Sausalito is the fourth location for a brand the Harris siblings built from a Napa Valley family vineyard, following Cultivar San Francisco, which opened in 2017, and the Cultivar Ghirardelli Square tasting room, which debuted in February 2024. The Sausalito location is by far the largest and most expensive of the three, and it's the one Harris calls the flagship. At 4,500 square feet, it's roughly three times the footprint of the original San Francisco restaurant.

The renovation kept the bones of a building with real history. The historic Hotel Sausalito still sits above the restaurant, and the design team, Yinger Studios, Lucy McCormick Design, and Sutro Architects, worked to blend that legacy with a new kitchen built around a Valoriani wood-fired oven shipped in from Tuscany, where the company has made ovens for more than fifty years. The dining room mixes high-top tables with booth seating and quartzite tabletops, and a wrought brass version of Cultivar's logo, a farmer tilling land, hangs over a 20-seat bar. None of that happened in a single season. It happened because a property that had been empty since 2020 needed someone willing to spend three years and seven figures to bring it back.

A Few Blocks Away, a Different Kind of Continuity

Notte Divino took a different approach to the same problem. The restaurant opened this past July in the space long occupied by Ristorante Divino, and rather than erase what came before, the new owners built their name directly on top of it. The grand opening event, hosted by the Sausalito Chamber of Commerce, was framed explicitly as honoring the legacy of Elizabeth Nebot, the longtime proprietor whose hospitality had made the original restaurant a neighborhood fixture.

New owners Jaxton Funk and Johnny "Love" Metheny kept the Southern Italian menu and the wine list that regulars knew, then layered in handcrafted cocktails, live jazz, and a later-night atmosphere the old restaurant didn't have. It's a smaller lift than what Cultivar took on, no building to gut, no historic shell to reimagine, but it's the same underlying logic. When a beloved restaurant closes in Sausalito, the safer bet isn't a clean slate. It's carrying enough of the original forward that the people who miss it still recognize what's there.

A Third Space Still Isn't Ready

Not every reopening on Bridgeway has landed yet. Piccino Sul Mare, the fourth concept from the team behind Piccino in San Francisco's Dogpatch and Piccino Presidio, has been in construction for a waterfront Sausalito location with a target 2026 debut, but no firm opening date has been announced. The group's other locations built their identity on produce grown at the company's own farm in Healdsburg, and the Sausalito menu is expected to carry forward the same antipasti, pizza, and house-made pasta program.

The fact that Piccino, an established operator with three working restaurants already, still hasn't opened its Sausalito doors says something about how long these builds actually take. Even a well-capitalized group with a proven format needs more than a year to get a Bridgeway space ready.

The City Is Solving the Same Problem From the Water

While restaurant owners were rebuilding storefronts, the Sausalito City Council was working a parallel angle on the same underlying question: how do you get more people onto Bridgeway. In May 2026, the council approved a pilot project to replace the aging bulkhead and silt-filled slips at the end of Turney Street with what the city called a reconfigurable modular floating dock system, awarded to developers Josh Richman and David Kornmeyer for a one-year test run, with the possibility of a 10-year lease if it works.

Assistant City Manager Brandon Phipps described what the city was looking for in a proposal: one that would "improve public access, protect eelgrass and the surrounding environment, and, importantly, provide a mechanism for visitors to arrive in Sausalito by water." Read that against Cultivar's three-year renovation and Notte Divino's legacy-minded reopening, and a pattern comes into focus. The restaurants are betting on customers finding their way back to Bridgeway on foot and by ferry. The city is betting on the same thing happening by boat.

What's Actually on the Fall Calendar

None of this is theoretical for the next few weeks. Bridgeway and the streets just off it have a run of events that put the two new restaurants, and the whole reopened stretch of waterfront, back in front of people who haven't walked down that way in a while.

• Oktoberfest takes over the IDESST Portuguese Hall on Saturday, October 3, with an Oompah band lineup and a Bavarian food spread built around bratwurst and pretzels.
• Gallery Sausalito's Biggest Small Works Show runs October 1 through 29 at 30 Princess Street, with more than seventy artists each contributing a 12-inch by 12-inch piece. The artists' reception is set for Saturday, October 10, from 5 to 7 p.m.
• The Sea Trek Regatta brings paddleboarders and kayakers out onto Richardson Bay this month, with routes that trace toward Angel Island and the Golden Gate Bridge.
• The Schooner Freda B runs its Full Moon Sail on October 25, one of the recurring evening sails that has become a fixture of the town's harbor calendar.

None of these events require a reservation at Cultivar or Notte Divino to enjoy, but the geography lines up. A short walk covers the art opening, the ferry landing, and both restaurants, which is exactly the kind of foot traffic the Downtown Sausalito Association has said it wants to build around Bridgeway, Princess Street, the ferry landing, and the waterfront as connected pieces rather than separate stops.

The two restaurants that reopened this year didn't happen quickly, and the dock project a few blocks south won't either. What they share is a wager that Bridgeway's ground floor is worth the multi-year investment it takes to get it right, whether that means gutting a 1915 hotel or replacing a silted-in dock plank by plank.

If you're curious about what else is changing along Bridgeway or elsewhere in Sausalito, Home in Marin keeps a close eye on the neighborhood and is always happy to talk through what's new.