"I've been an Orinda resident for 13 years, and part of the reason is that I live here." That's Daniele Carsano talking about why he's opening a wine bar in the space that used to be Starbucks, a few doors down from the Orinda Theatre marquee. Carsano isn't new to the restaurant business. He's been part of Walnut Creek's Montesacro and Berkeley's Casa Barotti, among other Bay Area concepts. But this one is personal in a way the others weren't, because the storefront he's taking over has been dark for long enough that most people who live here stopped expecting anything to happen with it.
That storefront isn't the only one. A few blocks away, across Highway 24, the old Bank of America building at 31 Orinda Way has sat empty since the branch closed in March 2022. For more than four years it's been the kind of building people mention when they're explaining downtown Orinda to a visitor: "that's the empty bank, they keep saying something's coming." Something is. Both storefronts are filling in during the same stretch of 2026, and the fact that they're on opposite sides of the highway that has quietly split downtown Orinda for years is the part worth paying attention to.
Two downtowns, one highway between them
Orinda's commercial core has never really been one place. Theatre Square, built around the 1941 Orinda Theatre, is a compact cluster of restaurants and shops with underground parking that's free after 8 p.m. on weekdays and free all weekend. It's where you go before or after a movie. On the other side of Highway 24 sits the Village Square, home to Orinda Books, McCullough's department store, the Hollyhock gift shop, and the Saturday farmers market. Community Park, with its amphitheater and open lawn, anchors that side.
For most of the last decade, an evening in downtown Orinda meant picking one side or the other, or driving out of town entirely. That habit didn't come from a lack of options. Casa Orinda, the roadhouse on Moraga Way that's been serving fried chicken since 1932, has always been there. So has Fourth Bore's tap room in Theatre Square. What was missing was a reason to treat the two halves of downtown as one evening instead of two separate errands.
What's landing at 31 Orinda Way
CreekHaus is the name attached to the old bank building, and the name is doing real work. The site backs onto San Pablo Creek, and the project's plans call for creek-facing decks and outdoor gathering space behind the building, something downtown Orinda hasn't had in any real form even though the creek runs through part of its commercial core.
The project is led by Ben Zarrin, an Orinda resident whose company Paymun is best known locally for luxury home development in the Wilder section of town. Equator Coffees, a women-owned Marin County roaster, will anchor the daytime side as its 13th location. In the evening, CreekHaus Beer Garden takes over, with PizzaHacker, which already runs locations in San Francisco's Mission-Bernal neighborhood and in Mill Valley, handling food service under the oak trees. An upscale bistro and full cocktail bar are planned for a later phase, along with private event space. Upstairs, Paymun's own offices will share the second floor with Launchpad Learning Lamorinda, a tutoring program that listed its new address at 31 Orinda Way with an August 2026 opening note.
The building itself has grown along the way. City planning records describe the original 2023 approval as an expansion from a 4,712-square-foot single story building into an 8,810-square-foot, two-level structure. Revisions filed in 2025 pushed that to 9,397 square feet with a third story added for storage and rooftop mechanical access. For a downtown where most commercial buildings are one story and modest, that's a meaningfully larger footprint than what's been there before.
Not everyone has been purely enthusiastic. Friends of Orinda Creeks, a local restoration group, has raised the question of whether the project's creek-facing decks will end up privatizing public access to the water rather than opening it up. One member described the appeal directly: "Imagine getting a glass of wine and seeing the creek view." The group has said it isn't opposed to the development, only that it wants the creek to stay a shared amenity rather than a backdrop reserved for paying customers. As of the most recent reporting available, the project was described as approaching completion but without a confirmed public opening date, after earlier estimates pointed to a summer opening that has already shifted once.
What's landing at 2 Orinda Theatre Square
Sorso Bar & Bites is smaller in scale but sits in a more visible spot: the former Starbucks storefront at 2 Orinda Theatre Square, directly adjacent to the Orinda Theatre. Carsano's plan is an Italian-inspired wine bar with a light kitchen, seafood crudos, pressed sandwiches, and a full cocktail program built around a wine list he's called a personal passion. Expected hours run from 3 to 10 p.m., possibly later on weekends, in a town that Carsano himself has pointed out doesn't have much of a late-night scene to begin with.
The location matters as much as the concept. That storefront has sat vacant for a significant stretch, and its reopening is expected to give the rest of Theatre Square a lift, including the Fourth Bore tap room, the Japanese and Korean fusion restaurant Serika, and Shemroon, the Persian-inspired coffee shop next door. Theatre Square is also seeing smaller shuffles this year: Kibi's, the Vietnamese spot locals have relied on for fast casual food, is relocating to a new space within the same complex rather than leaving it. As of the most recent local coverage, Sorso's exact opening date still hadn't been confirmed, though the earlier target of late spring or early summer had already come and gone by midsummer.
The rest of the calendar didn't wait for construction
None of this is happening in a vacuum. The Orinda Farmers' Market runs every Saturday, year-round, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Orinda Way in front of Community Park, a fixture that predates any of this construction and will keep going regardless of when the new buildings open.
Community Park's Thursday night concert series has become its own summer institution, with this year's lineup running through:
- The Kate Burkart Band
- Salvage Title
- Sixteen Scandals
- Tom and the Broken Hearts
The Rotary Club of Orinda's annual Opera in the Park performance rounds out that series each summer.
The Orinda Theatre has its own momentum. Its Live At the Orinda concert series sold out its 2025-2026 season, and the new 2026-2027 season opens with jazz and cabaret veteran Marilyn Maye, with individual tickets for the rest of the season having gone on sale September 10.
And this week specifically, the Orinda Starlight Village Players are closing their 43rd season with a run of Dracula at the Community Center Park Amphitheater, the same lawn that sits across the street from the CreekHaus construction site. The production closes this Saturday, September 26, after a run that included Thursday performances on September 10 and 24. Anyone who's caught a show this month has walked past the old bank building on their way in.
What actually changes once both are open
None of this turns Orinda into a nightlife destination, and nobody involved has claimed it will. What changes is more specific than that. Right now, an evening downtown means choosing a side. Theatre Square has the movie and the tap room. The Village Square side has the park, the market, and whatever's playing at the amphitheater. Once Sorso and CreekHaus are both running, for the first time in years there's a plausible route that starts with coffee or a beer garden pizza on one side of Highway 24 and ends with a glass of wine and a film on the other, without anyone needing to get back in a car in between.
Both timelines have already slipped once, so the honest version of this is that the two ends of that route aren't fully lit yet. But the storefronts that have sat dark the longest in this town are both, finally, under active buildout at the same time, and that's the kind of coincidence that actually reshapes how a Thursday night here works.
Downtown Orinda has been changing in slow motion for years. If you want someone who's been watching that change up close, Shandrika Powell has spent years tracking exactly this kind of shift across Lamorinda, one storefront at a time. Reach out if you'd like the next update before it hits the local news.
