Walk Shattuck Avenue between University and Vine this week and count the papered-over windows. There used to be more of them. The same is true if you walk Telegraph south from Bancroft, or Fourth Street past the spot that was still a construction site as of Memorial Day this year. Something has been happening in Berkeley's food scene since late spring, and it is not the thing most roundups describe.
The easy story is "Berkeley got a lot of new restaurants this summer." The real story is narrower and more useful if you actually live here: those openings landed across four corridors that Berkeley residents usually treat as separate worlds, Fourth Street, Shattuck Avenue in the Gourmet Ghetto, Telegraph Avenue, and San Pablo Avenue, inside the same ten-week stretch. For years, a Berkeley food conversation has meant picking one of those blocks and staying there. This summer made that habit harder to keep.
A Map That Used to Have Four Corners
Berkeley residents tend to sort themselves by corridor. You are a Fourth Street person who does errands and lunch in one loop, or a North Shattuck regular who has had the same coffee order at the same counter for a decade, or a Telegraph person whose radius runs from campus to People's Park and rarely wanders further. Each strip developed its own rhythm and, more quietly, its own backlog of empty storefronts left over from 2023 through 2025.
What changed is not that any single district got busier. It is that roughly fifteen food and drink businesses opened across all four districts between late May and mid-July 2026, and most of them moved into spaces that had sat dark for months or, in one case, close to a decade. A few examples make the pattern legible.
| Corridor | New arrival | Previously |
|---|---|---|
| Fourth Street | Divan, modern Turkish restaurant and bar | Pollara |
| Shattuck Avenue (Gourmet Ghetto) | Serotonin Scoops | Vacant arcade storefront, Epicurious Garden |
| Telegraph Avenue | El Trompudo, Jalisco-style tacos | Joshu-ya, closed since 2017 |
| San Pablo Avenue | Glom Thai | Sistory |
None of these are chain expansions filling identical footprints. Each one is a different operator betting on a different kind of demand, in a different part of the city, at roughly the same moment.
Fourth Street Finally Has a Lunch Answer
Divan, from the team behind San Francisco's Taksim Mediterranean restaurant, took over the former Pollara space at 1788 Fourth Street with a full redesign that added a new bar and a dedicated dining terrace. The restaurant soft opened for lunch on Monday, June 22, running 11am to 3pm on weekdays and 10am to 3pm on weekends. By late July it had added dinner service, with a menu built around starters, flatbreads, and mains featuring fish, vegetarian options, and beef or lamb.
That timing lined up with a summer of programming on the same block. Fourth Street hosted an after-hours summer market on the Makers Row in June, and a Cars and Coffee style gathering for vintage Toyotas drew a different crowd to the corridor in mid-July. A strip that has long leaned on retail hours now has an anchor open past the dinner rush too, which changes what an evening errand run on Fourth Street can turn into without much extra planning.
The Ice Cream Anchor Shattuck Avenue Lost
Serotonin Scoops opened inside the Epicurious Garden at 1511 Shattuck Avenue, a few doors down from Dera Cafe, giving the arcade an ice cream anchor it had not had since energy in that space thinned out during the pandemic. A few blocks up, Hopkins Cafe opened in the former Espresso Roma space in North Berkeley, another long-running local counter that had gone quiet before this year. If you already run a Saturday morning coffee-and-errands loop through the Gourmet Ghetto, these are the kind of additions that do not reroute you, they just give you more reasons to linger where you already were.
Not every storefront on this stretch has been claimed. Guerilla Cafe, which held its Shattuck corner for roughly two decades, went dark last winter, and that space is still sitting open. It is a useful reminder that a filling-in summer is not the same as a fully occupied one.
A neighborhood's food map does not change because of one new menu. It changes when enough small reopenings happen close enough together that walking somewhere feels different than it did in April.
Telegraph's Nine-Year Vacancy Finally Filled
The most striking fill-in this summer sits on Telegraph Avenue, where a Jalisco-style taco spot called El Trompudo has moved into the space that once held Joshu-ya, one of Berkeley's earliest sushi restaurants. Joshu-ya opened in 1978 and closed in 2017. The storefront had been empty since then, nearly nine years, until this summer, which makes it the longest vacancy of anything on this list to finally turn over.
San Pablo Avenue Gets Its Own Turnover
The fourth corridor in this pattern runs along San Pablo Avenue, where Glom Thai has taken over the spot that used to be Sistory. It is a smaller story than Divan or El Trompudo, a straightforward swap of one neighborhood restaurant for another, but it fits the same summer rhythm: a storefront that could have sat empty found a new tenant instead.
Beyond the Four Corridors
The pattern was not limited to those four strips. Milk Cloud Bakery, run by baker Elizabeth Khuu, held its soft opening on July 24 in the Berkeley Kitchens space that used to be La Noisette, with a rotating menu that includes shokupan, ramen egg sandwiches, a strawberry black sesame sando, and creme brulee basque cheesecake slices, open Thursdays through Saturdays during the soft-open period. A few blocks over, Pop Bar opened on University Avenue between Walnut Street and Shattuck Avenue, serving customizable gelato and sorbetto-based popsicles that can be dipped and topped to order.
On the campus edge, a new Gateway Cafe opened July 20 at the Barbara and Gerson Bakar Gateway Building on Hearst Avenue, run by UC Berkeley Dining and serving Mediterranean food and build-your-own bowls, timed to open just before students return for the fall term. Fall semester at Cal typically starts in late August, so anyone walking that stretch of campus edge this week is getting a preview before the crowds arrive.
A Saturday Loop That Did Not Exist in April
If your usual weekend routine has stayed inside one district, here is what a single loop across all four can look like right now.
- Start on Fourth Street with lunch at Divan, timed early enough to beat the dinner rush that only started in late July.
- Head up to Shattuck Avenue for a scoop at Serotonin Scoops inside the Epicurious Garden, then browse the rest of the arcade near Dera Cafe.
- Detour to San Pablo Avenue to see what Glom Thai has done with the old Sistory space.
- Finish on Telegraph with tacos at El Trompudo, in the space that sat empty for nine years before this summer.
- If you still have room, swing by University Avenue for a popsicle at Pop Bar, or save a Saturday morning for Milk Cloud Bakery, which runs Thursday through Saturday during its soft opening.
None of this required a car ride across town that felt like a special trip. It required treating four blocks that used to feel separate as one afternoon.
What Changes When the Map Fills In
The individual restaurants are not the point. The point is that Berkeley's food scene, which has run on district loyalty for years, spent one summer quietly erasing the lines between those districts. A resident who used to be a Fourth Street person or a Gourmet Ghetto regular now has a legitimate reason to cross into blocks they used to skip, not because anyone asked them to, but because the empty storefronts that used to make those blocks feel unfinished are not empty anymore.
Guerilla Cafe's old corner is still sitting there, unclaimed. So is whatever comes next on the strip that has not filled in yet. That is worth watching, because if this summer's pattern holds, the next vacancy will not stay a vacancy for long.
If you are curious about what is changing on a specific block, or you are weighing your own next move somewhere in this stretch of the East Bay, Teri Carlisle & Alexandra Dierkx know these streets the way a resident does, not just the way a listing sheet describes them. Reach out any time you want to talk through what a particular corner of Berkeley actually looks like day to day.
