The old Starbucks at 2 Orinda Theatre Square sat dark for so long that its blacked-out windows became a kind of local landmark, the spot you point to when you're giving someone directions to the movie theater. A few blocks away, past Community Park, the old Bank of America at 31 Orinda Way has been closed since March 2022, its parking lot a familiar shortcut and its vacant sign a running joke among anyone who's lived downtown for the past four years.
Both spaces are filling in right now, on nearly the same calendar. That's the part worth sitting with. Orinda has had empty storefronts before. It's rarer for its two most conspicuous ones to turn over in the same season, to the same kind of owner, for the same reason.
The theater corner is getting its wine bar
The former Starbucks space is becoming Sorso Bar and Bites, an Italian wine bar and small-plates concept from Daniele Carsano, a Turin native who has spent years building Italian restaurant concepts around the Bay Area, including Walnut Creek's Montesacro and Casa Barotti on College Avenue in Berkeley. Carsano lives in Orinda. He told Diablo magazine he's aiming to open the week after Labor Day, which puts Sorso's debut right around now.
The pitch is aperitivo culture: cocktails, a wine list by the glass or bottle, and Italian small plates built for sharing rather than a full entree. Carsano has said plainly that "Orinda could use a contemporary restaurant," and his stated goal is to give people a reason to stay in town after a movie instead of driving to Lafayette or Walnut Creek for a nightcap.
Sorso isn't landing in a vacuum. Theatre Square has quietly turned over several of its smaller tenants over the past year. Lamorinda Atelier, an art gallery showing contemporary and secondary-market work, opened in the square in November 2025. Nine Tailed Fox, a boba shop opened by an Orinda native and Miramonte graduate, replaced Sharetea earlier this year. 8Moose Pizzeria took the spot that had cycled through Nation's and then Bravo's Pizza. Shemroon, a Persian-inspired coffee shop, opened next door to where Sorso is now finishing its buildout. The square's longer-standing anchors, the Fourth Bore Tap Room and the sushi spot Serika, are still there and should see a lift once Sorso is drawing people in for a pre-movie glass of wine.
Not every change in the square has been an opening. Morrison's Jewelers closed after more than 102 years in business, with a handwritten sign in the window announcing the owners' retirement. It's a reminder that turnover downtown cuts both ways, and that a wave of new restaurant openings doesn't erase the loss of a business that outlasted most of the buildings around it.
The bank branch is becoming a creekside gathering spot
The bigger structural change is happening at 31 Orinda Way, where the shuttered Bank of America building is becoming CreekHaus, a mixed-use project from Paymun, the Orinda-based development firm run by Ben Zarrin, also an Orinda resident, known locally for his luxury home development in the Wilder neighborhood.
The scale has grown since the city first approved it. The 2023 approval called for expanding the existing 4,712-square-foot single-story building into an 8,810-square-foot, two-level structure with restaurant and office space. Later revisions pushed that to 9,397 square feet and added a 540-square-foot third story for storage and rooftop mechanical access.
What's moving in matters more than the square footage. Equator Coffees, a women-owned roaster based in Marin County, is opening its 13th location here to anchor the daytime side of the building. In the evening, CreekHaus Beer Garden takes over, serving craft beer alongside pizza from PizzaHacker, which has existing locations in San Francisco's Mission-Bernal neighborhood and Mill Valley. An upscale bistro and full cocktail bar are planned to follow in a later phase. Upstairs, Launchpad Learning Lamorinda, a tutoring and after-school program for Orinda and Lamorinda students, lists its address as 31 Orinda Way, second floor, with an August 2026 opening note.
The name isn't incidental. San Pablo Creek runs behind parts of downtown Orinda but rarely factors into daily commercial life there. CreekHaus is designed around a rear deck facing the creek, meant to turn a waterway most residents never see into part of the experience of getting a coffee or a beer.
That plan has drawn some real scrutiny. Friends of Orinda Creeks, a local group that has pushed for years to treat San Pablo Creek as a public amenity rather than a drainage afterthought, has said it supports the project's creek-facing concept while pressing developers to make sure the deck doesn't end up privatizing public access to the water. One member described the appeal directly: "Imagine getting a glass of wine and seeing the creek view." The group's concern is less about whether that vision happens and more about who gets to stand close enough to see it once the fencing comes down.
Why two vacancies filling at once isn't a coincidence
It would be easy to read Sorso and CreekHaus as two unrelated projects that happened to land in the same year. The more useful read is that they're the same bet made twice. Carsano is a thirteen-year Orinda resident spending his own capital on a town he says lacked a comparable downtown restaurant scene. Zarrin is an Orinda resident building on a site two blocks from where he lives. Neither project came from a franchise following a demographic spreadsheet into a market it had never visited. Both came from people who already had a stake in whether downtown Orinda worked.
The city has been saying the quiet part out loud for a while now. When Orinda launched its DowntownOrinda.com website, Mayor Latika Malkani framed the ambition directly, pointing to downtown's potential to become a "premier shopping and dining destination in the Lamorinda area" and naming Theater Square and CreekHaus specifically as the projects meant to get it there.
Whether that ambition lands is genuinely open. A former bank building and a former coffee chain storefront sitting empty for years is a low bar to clear. Turning two dead corners into places people choose to end up on a Tuesday night, rather than places they drive past on the way somewhere else, is a different and harder test. This month is close to the first real chance to see it happen.
The rest of the fall calendar
Downtown isn't only measured in storefronts. The Orinda Starlight Village Players are staging their 43rd season at the Orinda Community Center Park Amphitheatre, presenting Dracula from September 4 through 26, with performances Friday and Saturday nights and two Thursday shows added in. Community Park itself has spent the summer hosting free Thursday evening concerts, including a set from Tom and the Broken Hearts, with neighbors setting up blankets and food trucks parked at the edge of the lawn. The park sits directly across the street from CreekHaus, which is not a coincidence so much as the whole point of putting a creekside beer garden there in the first place.
Inside the Orinda Theatre, the Live At the Orinda concert series opens its 2026-2027 season with jazz and cabaret veteran Marilyn Maye, with individual tickets going on sale September 10 after the season's subscriptions sold out entirely. The theater's separate concert calendar also has a Matt Stone tribute to Elvis booked for October 10.
None of this requires a reason to visit downtown Orinda this fall. If you already live here, you've probably walked past both buildings more times than you can count, wondering when the windows would stop being blacked out. The answer, for the first time in a while, is now.
If you've been watching these changes and started wondering what they mean for your own house, whether that's the value of being a five-minute walk from a downtown that finally has somewhere to go after dinner, or just curiosity about how a stronger commercial corridor tends to ripple into residential demand, Lauren Kraus knows this market block by block. Request your complimentary home valuation whenever you're ready to see where things stand.
