On the evening of July 24, Santa Cruz Avenue did something it had not done in years: it filled up on a Friday for no reason other than music. Ali El Safy, who owns both Bistro Vida and Bar Loretta, watched his restaurants take in 40 to 50 more diners than a typical Friday night. "The whole community is now coming out to support the restaurants and other businesses too," he said. Laura Melahn, one of the organizers, put it more bluntly during the event itself: "Santa Cruz Ave is bumping."
That sentence would have sounded strange a year ago, and not because downtown Menlo Park lacked restaurants. It had plenty. What it lacked was a reason for people to actually use them on a weeknight, which is the part of this story that most drive-by coverage misses.
The Restaurants Were Already Full Before Fourth Fridays Started
By the time the first Fourth Friday happened, downtown Menlo Park's dining supply problem had already been solved. Springline, the 6.4-acre mixed-use development a short walk from the Caltrain station, reached full restaurant occupancy in June 2026 when Alisios, a contemporary Mexican restaurant from the team behind Burma Superstar and Burma Love, opened as the project's final tenant. Bar director Humberto Galeano, who had also opened the very first Springline restaurant years earlier, summed up the arc himself: "It's funny because we were the first one, and now we are the last one."
The roster around Alisios reads like a small map of San Francisco's restaurant scene relocated south: Causwells, the Marina bistro known for its cult burger, opened at Springline in April 2026 in a space twice the size of its original, complete with a tableside martini cart. Barebottle Brewing, Che Fico, Burma Love, Andytown Coffee Roasters, Proper Food, Robin and Bubbelah round out the list. Separately, on the west side of downtown, Yeobo Darling brought a husband-and-wife chef team with Michelin-starred pedigree to Santa Cruz Avenue, and a longtime Chestnut Street restaurant that had been displaced when its building sold resettled a block over on Oak Grove.
The Almanac counted at least 10 new restaurants and cafes added to Menlo Park in 2025 alone. That is not a modest number for a downtown this size, and it means the ingredients for a lively Friday night had already been sitting on the shelf for months before anyone lit the stove.
Then Why Was Santa Cruz Avenue a Ghost Town on Fridays?
Ask a downtown merchant what a typical Friday night looked like before this summer and you get a consistent answer. LeVant Dessert owner Maya Fezzani called it a "ghost town." Full restaurants existed. Foot traffic between them did not.
Part of the explanation is structural. Menlo Park's chamber of commerce dissolved in 2023 because of financial pressure tied to the pandemic, and nothing replaced it. There was no formal group coordinating marketing, cross-promotion or shared events among Santa Cruz Avenue businesses, which meant a restaurant filling up on a Friday had no natural way to pull the bookstore next door or the toy shop across the street into the same evening. Individual businesses were succeeding in isolation. Downtown as a whole was not.
The Menlo Park City Council made downtown revitalization one of its stated priorities in 2025, which set the stage for something to fill that coordination gap. Nobody at city hall built it, though. A group of residents did.
What the Downtown Menlo Fund Actually Built
The Downtown Menlo Fund is a nonprofit founded in late 2025 by four Menlo Park residents: Marnie Foody, Ben Eiref, Paul Charrette and Laura Melahn. Its founders describe the mission around three pillars: beautification of the physical street, support for businesses trying to stay viable downtown, and community events that give people a reason to show up. Foody has been direct about the gap they were trying to close, noting that the city's own community events tend to happen outside the downtown core rather than inside it.
Fourth Fridays is the fund's first event series, and it did not invent the format. It borrowed it. The model is patterned after Los Altos First Fridays, a monthly live music event that has run in downtown Los Altos for roughly 15 years and has become a fixture of that city's calendar. The connective tissue between the two towns runs even deeper than imitation. Carol Garsten, the event coordinator at Gallery House, a Peninsula art gallery that moved to downtown Menlo Park in 2024 after 65 years in Palo Alto, is herself a co-founder of Los Altos First Fridays and previously ran Palo Alto's 3rdThursday music series for two years. She is now organizing in-gallery performances timed to Fourth Fridays, meaning one person's community-building playbook has now touched three different downtowns on the Peninsula.
What July 24 Actually Looked Like on the Ground
The debut event ran from 6 to 9 p.m. and spread performers across several points on Santa Cruz Avenue rather than concentrating everyone in one spot. Cover bands The Members, a local "dad band" with a long following, and The Wanderers played back to back on the main stage in the pedestrian plaza at the 600 block, which the city council has signaled it wants to eventually turn into a permanent gathering space. Balloon artist Steve "The Magic Guy" Koehler set up in front of Cheeky Monkey Toys. Singer-songwriter Gaby Castro-Moroder performed original songs and covers outside Mademoiselle Colette, where manager Barbara Sampaio said the evening brought in longtime clients alongside new faces stopping in for dessert. Guitarist Norman Kahan played sidewalk sets nearby. Inside Gitane, the Dave Nesbitt Jazz Band performed for diners, and Feldman's Books hosted a set from Melodious Thunk.
Melahn framed the whole point of the exercise plainly after the event: "That's the whole idea: Bring people out to enjoy the town together."
The Next Two Fridays, and the Series People Keep Confusing It With
Fourth Fridays returns on August 28 and September 25, with lineups still being finalized. Residents planning around it should know it is not the same thing as the city's own Summer Concert Series, which runs weekly at Fremont Park and Karl E. Clark Park from July 8 through August 12. That series is city-sponsored, happens at fixed park locations rather than up and down the commercial strip, and wraps up before the next Fourth Friday even begins. Fourth Fridays is nonprofit-run, moves along Santa Cruz Avenue itself, and is timed specifically to pull people into the businesses rather than a park.
What This Says About Downtown Menlo Park Right Now
The easy version of this story is "downtown got a cool new event." The more useful version is that Menlo Park spent the better part of two years solving a supply problem, filling Springline, resettling displaced Chestnut Street tenants, bringing in a Michelin-caliber kitchen, and still ended up with quiet Friday nights, because supply was never the actual constraint. The constraint was coordination, and that had to be built by hand, by four residents starting a nonprofit with no chamber of commerce to lean on.
The city is making adjacent moves that point the same direction. At its June 23 meeting, the city council approved zoning changes opening Santa Cruz Avenue to more types of ground-floor businesses, including spas and salons without a conditional use permit, while capping financial institutions at 30,000 square feet of downtown space, a category that already accounts for about 28,000 square feet. Read alongside Fourth Fridays, it looks less like a single event and more like a downtown testing several levers at once: business mix, physical activation and simple foot traffic, all aimed at the same Friday night that used to sit empty.
For anyone who already calls Menlo Park home, the practical takeaway is small and specific. The restaurants have been ready for a while. Now there is finally a reason to treat a Friday like one.
Ryan Gowdy has spent more than two decades watching Peninsula downtowns evolve block by block, and conversations about Menlo Park's revival come up often with clients weighing a move into or within Silicon Valley. If you are curious how a neighborhood's day-to-day texture, not just its listings, might fit your next move, Ryan Gowdy welcomes a conversation, including a complimentary home valuation and consultation whenever the time is right.
