Solano Avenue Restaurants in Albany: The Reinvestment Story

On Sept. 23, 2026, a new sushi counter opened at 977 San Pablo Avenue, at the corner of Buchanan Street. The menu runs udon, ramen, bento boxes, katsu plates, and a long list of classic and specialty rolls, with beer, sake, and wine behind the counter. On its own, that is a small, ordinary fact: another restaurant in Albany. What makes it worth pausing on is who opened it. O2 Sushi comes from the team behind O2 Eatery, the existing Solano Avenue spot a few blocks away. O2 Sushi connects two Albany-area addresses through the team behind an existing local restaurant.

That distinction adds another perspective on how this stretch of Solano Avenue has changed over the past two years.

The Story the Food Press Tells

The version that ran in SFGate this January described Albany as a quiet suburb suddenly overtaken by destination-worthy openings, the kind of wave that turns a sleepy street into a food-press circuit stop. The timeline in that piece is real: 2024 brought wine bar Best Friends, Latin Californian spot Brezo, and Palestinian-inspired Lulu. 2025 added health-focused Kitava, an outpost of Oakland's Yonsei Handrolls, and kouign-amann bakery Starter Bakery. The piece traced the start of the wave back to 2017, when Juanita and Maude opened its doors and became the kind of date-night reservation people drive across the bridge for. Old-guard anchors like Sam's Log Cabin and Schmidt's Pub were still standing through all of it, doing what they'd always done.

Read that way, Solano Avenue looks like any other corridor caught in a citywide restaurant cycle: rents rise, chains circle, a wave of new operators tests the market, some survive and some don't. That's the generic version, and it's not wrong exactly. It's just missing the part that only shows up if you track who's actually signing the leases.

What the Addresses Actually Show

Look at four things that happened on or just off Solano Avenue in the past eight months, and a different pattern comes into focus.

Two of these four events involve continuity, not turnover. The new concept comes from O2 Eatery's team, rather than an outside operator. Lulu didn't close and vacate 1106 Solano Ave for someone else to take a chance on. The same operator rebuilt the business inside the same four walls, trading a full dinner menu for counter service and a new name. Anahuac, an actual ownership change, moved into a storefront that was already zoned and built for a restaurant, at 1501 Solano, the former Fonda space. Nobody had to fight for a new conditional use permit or gut a retail space that had never held a kitchen.

The fourth case involves two locations. House of Curries ran locations in both Berkeley and Albany. The Berkeley location, on Sacramento Street, closed and was replaced by a new restaurant called Narwal Urban Village, confirmed by East Bay Nosh's reporting in May. The Solano Avenue location in Albany, run under the same name, kept operating. Same brand and ownership structure, with different outcomes at the two locations.

What the Examples Show About Solano Avenue

None of this means Solano Avenue is immune to restaurant failure. The examples include businesses with an existing foothold here, as well as a new operator taking over a restaurant space. These examples offer a different perspective from a restaurant review, focusing on businesses with a local presence and the addresses they operate.

The street also has long-running anchors. Juanita and Maude has been running its changing menu and patio seating near Solano and San Pablo since 2017. Sam's Log Cabin and Schmidt's Pub predate most of the newer openings by decades. A wine bar like Best Friends or a bakery like Starter Bakery joins a street where people already have a reason to walk from one end to the other.

The examples show established businesses extending or changing their local presence alongside new operators opening on and near Solano Avenue.

What's Actually New to Try This Fall

If you're trying to sort out what's genuinely new on Solano Avenue right now versus what's a familiar name in a different format, here's where things stand as of late September 2026:

• O2 Sushi (977 San Pablo Ave) is the newest addition, open as of Sept. 23, with udon, ramen, and sushi rolls from the O2 Eatery team.
• Anahuac (1501 Solano Ave) is still fairly new, having opened at the end of January in the former Fonda space, with fajitas, enchiladas, and a large seafood selection.
• Lulu's Little Kitchen (1106 Solano Ave) is the same food you may remember from Lulu, now served counter-service style since its February relaunch.
• Best Friends, Brezo, Kitava, and Starter Bakery are the 2024 and 2025 additions that have had a full year or more to settle into daily rhythms rather than opening-week lines.
• Juanita and Maude, Sam's Log Cabin, and Schmidt's Pub remain the fixed points that were doing steady business before any of the above existed and are still doing it now.

That list isn't a ranking. It's a way of reading the street correctly. When a friend asks what's new on Solano, the honest answer this month is two new kitchens, one reopened space, and a set of additions from the last two years that have already proven they can stick around.

Taken together, these examples show a mix of a new concept from an existing local business, a same-operator format change, a new operator in an existing restaurant space, and different outcomes at two House of Curries locations. They describe activity on and near Solano Avenue without establishing a single pattern for who will open next.

If you're the kind of person who tracks these things because you live near enough to walk to all of them, this is a snapshot of the street as of late September 2026—not a forecast of who will open next.

If you're curious about the East Bay neighborhoods behind streets like this one, Tracy Zhou writes about Albany, Berkeley, Kensington, and the surrounding communities from the inside. Let's Connect.