Highway 24 splits downtown Orinda into two halves that have spent decades ignoring each other. North of the freeway sits the Village District, home to the post office, the library, and a bank branch that closed without much fanfare. South of it is the Theatre District, built around the marquee that's been the town's one reliable reason to park the car and stay a while. For years, if you wanted an actual evening out in Orinda rather than a drive-through errand, you crossed to the theatre side. The other half of downtown gave you a bank line and a drugstore.
That arrangement is finally breaking, and it's breaking on both sides of the highway at the same time. That timing, not any single restaurant, is the part worth paying attention to.
The Village Side's Emptiest Corner Since 2022
The former Bank of America branch at 31 Orinda Way closed in March 2022 and sat there, conspicuously vacant, for more than four years. In 2022, Orinda developer Ben Zarrin and a partner bought the property for $2.8 million, outbidding suitors that reportedly included JPMorgan Chase. What Zarrin's company, Paymun, has been building there since is called CreekHaus, and the project has only gotten bigger as it's moved through city review. The 2023 approval called for renovating the existing 4,712-square-foot single-story building into an 8,810-square-foot two-level structure. Revisions in 2025 pushed it further, to 9,397 square feet with a third story added for storage and rooftop mechanical access.
The tenant lineup has taken shape alongside the expansion. Equator Coffees, a Marin County company, will anchor the daytime side as its 13th location. CreekHaus Beer Garden will run the evening side, with pizza service from PizzaHacker, which already operates in San Francisco's Mission-Bernal area and in Mill Valley. City leaders have been vocal about what this means for downtown as a whole. When the city launched its DowntownOrinda.com site in 2025, Mayor Latika Malkani specifically named Theater Square and the soon-to-open CreekHaus as the two projects that could turn downtown into a real Lamorinda shopping and dining destination.
One more detail signals how quickly this is moving. Launchpad Learning Lamorinda, a tutoring and after-school program for Orinda and Lamorinda students, now lists its address as 31 Orinda Way, second floor, with an opening note for this month.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. The building sits inside the Village Square shopping center, which already includes McCullough's department store, Orinda Books, the Hollyhock gift shop, and Orinda Prints & Archiving upstairs, next door to the post office and across from a Rite Aid that's since gone dark. CreekHaus isn't creating a downtown from scratch. It's filling the one true hole in a block that's otherwise held steady for years.
The Debate Behind the Name
CreekHaus takes its name from San Pablo Creek, which runs behind the property and behind much of downtown Orinda, largely hidden from daily foot traffic. The plan includes a rear deck facing the creek, and that's where the project has run into its first real friction.
Friends of Orinda Creeks, a local group that has studied waterway restoration in places like Napa, Ashland, and San Luis Obispo, isn't opposed to the development. Their concern is narrower and more specific: whether a creek-facing deck built for paying restaurant customers ends up functioning as private access to what should be a shared amenity.
"Imagine getting a glass of wine and seeing the creek view."
That's how group member Michael Bowen described the upside to Patch, before adding the catch: the same design that makes the creek an asset could also fence it off from anyone who isn't seated at a table. During construction, parts of the rear area have in fact been fenced with warning signs posted where the creek runs between the shopping center parking lot and the highway. Paymun's own accounting director told Patch the company recognizes the creek corridor's importance to the community and will keep evaluating how the finished project fits around it. Whether that holds once the deck opens for business is the kind of question that only gets answered after the ribbon cutting, not before it.
The Theatre Side Finally Gets an Anchor Too
Across the highway, the equivalent dead spot has been the former Starbucks storefront in Theatre Square, sitting empty for a long stretch right next to the marquee. It's being filled by Sorso Bar & Bites, a wine bar and small-plates concept from Daniele Carsano, a 13-year Orinda resident who's spent years building Italian-inspired restaurants around the Bay Area, including Walnut Creek's Montesacro and Berkeley's Casa Barotti. Carsano was targeting a late spring or early summer opening, with hours running 3 to 10 p.m. and the possibility of staying open later on weekends if the demand is there. He's said outright that Orinda doesn't have much of a late-night scene and that he's curious whether Sorso can help start one.
The addition matters less as a standalone restaurant and more as connective tissue. The storefront had been vacant for a significant time, sitting between businesses that were already working: the tunnel-themed Fourth Bore Tap Room, Japanese restaurant Serika under newer ownership, and Shemroon, a Persian-inspired coffee shop next door. Sorso doesn't need to build a food scene in Theatre Square. It just needs to stop being the one dark window on the block.
That block has kept turning over on its own in the meantime. Lamorinda Atelier, an art gallery, opened there in November 2025. Boba shop Nine Tailed Fox replaced Sharetea earlier this year, opened by a Miramonte High School graduate and Orinda native. 8 Moose Pizzeria took over a spot that had cycled through Nation's and then Bravo's Pizza before it. None of that turnover made headlines the way CreekHaus or Sorso have, because none of it filled a space that had actually gone dark.
The Marquee Never Needed Saving Twice
It's worth remembering that the theatre at the center of all this activity has already survived its own near-miss. The Orinda Theatre opened December 27, 1941, designed by architect Alexander Aimwell Cantin, with auditorium and lobby murals by Anthony Heinsbergen painted with pigments that glow under black light. In 1984 a developer bought the property planning to demolish it for a shopping center. A grassroots campaign changed enough minds that the shopping center was built around the theatre instead, and it reopened in 1989, with a second wing of screens added in 1996.
The theatre has kept finding ways to stay relevant since. Film historian Matías Bombal leads a free hour-long tour the last Sunday of every month, walking through the murals and the building's origin story. The venue's Live at the Orinda concert series sold out its 2025-2026 season. Earlier this year, a restored screening of Star Wars: A New Hope filled the main auditorium close to its roughly 600-seat capacity, with families showing up in costume for a Saturday matinee. Whatever happens with Sorso next door, the marquee was never the part of downtown that needed rescuing. It's the storefronts around it that are only now catching up to what the theatre has been doing all along.
What the Village Side Already Had
Even with a vacant bank building at its center, the Village District has never been empty on weekends. The Orinda Farmers' Market sets up every Saturday morning on Orinda Way in front of Community Park, and Orinda Summer Thursdays brings food trucks and free concerts to the same park through the summer months. Those are reasons to show up. What they've never been is a reason to stay past dusk, because when the market packed up or the last band finished, there was nowhere left to go.
That's the piece CreekHaus is aimed at, and it's the same piece Sorso is aimed at on the other side of the highway. For the first time in years, both halves of downtown Orinda are getting an answer to the same question at roughly the same time: what happens after the market closes, after the movie lets out, after the food trucks pull away. Whether the creek deck ends up feeling open or fenced, and whether Sorso's hours actually stretch into a real evening scene, are things only time will settle. But the fact that both dead corners of downtown are being addressed in the same season, by people who live a few blocks from what they're building, is the part of this story that hasn't been true in a long time.
If you're weighing what a home near Orinda Village or Theatre Square is really worth once these projects settle in, that's exactly the kind of neighborhood-level read Gillian Judge Hogan brings to every conversation. Work With Gillian to talk through what's changing in your corner of Lamorinda and what it means for your next move.
