Thursday evening, Downtown Campbell puts on its wine walk again, the seventeenth time the association has closed down the avenue for an evening of tasting glasses and open storefronts. If you've done this walk before, you know the choreography: pick up your glass, follow the route past the shops that stay open late for the occasion, stop wherever the pour looks interesting. It's a routine most Campbell residents could do with their eyes closed.
Except this year the route runs past two addresses that were either empty or in bankruptcy twelve months ago. That's the detail worth noticing before you fill your first glass.
The Block That Changed First
Walk east on Campbell Avenue past the 270s and you'll pass two restaurants standing almost shoulder to shoulder: Elia at 276 E. Campbell Avenue and Sultan's Kebab at 278 E. Campbell Avenue. Different cuisines, different names on the awning, same person behind both. Fatih Ulas is a partner in each. That's not a coincidence of leasing, it's a bet on the block itself.
A year ago, neither space was open. 276 E. Campbell Avenue was Opa!, which closed in the fall of 2025 following bankruptcy. Next door, 278 E. Campbell Avenue had been Mo's Breakfast + Burger Joint. Two storefronts, two different failures, one operator deciding both were worth a second act within weeks of each other.
Elia brought in its Mediterranean menu, mezethes, seafood, and a weekend brunch service, as the fourth location for a company that started in Pleasanton in 2021 before adding Walnut Creek and a San Carlos location with three private dining rooms and nightly live music. Renovations targeted a late January to early February 2026 opening. Sultan's Kebab followed almost immediately, with head chef Mahmut Seyhan, who ran the kitchen at the Pleasanton location for more than a decade, coming on as a partner in Campbell. The liquor license went in around late January 2026, with an opening the operators told local reporters would land by the end of February.
Here's the comparison worth sitting with:
| Address | What closed | What replaced it | Opened |
|---|---|---|---|
| 276 E. Campbell Ave | Opa! (closed fall 2025, bankruptcy) | Elia, Mediterranean/Greek | Late Jan–early Feb 2026 |
| 278 E. Campbell Ave | Mo's Breakfast + Burger Joint | Sultan's Kebab, Turkish | End of Feb 2026 |
| 368 E. Campbell Ave | (vacant) | TRIAL | ERROR, cocktail bar |
Two closures, absorbed by one operator, on the same short stretch of sidewalk, inside a single quarter. If you're the kind of person who reads a shuttered storefront as a bad sign for a street, this is the opposite read: someone with three other Bay Area locations already running looked at that exact block after two failures and opened two restaurants there anyway.
The Bar Still to Come
The route past 276 and 278 tells you what already happened. Further down at 368 E. Campbell Avenue, something is still being built, and it's the one opening most worth watching before winter.
TRIAL|ERROR is coming from Jason Seele, the owner of Los Gatos Soda Works and a bartender with 24 years behind the bar. It's opening in October, and the cocktail program leans on ingredients most Campbell menus haven't touched, black cardamom sourced from Ethiopia, tonka beans from Venezuela, galangal from Southeast Asia. Some drinks arrive in a Philippine conch shell. Others come in a glass bird set on a nest, with a food pairing on the side.
Seele told Palo Alto Online that his cocktails have "a beginning, a middle and a finish, like a good story would," rather than something that tastes the same sip to sip.
That's a specific bet, and a bigger one than it looks. A cocktail bar built around narrative structure and ingredients most local drinkers have never encountered assumes an audience ready for something more ambitious than the neighborhood pub format that's dominated this stretch for years. Whether Campbell is that audience is the open question of the fall. The operators behind Los Gatos Soda Works already read one South Bay downtown correctly. October will tell you if they read this one the same way.
The Parts of the Avenue That Didn't Move
None of this changes the parts of Campbell Avenue that don't need updating. The Sunday farmers market still runs 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., rain or shine, along East Campbell Avenue between Central Avenue and Third Street, the way it has for years. Downtown Campbell's own materials describe it as one of the best year-round markets in the South Bay, and whatever you think of that claim, the produce, the craft vendors, and the coffee-and-people-watching routine that follows it are unchanged.
The coffee cluster around the market hasn't moved either. Breaktime Tea, Manresa Bread Café, Orchard Valley Coffee, Steepers, and Starbucks all sit within a two-block radius on East Campbell Avenue, close enough that you can pick one before the market and a different one after without walking more than a few minutes between them.
A few blocks off the restaurant row, the Ainsley House still gives the avenue its quietest anchor. The 1925 English Tudor Cotswold cottage at 300 Grant Street has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2005. It was built for Campbell canning pioneer John Colpitts Ainsley and his wife Alcinda, and moved to its current lot in 1990 after the family donated it to the city. Docent-led tours still run out of the Carriage House visitor center. Down the street, Heritage Theatre at 1 W. Campbell Avenue keeps its fall lineup of touring music and theatrical shows going, with a rotating pop-up art gallery in the lobby that's free to walk through even on a night you're not there for a performance.
None of that changed while two restaurants closed, reopened under new names, and a third got ready to arrive. That's worth noticing too. The avenue absorbs turnover on the restaurant row without disturbing the fixed points around it.
What Thursday's Route Actually Proves
If you're walking the wine walk this week, you'll pass both readings of Campbell Avenue in the same twenty minutes: the fixed points that have anchored the street for decades, and two storefronts that were either bankrupt or empty a year ago, now serving Mediterranean small plates and Turkish kebabs to a Thursday-night crowd holding tasting glasses.
That's the thing about a wine walk in its seventeenth year with more than two dozen wineries pouring across downtown. It's not just a party. It's an annual proof point for how much foot traffic this two-block stretch can support, and this year it's proving that even after two closures, the answer was enough to draw a fourth Bay Area location for one restaurant group, a fourth for another, and now a bar concept ambitious enough to import spices from three continents.
If you own here, that's a small but real signal about the health of the commercial corridor a short walk from your front door. If you're just here for the wine, it's a good excuse to try Elia's brunch before the weekend gets away from you, or to put October 's TRIAL|ERROR opening on a calendar you actually check.
Either way, the route hasn't changed. What's along it has.
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