Grand Avenue Filled Four Storefronts in Four Months

"We're six Oakland residents who couldn't watch this block stay dark."

That's how Chris Pastena described the decision behind Oakland Athletic Club, the sports bar reopening in June at 59 Grand Avenue after its previous run ended on Super Bowl Sunday. The line reads like sentiment. The timing says something more specific: four other businesses moved into this same stretch of Uptown within the same four-month window, without any of them coordinating with the others. That's the part worth paying attention to. A single splashy reopening tells you one operator is optimistic. Four unrelated operators filling four separate storefronts on the same three blocks tells you something about the block itself.

The Block That Went Dark

The Athletic Club opened in 2018 at the corner of Grand Avenue and Webster Street, right as Oakland was still home to three professional sports franchises. Then the Raiders left for Las Vegas at the end of 2019. The Warriors had already crossed the bay to the Chase Center. Covid arrived next. The A's spent years in an increasingly public dispute with the city before decamping for Sacramento. By the time the Athletic Club closed for good on February 8, 2026, former co-owner Miles Palliser told the San Francisco Chronicle that 2025 revenue had fallen to 70 percent of what the bar pulled in back in 2019. That's not a business having a bad quarter. That's a bar that watched its entire reason for existing leave town, one team at a time, over six years.

The closure landed as more than a lost happy hour spot. It read as a verdict on Uptown itself, a neighborhood that had spent the pandemic years losing anchor tenants faster than it could replace them.

A Deadline, Not a Trend

What happened next is where the story gets specific. A group of six Oakland residents, incorporated as OIAST LLC, short for "Oakland Is A Sports Town," took over the lease and set a hard deadline: reopen before the first match of the 2026 FIFA World Cup on June 11. Majority owner Angela Tsay runs the apparel company Oaklandish. Chris Pastena, who previously owned Calavera and Chop Bar, took over the food program. Adi Taylor, co-owner of Drexl and Sandbar, runs the bar. They made the deadline. On opening day, the bar had to turn people away for the Mexico versus South Africa match.

Tsay told CBS News San Francisco the bet was bigger than one bar. "Oakland has taken its lumps post Covid, and I think that we are ready for an Oakland Renaissance," she said. "I think that making this bet on downtown Oakland is a reflection of how deeply we all believe that Oakland is on the comeback."

That's the kind of quote that could sound like marketing copy if the surrounding blocks hadn't backed it up within weeks.

The Same Three Blocks, Filling In

Here's what opened around the Athletic Club between May and September, all within walking distance of Grand Avenue:

Bolo's Bites moved into the space that sat empty for the better part of two years after Cafe Umami closed, on the same block as Mama's Boy Pizza, Farley's and Mela Bistro. The menu runs toward classic deli sandwiches, a Reuben, roast beef, corned beef, pastrami, plus a house-roasted turkey and simpler cold options like egg and chicken salad. It's the kind of lunch spot a block needs before it can support anything more ambitious, and it's already drawing regulars who've called out the Warriors Sandwich by name on Yelp.

Bar Skula is the more deliberate bet. It comes from the team behind the now-closed Luka's Taproom, moving into the old Sidebar space at 542 Grand, close enough to Lake Merritt that the dining room looks out over the water. The menu leans into oysters, ceviche and a rotating cocktail list, and the room is wrapped in murals that include a rendering locals have nicknamed the Lake Merritt Monster. Diners keep describing it as feeling like a tribute to the neighborhood rather than a transplant from somewhere else.

A Few Blocks Over, the Same Pattern

Michele McQueen has been building toward this for a while. She opened the cocktail bar Lucy Blue in the former Uptown home of Paul Canales' longtime Spanish restaurant Duende, and that bar did well enough that she and business partner Matt Sturm followed it with Five and Dime, a neighborhood tavern with wings, smash burgers and short rib sandwiches that soft-opened this September at 329 14th Street. Two blocks from there, Game Parlour, a board game cafe with an existing San Francisco location, opened its first Oakland outpost on Valdez Street the same week, waiving its usual game fee for anyone who orders food.

Not every move on this stretch has been an arrival. Drink Thicc, the smoothie shop that had been operating in Uptown, relocated to Temescal in early September while it builds a permanent flagship, a reminder that this corridor's churn runs in both directions. Sweet Fingers Jamaican took the opposite path, closing its longtime East Oakland location on Foothill Boulevard in April and reopening on Telegraph Avenue in July with a menu built around oxtail, curry goat and jerk chicken wings.

What a Filled-In Corridor Actually Means

None of these five businesses needed the others to succeed. Bar Skula's owners weren't waiting on Bolo's Bites. McQueen wasn't timing Five and Dime to the World Cup. That's the detail that separates a real corridor recovery from a single good headline. When one operator reopens a landmark, it's a bet on that block. When four more independent operators sign leases on the same three streets in the same season, it's closer to a signal that the block is worth betting on, whether or not the original anchor makes it.

A plausible Thursday evening on this stretch now runs something like this: sandwiches from Bolo's Bites for lunch, a walk down Grand past a mural-covered dining room at Bar Skula, and a seat at Oakland Athletic Club for whatever match happens to be on, all without crossing a street that didn't have an open storefront on it eighteen months ago. That itinerary didn't exist at the start of the year. It exists now because five separate people or teams decided it was worth building, in the same four months, on the same few blocks.

If you're spending more time on this stretch of Grand Avenue, you're not alone, and you're probably noticing the same thing regulars near Lake Merritt have been saying all year: the neighborhood's rhythm changed before anyone put a number on it. For a broader look at what's shaping daily life across Oakland this year, our Oakland neighborhood guide tracks the same kind of block-by-block detail.

If watching this corridor fill back in has you wondering what it means for your own corner of Oakland, or you're just curious what your house would be worth in a market that looks different than it did two years ago, Mike Lane Group is happy to talk it through, no pressure, no obligation.