Temescal This Summer: What's New on Telegraph and Where to Go This Week

Walk one block of Telegraph Avenue between 50th and 51st this July and you're standing in front of more recent food turnover than most Oakland neighborhoods see in a year. The Cattaneo Block, the landmarked strip that stretches from 5006 to 5010 Telegraph and centers on 5000, has quietly become the piece of Temescal doing the heaviest lifting in the neighborhood's summer food map. If your mental list of "where to go on a weeknight" still ends at Burma Superstar and Pizzaiolo, it's out of date.

One block, most of the changes

The reason to start at 5000 Telegraph is that a single storefront there has already reset twice inside eighteen months. Small Change opened in July 2024 as a seafood-plus concept with table service and a price point that never quite matched the neighborhood. By early March 2026, Oaklandside reported that the same space had been rebranded as Ace Seafood, with Peter Gutowski and Tay Kennedy taking over day-to-day operations while original partners the Lipelts stayed on as owners. The stated goal was to build something more casual for neighbors who had found the original menu too expensive.

The mechanics of that shift are more interesting than the rebrand itself. Ace kept the customer favorites, mussels, fish and chips, chowder, oysters, and added wings, on Gutowski's argument that a neighborhood spot needs good chicken wings. It moved from full table service to modified counter service with open tabs. Most importantly, it stopped trying to fill 18 interior seats as a dining room and started treating the 48-seat back patio, shared with Poppy Bagels next door, as the primary asset. The two operators now coordinate hours so the patio is usable across the whole day.

That is the anchor. Around it, the block reads like this:

• 5000 Telegraph — Ace Seafood, Wednesday to Sunday, noon to 8 p.m., counter service, shared back patio
• Poppy Bagels, next door, counter-service bagels and open-faced sandwiches, sharing the patio
• 5006 to 5010 Telegraph — the Cattaneo Block itself, a designated Oakland landmark
• The G&G hardware neon, still hanging above the block from a store that has been gone for decades
• Genova Delicatessen, on the site of a former train barn, an operating tenant since 1926

The Cattaneo Block is one of the few places in Oakland where a hundred-year-old Italian deli, a landmark neon sign for a business that no longer exists, and a nine-month-old rebranded seafood counter share the same address range. Most of Telegraph's turnover is spread thin across ten blocks. This one address is where you can watch the pattern happen at close range.

What "Wednesday to Sunday, noon to 8" is actually telling you

The Ace hours are worth pausing on because they reflect a broader pattern along this stretch. Ace is closed Monday and Tuesday and shuts at 8 p.m. the rest of the week. Poppy runs the same patio on a different clock. Between the two, the patio at 5000 has full-day coverage without either operator having to staff a fourteen-hour day alone.

That is a small thing that changes how you use the block. A Wednesday at 6 p.m., historically a slower Temescal night, is now one of the better windows to get seated outside with oysters and a bagel-sandwich-turned-late-lunch on the same table. On a Sunday afternoon the same patio pivots the other direction. Neither operator is chasing the Friday-Saturday dinner rush the way the previous tenant did, and the block reads calmer for it.

July 18 at Temescal Brewing: the pipeline for what comes next

Two blocks south, at 4115 Telegraph, Temescal Brewing is hosting Pop Nosh 2026 on July 18. The event is free, family-friendly, and, per Oaklandside's July 6 preview, a curated set of East Bay food vendors on the rise. It is the third year Nosh has run it at the brewery.

The lineup is worth reading because it functions as a preview of who might sign a lease somewhere on Telegraph in the next twelve to eighteen months:

• Aku's BBQ, an izakaya-style stand launched in early 2025, serving yakitori
• Jade Lumpia Bar, making its first appearance outside its Pour Manners residency, with a Colombian-Filipino menu
• Smash n' Stack Burger Shack
• Pie on the Fly, known from the Kensington Market and Factory Bar in Richmond
• Aces Ice Cream, another 2025 launch, small-batch flavors
• DJ Wiley Coyote on the soundtrack, with Temescal Brewing's own beers on tap

In the last year alone, Cenaduria Elvira, Bolita Masa and Saints Smokehouse have all made the transition from buzzy pop-up to full brick-and-mortar.

That line from Nosh's own preview is the reason the July 18 event is worth an hour of your afternoon even if you already have dinner plans. The Temescal Brewing patio is where the neighborhood tests its next tenants. If you were paying attention there in 2023, you saw Poppy Bagels before Poppy Bagels was next to Ace.

The wider Telegraph read

Zoom out from the Cattaneo Block and the rest of Temescal's 2025 to 2026 additions cluster into two categories. On the bar side, Tallboy is the newer martini bar the neighborhood has been quietly filling on weeknights, written up by The Infatuation in May 2026 as a laid-back Temescal room. On the counter side, Daytrip Counter, which opened in late 2025, is the rotisserie-chicken-focused follow-up to the original Daytrip, and it has become one of the easier weeknight takeaway options between 40th and 51st.

Older tenants still hold the corners. Burdell, Chef Geoff Davis's soul food restaurant, remains one of the neighborhood's higher-profile rooms, built around family recipes and Black farming and foraging traditions. Burma Superstar, Pizzaiolo, Bakesale Betty and Homeroom continue to run the volume through the middle of Telegraph. Temescal Alleys, the converted horse-stable retail lane, still functions as the neighborhood's daytime anchor for shopping and coffee. None of that has changed. What has changed is the density of new options between 50th and 51st, and how much of that density lands at a single address.

A short list for the rest of July

If you're building an actual weekend around any of this:

• Friday or Saturday evening — Ace Seafood on the patio at 5000 Telegraph, then a walk south to Tallboy for a nightcap
• Sunday morning — Poppy Bagels on the same patio, before the afternoon crowd rotates in
• Saturday, July 18, afternoon — Pop Nosh at Temescal Brewing, 4115 Telegraph, free, no reservation needed
• A weeknight you would normally skip Temescal for — Daytrip Counter for rotisserie, then a slow walk up Telegraph to see which storefronts have paper on the windows

The last one matters because the block-level story here is not finished. Small Change to Ace happened in about eighteen months. The pop-ups showing up at Temescal Brewing on the 18th are running the same clock. If you own or rent in Temescal, the useful move this summer is to keep the mental map open and revisit the same three or four addresses often enough to catch the next reset when it happens.

If you find yourself paying that kind of attention to your block because you're thinking about what your home is actually worth in this market, or because a friend across the bridge keeps asking what living here is like, the team at Michael Lane knows this stretch of Telegraph well and is happy to talk. Get a free home valuation or start your East Bay search when you're ready.