The Villa Went Quiet For Three Years. What Replaced It Says Something About How Santa Rosa Gathers Now.

Drive up Montgomery Drive toward Annadel State Park on any evening this summer and you'll notice something that wasn't there a year ago: the lights are on at the top of the hill again. For three years, the building that once housed The Villa sat dark, its parking lot empty, its dining room a rumor for people who remembered driving up for a birthday dinner or a graduation toast sometime before 2022.

That building isn't the only landmark restaurant space in Santa Rosa that spent the last few years empty. A mile or so west, on Guerneville Road, another one just came back to life too. Put the two side by side and a pattern shows up that a single reopening wouldn't reveal on its own: neither building came back as what it used to be. The white tablecloths are gone. What's replacing them looks a lot more like a beer garden than a dinner reservation.

Three Years Dark on the Hilltop

The Villa's story goes back to 1962, when the hilltop restaurant opened as The Hilltopper, a mid-century spot for continental dining and dishes like lobster thermidor and sole meunière. Gaspare Bernardo took it over in 1976 and ran it as an Italian restaurant for nearly fifty years, building a following on tableside Caesar salad, spaghetti and meatballs, and a view over what's now Annadel State Park that made the drive up the hill worth it on its own. Bernardo retired in 2022, and the building went quiet.

It stayed quiet through 2023, 2024, and most of 2025. That's the kind of vacancy that starts to feel permanent to the people who pass it regularly. It took Liz and Dez Fiedler, along with business partner Jimmy Simpson, the team behind the original Junction in Mill Valley, buying the 3.5-acre property and spending roughly two years on planning and reconstruction before the lights came back on. The Junction opened at 3901 Montgomery Drive on May 11, 2026, with Jeff Krupman of San Francisco's PizzaHacker running the menu.

Bernardo showed up for the preview night. He's in his 80s now, and he sat with his family over pizza at the restaurant that had been his life's work for over four decades, watching what it had become.

The Beer Garden Standing Where the Tablecloths Used To Be

Here's what's actually different, and it's not a small detail. The Villa was white-tablecloth Italian dining for the better part of fifty years. The Junction is a 4,000-square-foot beer garden with a 150-seat dining room, 30 beers on tap, an on-site bottle shop, and a full bar, which is more than the original Mill Valley location has. There's a game room with shuffleboard and vintage arcade machines, a photo booth, foosball, and Skee-Ball. There are fire pits. Dogs are welcome underfoot while their owners eat blistered pizzas and fried chicken sandwiches.

Liz Fiedler put it simply after the opening: "Everyone who comes by has a story to tell us. People remember this place." The nostalgia is doing real work here, but the format it's attached to has nothing to do with a dinner reservation. It's a gathering spot built for groups, kids, and dogs, not a special-occasion dining room. The original front doors and the restored Villa sign are still there. What happens behind them changed completely.

A Mile West, the Same Building Does It Again

Head west from downtown to Guerneville Road and you'll find a building with an even longer résumé of reinvention. It dates to 1944 and started life as a chicken coop before being converted into a restaurant and bar. Big Oak Chicken Shack served fried chicken and hot biscuits there in the late 1940s. Over the decades since, the same address has been the Spaghetti Factory, the Country Western Bull Rider Saloon, Willowside Café, and Zazu Kitchen + Farm before it became Walter Hansel Wine & Bistro in 2013.

Walter Hansel Wine & Bistro closed in August 2025 after twelve years at the location, with owner Stephen Hansel citing rising food costs and declining foot traffic. Less than a year later, Lawrence and Stephanie Bondulich, a husband-and-wife team from New York, are set to open Owl & The Vine there in late summer 2026. It's their first venture in Sonoma County. In Manhattan, they run Bin 71, an Italian enoteca-inspired wine bar on the Upper West Side now in its 21st year with more than 100 wines by the bottle, and The Owl's Tail, a cocktail bar serving small plates in the same neighborhood.

The menu for Owl & The Vine hasn't been released yet. But the name on the door already tells you something: this is a wine bar and taproom, not a bistro with a reservation book. Same shift as the hilltop. Same direction.

Why the Timing Isn't Random

Both of these buildings could have come back at any point in the last few years. That they're both flipping their lights back on in the same summer isn't a coincidence worth ignoring, because this is also the summer Santa Rosa's outdoor calendar is at its fullest. The Wednesday Night Market has been running on Courthouse Square since May 13 and wraps its 14-week run on August 12, drawing an average of 7,000 to 9,000 people a night for its 37th year. Summer on the Square, put on by the Santa Rosa Metro Chamber with Poppy Bank as presenting sponsor, still has Movie Mondays through the middle of the month, including The Goonies on August 17, before the season closes with the Sonoma County Super Jam on August 28, a free concert on Old Courthouse Square featuring The Pulsators and a lineup of local artists.

Layer the Santa Rosa Marathon weekend on August 22-23 on top of that, with its after-party and complimentary beer at Old Courthouse Square for runners 21 and older, and this is a town with something happening on the square nearly every night through the end of the month. A beer garden with a playground and a wine bar built for groups aren't opening into a quiet season. They're opening into the busiest stretch of the year, which is either very good timing or evidence that the people who own these buildings understand exactly what kind of night Santa Rosa residents are actually looking for right now.

What This Means for a Tuesday Night Here

If you've been putting off the drive up Montgomery Drive because you remember the Villa being closed, that reason no longer applies. Go on a weeknight if you want the view without the crowd that a Friday or a marathon weekend will bring. If you're on the west side and used to drive past a boarded-up building on Guerneville Road, keep an eye on it over the next few weeks. Twelve years of Walter Hansel regulars and whoever remembers the Spaghetti Factory or Willowside Café will have their own reasons to walk back in once it opens.

What both openings suggest, taken together, is that the kind of place Santa Rosa wants right now isn't the place that requires a reservation and a nice shirt. It's the place with thirty taps, a dog under the table, and a view that's been there since 1962, even if almost nothing else about the building has stayed the same.

Santa Rosa keeps changing shape without losing the landmarks that gave the town its character in the first place. That's the kind of texture that doesn't show up on a listing sheet, but it's exactly what makes a neighborhood worth paying attention to over time. If you're watching how this town evolves and thinking about what that means for your own next move here, Ashley McSweeney would be glad to talk through what's changing and what it means for you.