Downtown Orinda's Storefronts Are Filling In: What's Opening Around Theatre Square and Orinda Way

For the last few years, walking through downtown Orinda has meant walking past a lot of paper-covered windows. The Starbucks at Theatre Square left. The Bank of America on Orinda Way closed in early 2022. Morrison's Jewelers, a fixture on Moraga Way for more than a century, put a retirement sign in its window. If you live here, you have watched the vacancies without any clear sense of what would replace them.

That question has an answer now, and the answer has a shape worth noticing. The two most significant new projects are opening on the two ends of downtown at almost the same time. Nothing much is changing in the middle. What is changing is the pull at either edge, and by fall it will give residents a reason to actually move between them.

Two projects, two ends of downtown

Highway 24 splits downtown into the Village District to the north and the Theatre District to the south. Until this year, the interesting foot traffic sat mostly on the theatre side. That balance is about to shift.

Neither of these is a chain quietly filling in a slot. They are both purpose-built to bring people to downtown Orinda who might otherwise drive to Lafayette or Walnut Creek. That intent is the whole story.

What Sorso is actually replacing

The former Starbucks storefront is one of the most visible corners in Theatre Square, and it sat dark long enough that most regulars stopped registering it. Daniele Carsano, who has been involved in Italian concepts including Mint 54, Montesacro, and Casa Barotti, is opening Sorso Bar and Bites in that space, next to the historic Orinda Theatre.

Carsano is not an outside operator testing the market. He has been an Orinda resident for 13 years, and the decision to open here was partly personal. He wants the bar to stay open late enough for people to linger after a movie at the Orinda Theatre, and he hopes to pull people from Lafayette, Walnut Creek, Oakland and Berkeley rather than watching Orinda residents drive to those places instead.

The format matters. Sorso means "to sip" in Italian, and it will be a wine bar focused on small plates rather than full entrees, with a light kitchen and a broad wine list, plus a full cocktail program. Carsano is targeting a late-spring or early-summer launch with hours from 3 to 10 p.m., possibly later on weekends. For a downtown whose dinner options have largely closed by nine, that stretch of evening is new territory.

"I'm going to do something in Orinda and prove people wrong." — Daniele Carsano, on being told Orinda was too quiet for an upscale bar

CreekHaus is bigger than it looks

Across the freeway, the former Bank of America branch has been the subject of city planning notices for years. The scope explains why. The original 2023 approval called for renovating and expanding a 4,712-square-foot single-story building into an 8,810-square-foot two-level structure, and 2025 revisions increased the proposed building to 9,397 square feet and added a 540-square-foot third story for storage and rooftop mechanical access. The building is roughly doubling.

The daytime side will be anchored by Equator Coffees, and PizzaHacker, which currently operates in San Francisco's Mission-Bernal area and at The Junction in Mill Valley, will run pizza service in the beer garden. Further phases are planned to include an upscale bistro, a full cocktail bar, a lounge, and private event spaces, plus offices and community rooms.

There is also a second-floor tenant that changes who uses the building during the day. Launchpad Learning Lamorinda now lists its address as 31 Orinda Way, 2nd Floor, at CreekHaus, with a "Coming August 2026" note, describing itself as a tutoring and after-school learning program for Orinda and Lamorinda students.

The other detail worth flagging is the back of the building. San Pablo Creek runs behind the site, and prior project materials described creek-facing decks and outdoor gathering areas. Downtown Orinda has a creek running through part of its commercial core, but it is not always a visible or active part of the downtown experience. If the creek-facing deck lands the way the plans suggest, it will be the first place in downtown where the water is part of the experience rather than something you cross a parking lot to ignore.

Theatre Square is quietly repopulating

Sorso is the headline, but it is not arriving into an empty square. The neighboring storefronts have been filling in on their own timeline:

• Lamorinda Atelier, an art gallery, opened at Orinda Theatre Square in November 2025 as a creative gathering place showcasing contemporary art alongside secondary market works.
• Shemroon Cafe, a Persian-inspired coffee shop, now sits next door to the incoming Sorso and is part of the group of Theatre Square tenants alongside the Fourth Bore tap room and the Japanese eatery Serika, which is under relatively new ownership.
• Kibi's Cafe, a longtime Vietnamese favorite, is moving just across the way within Theatre Square.

Read together, these are not random tenant swaps. They are a square that had drifted toward vacancy pulling itself back into a coherent mix: gallery, cafe, tap room, sit-down Japanese, wine bar, plus the theatre itself. The list is starting to look like a walkable evening rather than a set of unrelated storefronts.

Building an evening around the theatre

The Orinda Theatre's calendar is the other piece of this. If Sorso is trying to stay open past a movie, it helps to know what movie. A few dates residents can put on the fridge for late summer and fall:

• Aug 20, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. — Free Movie Night at 4 Orinda Theatre Square.
• Aug 30, 11 a.m. — Free tour of the historic Orinda Theatre.
• Sept 5, 1 p.m. — Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938), Disney Restoration Series.
• Oct 10, 7:30 p.m. — Matt Stone as Elvis, live at the Orinda Theatre.
• Nov 14, 7 p.m. — Stroll Down Penny Lane, a live performance with films set to the songs of Paul McCartney.

One practical note if you are the person who usually drives in circles looking for a spot: the theatre's box office opens 15 minutes before the first showtime of the day, and parking validation in the lobby is good for four free hours. Four hours is enough for a show and a drink afterward. Which is presumably the point.

The closing worth acknowledging

Not everything is opening. Morrison's Jewelers is closing on Moraga Way after more than 102 years in business, with a sign in the window noting that Dave and Chris are retiring. That is a retirement, not a market signal, but it is still a reminder that the mix downtown is turning over in both directions at once. A century-old jeweler leaves. An Italian wine bar arrives next to an art gallery that was itself a Starbucks-era vacancy a year ago.

What this actually means for residents

Downtown Orinda has spent a long time being described by its potential rather than its inventory. The interesting change in 2026 is that the inventory is catching up. By the end of the year, a resident who wants coffee in the morning, a place to send a kid for after-school tutoring, a creek-facing lunch, a pizza and a beer, a wine bar before a movie, and a live show at the theatre can do all of it inside a walk of roughly a quarter mile on each side of Highway 24.

That is not a transformation. It is more like a completion. The buildings were already here. The theatre was already here. What was missing were the anchor tenants on either end that made the whole downtown legible as a single evening rather than a scatter of errands. Sorso on the south, CreekHaus on the north, and the surrounding tenants filling in around each of them are what closes that gap.

If you have owned a home in Orinda for a while, this is a good year to reintroduce yourself to your own downtown. Try Shemroon in the morning. Take the free theatre tour on August 30. Watch the CreekHaus deck go up. See what Sorso decides its late-night personality is going to be. The version of downtown you have been driving through for the last three years is not the version that will be here in December.

When you are ready to talk about your own next chapter in Orinda, whether that means finding a home closer to a walkable downtown or preparing a longtime residence for the market, The DiMaggio Betta Group is here to help. Get in touch when the timing is right.