Jason Sims told the Pacific Sun: "We want something where you feel comfortable to come in for a beer like you would with a real bar, but where you can also get a high-level cocktail with food and legitimate, high-level service."
Sims is one of the three partners who opened Corner Bar at 106 Throckmorton Avenue in April 2024, at an address with its own history. Before Corner Bar, 106 Throckmorton ran as Coho, and before Coho it was Vasco. It sits on a visible corner of downtown Mill Valley, a few doors from a train depot that has been serving coffee and selling books under family ownership since 1987.
If you've lived near the plaza long enough to remember Vasco and Coho, Corner Bar is worth a closer look, because what it adds is a specific stretch of the clock: the evening hours after the Depot's day winds down.
What the Depot Actually Covers
Walk to 87 Throckmorton Avenue and you're standing in a building constructed in 1929 by the Northwestern Pacific Railroad, on a site that's been a transit hub since 1889, when rail service first brought Mill Valley's earliest land buyers across the bay. The Mount Tam Railway ran scenic trips to the summit from this same plaza between 1896 and 1929. Passenger service continued until 1940, after which the building spent decades as a Greyhound bus depot before becoming the bookstore and cafe it is today, family-run since 1987.
The Depot Café and Bookstore has never been a small operation on the plaza. Its cafe opens at 7:30 a.m. and runs to 6 p.m. most days, with extended hours Thursday through Saturday for trivia and live music on the patio. The Mill Valley band Musical Feast has played there almost every Friday for close to 150 consecutive weeks, no cover charge. Thursday brings a rotating trivia night from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. The bookstore itself keeps its own hours, generally closing between 6 and 8 p.m. depending on the day, with the latest hours on Friday and Saturday.
That's a full day covered, morning coffee through early evening. What it isn't is a place to walk in at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday and order a proper cocktail with no reservation. For most of the week, once the cafe and bookstore close, the plaza's daytime anchor goes dark.
The Two Buildings, Side by Side
| Time window | Depot Café & Bookstore | Corner Bar |
|---|---|---|
| 7:30 a.m. | Cafe opens | Closed |
| Midday | Cafe and bookstore both open | Closed |
| 4 p.m. | Bookstore winding down; cafe still serving | Opens daily |
| 6 p.m. | Cafe closes (bookstore closes similarly most nights) | Kitchen running, bar full |
| 9 p.m. to midnight | Closed except Thu–Sat patio events | Open until 10 p.m. Sunday, 11 p.m. Monday–Wednesday, or midnight Thursday–Saturday |
Laid out this way, the overlap is narrow and the handoff is almost exact. Corner Bar opens at 4 p.m., right around the hour the Depot's day starts to wind down, and stays open three to six hours past the point the Depot goes dark on any given night. The two businesses aren't competing for the same customer at the same hour. They're covering different halves of a sixteen-hour day on the same fifty yards of sidewalk.
How the Corner Found Its Format
Vasco and Coho both occupied 106 Throckmorton before Corner Bar. Corner Bar's format is a cocktail lounge that also serves food, built by partners with long track records in Marin restaurants. The partners, Bill Higgins, Peter Schumacher and Jason Sims, come out of Buckeye Roadhouse, Playa and Bungalow 44. The kitchen is run by chef Michael Siegel, who built his name at Playa along with San Francisco's Bix and Betelnut.
The space seats sixty, with two bars, a velvet and leather lounge area, oversized brass chandeliers, and windows that look straight out onto the town square. The cocktail list leans toward the specific rather than the safe: the Up in Smoke pairs Toki Japanese whisky with green Chartreuse, mint and lime, while the Ultima Palabra runs charred pineapple-infused mezcal against yellow Chartreuse, maraschino liqueur, lime and thyme. Every day there's a $10 specials menu that includes a Nitro Espresso Martini made with Grey Goose vodka, Grind espresso liqueur, espresso and vanilla bean. On the food side, the small plates are built for sharing rather than solo dining: King Salmon Tartare on latkes, duck wings finished with an orange glaze, a mezze plate with pita, hummus and piquillo pepper, and fries with a tzatziki dip.
The format is built around walk-in flexibility. Corner Bar doesn't ask people to commit to a dinner reservation to justify coming in. You can sit at the bar for one drink or stay for three courses, and the room is built to make either choice feel normal.
The Shows Next Door Were Always the Missing Piece
Corner Bar sits within a few minutes' walk of both Sweetwater Music Hall and the Throckmorton Theatre, and the location wasn't an accident. Sims has said directly that the partners wanted to capture the crowds heading to and from shows at both venues, plus the foot traffic the Mill Valley Film Festival brings through downtown every fall. For years, if you had tickets to a Sweetwater show and wanted a drink beforehand that wasn't tied to a full dinner reservation somewhere else on the plaza, your options were limited. Corner Bar's no-reservation policy and late kitchen hours make it an option for a pre-show drink without a full dinner reservation.
This is the part that's easy to miss if you only think of the plaza in terms of its restaurants. The Depot has always drawn people in during daylight for coffee, books and the Friday night patio scene. Sweetwater and Throckmorton Theatre have always drawn people in after dark for a show. What was missing was the connective tissue between those two crowds, a place close enough to walk to from either and casual enough that showing up without a plan didn't feel wrong. Corner Bar is that tissue now, at the 106 Throckmorton address where Vasco and Coho once operated.
What This Looks Like on an Ordinary Week
None of this requires a special occasion to notice. On a Thursday, the Depot runs its trivia night on the patio starting at 5:30, and by the time that wraps up around 7:30, Corner Bar down the block is settling into its own dinner rush, open until midnight that night since Thursday falls in its extended Thursday-through-Saturday window. On a Friday, Musical Feast is setting up outside the Depot around 5:30 with no cover charge, while Corner Bar's kitchen is already open and running its own hours until midnight. Two live-music nights, two different rooms, same fifty yards of Throckmorton Avenue, and neither one asks you to choose between them because they're not competing for the same hour.
The plaza's oldest building was built to move people through Mill Valley on a schedule. The newest one on the corner was built to give them somewhere to stay once they've arrived. Both are still doing exactly that, just on opposite ends of the clock.
If you're weighing what it means to live two blocks from a plaza that finally covers its own evenings, Aimee Labagh Tenente knows this stretch of Mill Valley well enough to talk through it in detail, corner by corner.
