Ask ten Greenbrae residents where the neighborhood's center is and you'll get one answer. Not a downtown, not a main street. Bon Air Center, the seventy-year-old shopping center at Sir Francis Drake and 101, is where the day happens. Coffee before work. Groceries after school. A slice on a Friday when nobody wants to cook.
What's different in 2026 is that the pieces around Bon Air have started to fit together in a new way. A rebuilt bridge finally connects the parking lot to the creek path without a detour. A Detroit-transplant pizza shop has settled in next to the anchors. And a handful of the year's most talked-about openings sit within a five-minute drive on Magnolia Avenue and at Strawberry Village.
The story of Greenbrae this summer isn't a new development or a market shift. It's that the seam between Bon Air Center and the Corte Madera Creek Pathway got tighter, and the neighborhood's daily radius quietly widened at the same time.
What actually changed at 140 Bon Air Center
Bon Air still reads the way it always has. Fifty specialty merchants, family-friendly restaurants and essential services, on a site that has been the community's gathering place for more than sixty-five years. Mollie Stone's remains the anchor most residents interact with every week, and the Greenbrae location is worth knowing in specific detail: it offers a Stone Oven Pizza program, a Starbucks, grocery delivery, an Experience Tasting Room and a dry-aged beef smoker, plus the largest Housewares Department in the Mollie Stone's system. That last bit is the kind of thing regulars only discover after the third or fourth trip past the produce wall.
What's newer is the food.
Squared Pizza opened at 140 Bon Air Center and has quietly built a following. Owner Joe Garfola, a Detroit native and Marin 10-Miler, left a career in satellite networking and software engineering with the Marine Corps and Google to bring his hometown's pizza style to Bon Air. The specifics matter if you care about Detroit-style done properly. Traditionally the pies are made in a 6x8-inch mechanics tin; Garfola uses 9x9 tins, sources Grande cheese from Wisconsin, and puts the sauce on top "to protect the cheese." The pies bake in wide Middleby Marshall ovens, come out with deep air bubbles, and support up to four toppings before the dough starts to give. The hot seller since opening has been ham and pineapple, with pepperoni and cheese a close second. The shop keeps a couple of arcade games running for free while you wait, which is either charming or exactly the reason you go, depending on the age of your kids.
The next arrival at Bon Air is worth watching. The center's directory lists a handcrafted-dumpling and full-bar concept as "a lively neighborhood spot where handcrafted dumplings meet a full, fun bar experience," opening early summer 2026. A dumpling bar with a real drinks program is not a category Greenbrae has had before, and it slots into a center that has been dominated by fast-casual and grab-and-go for years.
The steady lineup around those newcomers is the reason Bon Air functions the way it does:
- Mollie Stone's Greenbrae for the weekly shop, plus the Stone Oven pizza counter and outdoor seating along the living wall
- Gott's Roadside for a burger you can eat with a kid on a bench
- Peet's for the standing coffee meeting
- Victoria Pastry Co., baking cakes and pastries since 1914 and specializing in the St. Honoré and wedding cakes
- Lark Shoes, Bella Marin for gifts, plus a Bank of America branch and a Tesla Supercharger that quietly turns a grocery run into a top-up
The mix hasn't been reinvented. It's been sharpened.
The bridge nobody talks about that changed the walk
If you've lived here more than a few years, you remember the awkwardness of trying to walk from Bon Air across the marsh toward MarinHealth or Hal Brown Park. The old crossing was tired and, at times, closed.
That changed last year. Marin County completed the Hal Brown Bridge Replacement project in February 2025. The reopened crossing includes an elevated ADA-compliant path, boardwalk, and bridge in Creekside Marsh, and it links the Corte Madera Creek multiuse path with MarinHealth Medical Center, Marin Catholic High School, Hal Brown Park, and nearby residential areas.
The practical upshot is that a routine which used to require a car — groceries, a physical therapy appointment, a walk with the dog — can now be done on foot from most of the flats without touching a crosswalk on Sir Francis Drake. That's not a landscape amenity. That's a change to how a Wednesday afternoon actually feels.
Three walks, by time budget
The creek path is the piece of Greenbrae infrastructure that most residents underuse, usually because they only know one entry point. The Corte Madera Creek Pathway is a flat, wide 3.5-mile multiuse path that is part of the San Francisco Bay Trail. Depending on the hour you have, three walks are worth knowing:
| Time you have | Walk | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| 15 minutes | Greenbrae Boardwalk | A 0.4-mile route near the creek with essentially no elevation gain, rated easy. A community of homes on pilings runs alongside, with lush vegetable gardens and butterfly habitats. |
| 45 minutes | Hal Brown Park loop via Creekside | Hal Brown Park at Creekside is a scenic greenspace with a playground, tennis courts, and walking paths through the wetlands, and the route south along the Corte Madera Pathway makes a loop around the creek. Roughly 2.2 miles with 22 feet of elevation gain, about half an hour to an hour. |
| 90 minutes | End-to-end pathway toward Ross | From the junction with the Bon Air Road Sidepath, the western segment closely follows Corte Madera Creek, passes through a narrow corridor with wetlands on one side and the creek on the other, enters Kentfield where the creek narrows, then crosses to the southern bank and ends in a parking lot behind a bike shop in Ross. |
Two useful details for a first outing. First, the path is open in two disconnected segments that can be linked via a bike ride on low-stress S. Eliseo Drive or a walk on its sidewalk. Second, if you're coming from the ferry side, the eastern segment begins at Remillard Park on Sir Francis Drake in Larkspur, a bayside spot with views of windsurfers and docking ferries and a central pond that hosts turtles and ducks. It's the closest thing Greenbrae has to a scenic overlook you can reach on foot without climbing anything.
Reasons to leave the block this summer
Part of living in Greenbrae is knowing that the best restaurants aren't always inside Greenbrae. This year's openings on Magnolia Avenue and at Strawberry Village are close enough to be part of a Tuesday, not a special occasion.
The one worth planning around is Feerma in Larkspur. Feerma is under construction on Magnolia Avenue, replacing Don Antonio's, and the founder is Borhen Hammami, former owner of Berber, a Michelin-recommended Moroccan restaurant in San Francisco. The name draws on "firma," meaning farm or nourishment, and the warmth of fire; while construction continues, the Ferma Love coffee cart is operating on site with add-ons like pistachio milk and black sesame, and the full restaurant is targeting summer 2026. A coffee cart in front of your future dinner spot is a rare kind of preview.
Strawberry Village, a short drive south on 101, is having its own year. Tartine, the San Francisco bakery that has drawn lines around the block on Guerrero Street for two decades, is opening its first Marin location at Strawberry Village. Cholita Linda is landing there too, bringing casual Latin street food that is craveable and unfussy. The pairing turns a Mill Valley errand into a legitimate weekend outing.
And if you find yourself in downtown Mill Valley, Tam Tavern serves elevated pub fare from Chef Michael Siegel, with Bavarian pretzels, bratwurst and schnitzel, beer-battered fish and chips, smashburgers, salads, and wood-fired pizzas. It's the post-hike option that used to require driving all the way into Sausalito.
The Greenbrae radius, redrawn
None of the individual updates are dramatic on their own. A pizza shop. A bridge. A dumpling bar. A bakery a few miles down the road. What they add up to is a neighborhood whose usable radius, measured in things you'd actually do on a Wednesday night, has grown without anyone renaming the place.
That's the version of Greenbrae worth knowing this summer. Not the one on the map. The one you can walk.
If you've been thinking about how your own home fits into this next chapter of the neighborhood, or you're curious what's moving quietly along Bon Air Road and the flats, Aimee Labagh Tenente knows this corner of Marin block by block. Find your San Francisco — Contact Aimee.
