New Restaurants in Inverness CA for 2026

For most of the past year, the most reliable landmark on the Inverness stretch of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard was a sign that said nothing was there. The Saltwater Oyster Depot's logo came down sometime after last summer, replaced by a plain "restaurant available" notice that sat in the window through fall, through winter, through the wet months when the only thing open past six o'clock felt like it might be your own kitchen.

That sign is gone now. So are three others like it. In the space of about ten weeks this year, four dining rooms across Inverness and Point Reyes Station that had sat dark, some for years, have reopened. The obvious story is that West Marin's restaurant drought broke. The more useful story, if you actually live here, is who broke it.

The Sign That Wouldn't Come Down

Saltwater's closure wasn't a quiet fade. Owner Luc Chamberland lost the restaurant's beer and wine license after state officials found hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid sales tax during an audit, trouble that Chamberland has said began during the pandemic when he cut administrative staff and started handling the books himself. For a town with exactly one full-service restaurant, that license suspension meant Inverness had zero.

The space did not stay empty by choice. Given how hard it already is to staff a kitchen on this coast, where wages have to compete with housing costs that price out most workers, plenty of people wondered if anyone would take the room on at all. Someone did. A team from Bolinas is reopening the space as First Valley Bistro, run by Roseanne Lavoy, Enrique Hernandez and Patrick Sullivan, the same three who operate Coast Café in Bolinas. The doors opened in early July.

Four Rooms, Different Local Connections

Here's the pattern worth noticing. The four operations have different kinds of local connections.

• First Valley Bistro, Inverness, in the old Saltwater space: run by the Coast Café team out of Bolinas.
• Bayside Bar and Lounge, at Tomales Bay Resort just west of Inverness: run by the resort's own owner, for the first time in two decades.
• Bar Auklet, Point Reyes Station, in the long-vacant Station House space: an experienced local restaurateur partnering with the Point Reyes Good Luck Fund.
• The reopened Roadhouse building on Point Reyes Station's southern edge, easy to spot for its fire-engine red paint: new ownership, but a family already established in the town's business community.

Taken together, those connections give residents a reason to watch how the rooms fare beyond the summer.

The Resort That Kept Changing Hands

As the Point Reyes Light reported, the building at Tomales Bay Resort has seen more restaurants than most residents have lived here. It started in 1947 as Tombahia, opened by an army nurse named Dorothy Meloney who used a G.I. loan to buy a stove and a grill and served burgers, clam chowder, chicken and oysters until it closed in 1953. Barnaby's took the space next, running from 1985 to 2008. Thepmonggan Thai followed for eight years. Fog's Kitchen ran from 2016 to 2019. A planned reopening as Andy's by the Bay stalled out in 2021, and the room sat empty after that.

Jeff Harriman, who bought the resort itself back in 2005, had leased the restaurant out to that rotating cast of tenants for the better part of twenty years. This time he's running it himself. Bayside Bar and Lounge opened during the first week of May, with a casual, seafood-forward menu that runs from smoked ribs to a vegan banh mi, plus pizza for dine-in or takeout.

The Point Reyes Light quoted Harriman describing the new mood as a "Cheers" vibe with a West Marin twist.

The lounge next to the dining room still has the pool table, foosball table and dart boards left over from the Barnaby's era, along with a stack of board games, a small detail that says the room is meant to be lived in, not just photographed.

What Bar Auklet Adds Down the Road

If you live in Inverness, Point Reyes Station is the town you drive to when Inverness itself is quiet, and for the last three years that drive got you fewer options too. The old Station House Café building had sat empty since 2023. An experienced local restaurateur has teamed up with the Point Reyes Good Luck Fund to bring the space back as Bar Auklet, recruiting a Bay Area chef and a sommelier for the kitchen and wine list. The opening landed in June.

A few blocks away, the old Point Reyes Roadhouse building, the one painted fire-engine red, is serving again too, under new ownership and a new name, run by a family already rooted in the town's business community.

Put together, the resident math changes. Where the choice used to be one open kitchen in Inverness or a longer drive north to Marshall or south to Olema, there are now four working rooms across a fifteen-minute radius, each tied to people with local experience in different ways.

What This Means If You Live Here

The interesting question isn't which of these four rooms has the best oysters. It's what the openings suggest about confidence in the market. The fact that local operators are expanding is a signal worth watching.

For a household in Inverness, that translates into something simple: this summer's dining map is not a pop-up. It's a set of rooms backed by people with different kinds of local experience, which makes the fair-weather calculation you might have made about West Marin dining a year ago worth revisiting now.

Places change hands here more often than the postcard version of West Marin lets on, and the story is usually in who takes over, not just what closed. If you're weighing what it actually means to live in a town where the restaurant scene has this much churn and this much resilience in the same breath, that's the kind of on-the-ground read B.G. Bates brings to every conversation about Inverness, Point Reyes Station, and the rest of West Marin. Begin your West Marin story, connect with B.G. Bates.