Inverness's New Restaurants All Have the Same Type of Owner
August 13, 2026
August 13, 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.
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.
Here's the pattern worth noticing. None of the four operators filling these spaces are outsiders arriving with a concept they've never tested. Every one of them is already running a business somewhere else on this same stretch of coast.
None of this is speculative capital chasing a lifestyle fantasy. These are people who already know what a Tuesday in February looks like on this coast, who have already built out a kitchen under West Marin's well and septic constraints, and who are choosing to do it again. That's a different kind of bet than a first-time restaurant opening cold in a resort town, and it's the reason a resident can reasonably expect these rooms to still be here next year, not just this summer.
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.
Harriman describes 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.
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 backed by an operator who has already survived the hardest years of running a restaurant here.
The interesting question isn't which of these four rooms has the best oysters. It's why local operators, and not outside investors, are the ones signing these leases in 2026. The people who know exactly how many covers a slow Tuesday produces, and what it costs to build a kitchen around a rural water system, are the ones expanding. That's not a coincidence. It's a signal about confidence in the market from the people positioned to actually judge it.
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 run by people with a track record of staying open through the slow months, which means the fair-weather calculation you might have made about West Marin dining a year ago is 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.
B.G. is dedicated to her community and continues to be a known resource with a unique and knowledgeable perspective on all aspects of West Marin.
