The Fence Around 145 First Street Is Finally Coming Down

Walk State Street on a Thursday evening this month and you will hit the farmers market before you hit anything else. Tables of stone fruit, a folding chair band playing somewhere past the cheese stand, a line for whatever the hot food vendor is running that week. Cut over to First Street, though, and you will still find the same plywood fence that has wrapped the old House on First space for years. A hand-painted sign leans against it advertising something called LUNA. Nobody walking past seems entirely sure when that sign becomes a restaurant.

It becomes one in early September. And the gap between "fenced lot" and "open for dinner" says something about how downtown Los Altos actually works that a list of new openings never quite captures.

What Two Years of Plywood Actually Bought

LUNA Mexican Kitchen's third location has been under construction at 145 First St. for more than two years, according to the Los Altos Town Crier, which reported the restaurant is now expected to open in early September. That is a long stretch for a build-out, and the reason isn't red tape. It's the property itself. Chef and founder Jo Lerma-Lopez has talked about wanting to keep the 1920s Craftsman home's redwoods and white picket fence intact while adding an outdoor bar and expanding the patio to match the feel of LUNA's original Alameda location in San Jose, which she opened in June 2017 before adding a second restaurant at the Pruneyard in Campbell in 2019. Building an outdoor bar into a century-old residential structure without losing what made you want the building in the first place takes longer than gutting a commercial storefront. That's most of what those two-plus years bought.

Kim Mosley, president and CEO of the Los Altos Chamber of Commerce, put it this way when the opening date was confirmed:

"Their new outdoor space on First Street is among the finest in all of Los Altos, a spectacular place for neighbors to gather over an exceptional meal."

LUNA's name stands for Local, Unrefined, Natural, Authentic, and the brand already carries a Michelin Bib Gourmand recognition from its earlier locations. None of that required the fence to come down any faster. The timeline was set by the building, not the concept.

A Sushi Counter That Skipped the Waiting

Compare that to what happened a few blocks away at the former home of Bevri, the Georgian restaurant that used to occupy a small storefront downtown. The team behind Mountain View's Sushi Jin opened Haru Japanese Restaurant in that same space on May 22, according to Palo Alto Online. No fence, no months of visible framing, no sign propped against plywood. Chef-owner Gavin Liang moved his kitchen into an existing restaurant shell and started serving gozen, the traditional Japanese set meal with a main dish, rice, miso soup and sides on one tray, along with an eight-piece omakase sushi tasting for $63.

Liang has been building high-end Japanese restaurants in the Bay Area for a decade. He co-founded Hinata, an omakase spot in San Francisco, in 2016, then helped open the kaiseki restaurant Sasa two years later, then opened Sushi Jin in 2022. Haru is a deliberate step down in formality from those, not up. "So many omakase restaurants open down in Santa Clara County," Liang told Palo Alto Online, so he wanted something more casual and more affordable instead. The menu backs that up: appetizers between $7 and $23, a 12-piece deep-fried roll called the Haru Roll running $14 to $32, and an ikura uni don at $40 for those who want to spend a little more.

The difference between Haru and LUNA isn't ambition or investment. Liang brought serious pedigree to a casual price point, and Lerma-Lopez brought a proven concept to a more complicated building. The difference is what each space needed physically before it could open. One needed a menu change. The other needed a new patio, a new bar, and two years of careful construction inside a house that predates the restaurant business entirely.

The Thursday Constant

None of this would matter much to someone who lives here if downtown went quiet while it waited. It doesn't, because the farmers market never stopped running underneath both stories.

The Downtown Los Altos Farmers' Market has occupied State Street every Thursday from 4 to 8 p.m. since April 30, and it's staying through the fall. LAVA's own event calendar lists Oct. 29 as the closing week, though a couple of other market-tracking sites still show a mid-October end date, so anyone planning around the very last Thursday should double check closer to the date. Either way, the market has already run through the entire stretch of construction fencing on First Street and the entire opening of Haru without missing a week.

It isn't just produce. The market pairs live music and a rotating wine vendor with the food stalls each week. On Aug. 6, that meant musician Norm Kahan playing while LAVA Summer Bubbles poured wine by the glass. It's run by the Los Altos Village Association, which has been promoting downtown businesses since the 1960s, in partnership with the Pacific Coast Farmers' Market Association, and it's sponsored by State Street Market, the Los Altos Mountain View Community Foundation and the city itself. That's a lot of institutional weight behind what looks, from the sidewalk, like a produce stand with a folding table.

That weight is the point. A restaurant space can sit behind plywood for two years without downtown losing its Thursday rhythm, because the rhythm was never coming from the restaurants in the first place. It comes from the market, which has been the one fixed appointment on State Street since before either LUNA or Haru signed a lease.

What This Fall Actually Looks Like

If you already walk State Street on Thursdays, here's the practical shape of the next few months. Haru is already in rotation, close enough to the market that a pre-dinner stroll through the produce stalls and a sushi counter afterward is an easy pairing. LUNA lands in early September, which puts its opening roughly six or seven weeks before the market's own closing stretch in late October. For a few weeks this fall, State Street and First Street will both have something new to walk toward on a Thursday night, one restaurant that opened with barely a ripple and one that took two years to get the patio right.

Neither timeline tells you anything is wrong with downtown Los Altos. It tells you the buildings decide the pace, and the market decides the mood in between.

If you're weighing what any of this means for property here, whether you're watching a storefront and wondering what it says about the block, or you're a longtime resident curious how a changing downtown affects your home's place in it, Tony Ngai tracks Los Altos at the street level, not just the spreadsheet level. Request a free neighborhood market report and home valuation to see how these changes are showing up in the numbers.