What's New On Ocean Avenue This Summer, From An Ingleside Terraces Resident's Point Of View

If you live inside the Urbano Drive oval, you already know Ocean Avenue is the closest thing you have to a main street. What you may not have clocked is how much of it changed in the last six months. Between February and July of 2026, at least four new food businesses opened on the corridor, a longtime hardware store landed on the city's Legacy Business Registry, and the Ocean Avenue Association started fielding a public argument over the red transit lanes running down the middle of it.

Taken together, the shift is quieter than a headline suggests. Ocean Avenue is not reinventing itself. It is stacking a new layer of owner-operated businesses on top of the old ones, and the result is a walkable corridor that finally rewards the fifteen-minute stroll from Entrada Court.

The new arrivals, in the order you'd hit them walking east

Start at Junipero Serra and walk toward City College. Here is what has opened since spring:

• San Marcos Food Center, 1712 Ocean Ave. A specialty Mexican grocer that quietly opened on June 16 and has been making improvements ever since. Owner Luis Ventura comes to the neighborhood with 12 years of experience from working for Mi Rancho Supermarket in San Jose and Redwood City. Grand opening was scheduled for July 25. Fresh produce out front, a meat counter in the back, open 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily.
• Taquería Gonzalez, in the former Taquería El Jalapeño space. The Gonzalez family took over the longstanding Taquería El Jalapeño space last month to open their second restaurant in the city. New sign, new paint, same footprint.
• Megan's Table, 1422 Ocean Ave. Cambodian and Thai, family-run, opened on Ingleside's Ocean Avenue late last week. It's owned by two families, one Cambodian and the other Thai, and is named after one of the owners' daughters. The menu runs from Cha Kroeung and pumpkin curry to pad see ew.
• Taishan Cuisine, 1155 Ocean Ave. A Chinatown transplant. Drawing from the success of their location on Broadway in Chinatown, the owners have set out to bring late-night Chinese food to Ingleside, something Chak felt the street was missing. Shumai, century egg pork congee, braised lamb with beancurd sticks, beef chow fun.
• Go Chicken, in the former Wok Up space at the Lakeside Village end. A new restaurant cooking up Chinese cuisine soft-opened on Wednesday on Lakeside Village's Ocean Avenue. Go Chicken serves Asian-inspired classics in the space of the former Hong Kong-style restaurant Wok Up which opened in August last year. Ten menu sections, including chow fun, wok, tofu, and rice.
• ROAR, 2301 Ocean Ave. A women's strength studio. A woman-owned exercise studio focused on muscle conditioning courses designed for women is open on Ocean Avenue. ROAR opened in Ingleside in August and welcomes anyone of any fitness level to join. With the slogan "where women rise," the company wants attendees to leave feeling empowered and supported. The Ingleside space is themed with vintage photos of women weight lifting on the beach.
• Charm Coffee, in the former Kaisen Don space. Third-wave, using Linea Caffe beans. The block of Ocean Avenue hasn't had a coffee joint since Fog Lifter Cafe transformed into That's Amore Woodfired Pizza a few years ago.
• MavyBeauty, 1410 Ocean Ave. Lash extensions and permanent jewelry from a licensed esthetician who was born and raised around this neighborhood.

That is eight owner-run businesses inside a roughly ten-block stretch, several of them replacing spaces that had gone dark or turned over quickly.

The pattern under the openings

Look at the list twice and the through-line is obvious. None of these are national chains. Every one has an owner whose name is on the door or in the local paper. The Ocean Avenue Association's executive director, Megan Catmull, said it plainly when San Marcos opened:

"One of the things that makes our corridor special is its incredible diversity of locally owned businesses, and San Marcos is a great addition to that mix."

That is the thesis for anyone paying rent inside Ingleside Terraces. When people talk about Ocean Avenue "improving," they usually mean the sidewalks or the transit lanes. The actual improvement is compositional. The corridor has spent the last cycle filling in with independent operators who are betting on repeat foot traffic from the surrounding blocks, which is you.

Two data points sharpen the picture. Charm Coffee moved into a space that had been Kaisen Don. Go Chicken took over a Wok Up that had only opened the previous August. Turnover is real. What is different in 2026 is that the replacements are landing faster and coming in with clearer local ties than the businesses they replaced.

The anchors that make the newcomers possible

None of this works without the old guard. In July, Win Long Hardware on Ingleside's Ocean Avenue, the one-stop shop for all manner of light construction and household goods, opened in 2014, bringing a much-needed hardware store to a neighborhood that had been without one for 25 years, according to its Legacy Business nomination. Owner Julie Chin's Irving Street store qualified the pair for the SF Legacy Business Registry, and the Ocean Avenue location joined in 2026. If you have ever run out of a specific gauge of picture wire on a Saturday morning, you already understand why this matters more than any restaurant opening.

Other anchors doing quiet work: Ocean Ale House, which the mayor stopped by earlier this year for a City Day event and which local news outlet the Ingleside Light frequently covers for community fundraisers; That's Amore Woodfired Pizza, still holding down Charm's former block; and the recently expanded H Mart in the greater Ingleside, whose new wing, per Ingleside Light coverage in June, grows the supermarket's footprint by a third and adds all kinds of new shopping opportunities.

A Saturday loop that only makes sense if you live here

Here is the walk to hand a visiting friend, or to do alone when the fog burns off around 11:

1. Coffee at Charm Coffee. Grab it to go if the light is good.
2. Walk south on Victoria one block, turn right on Urbano Drive, left on Borica, right on Entrada Court. You are now at the Ingleside Terraces Sundial. It is a twenty-eight foot marble and concrete gnomon that was to become the focal point of its own park and Ingleside Terraces, dedicated on October 10, 1913. Fifteen hundred people came to the opening at night, which is a very Ingleside decision for a monument that only works when the sun is out.
3. Loop the oval. By 1912, Ingleside Terraces had opened, with Urbano Drive paved on the loop of the old racetrack. The 0.92 miles of Urbano is almost exactly the length of the old thoroughbred track, which is why the block feels the way it does.
4. Back to Ocean for lunch. Taishan for shumai and congee if you want late-morning quiet, Megan's Table if you want the Cha Kroeung, Taquería Gonzalez if you want the counter.
5. San Marcos Food Center for the week's produce and a bunch of flowers on the walk home.

If your friend has ever asked why anyone lives inside Urbano's oval, that loop is the answer. The Sundial is not the point. The point is that a 28-foot Roman column is a five-minute detour from lunch.

What to watch on the corridor

Two things are worth tracking for anyone who owns here:

The proposed four-story building at 2445 Ocean Ave. A project application was filed with the San Francisco Planning Department on Feb. 14 to demolish 2445 Ocean Ave. The proposal calls for the first two stories to be occupied by commercial tenants in 3,845 square feet of space and the third and fourth floors will be 3,512 square feet of residential space, including outdoor open space for each unit. No parking is included in the plans. Whatever you think of the design, that block is where the next round of ground-floor tenants will land.

The red-lane fight. Recent local reporting shows anti-Ocean Avenue red lanes and natural turf advocates used the opportunity to tell the mayor about their issues at a recent City Day appearance. Whatever the outcome, it will change how the corridor drives, how deliveries arrive, and how easily your out-of-town relatives find parking on a Saturday afternoon.

The short version

Ocean Avenue in the summer of 2026 is denser, more independent, and more walkable from Ingleside Terraces than it has been in a decade. The Sundial has not moved. What has changed is the number of reasons to go the other direction on your walk.

If you are thinking about how any of this shows up in what your home is worth, or you are simply curious what a design-first listing looks like in this pocket of the city, Mandy Lee is happy to talk. Request a free home valuation whenever you are ready.