Walk the Grand Avenue side of Lake Merritt on a Tuesday evening in August and you can hear the neighborhood re-tuning itself. A crew is hanging a papier-mâché sea creature in a window that used to belong to Sidebar. A block east, the awning over the old Enssaro storefront looks a little too clean, because the sign came down in late July. Across Perkins, a line spills out of a Yemeni coffee shop that did not exist last spring.
Adams Point residents have watched Grand Avenue absorb slow change for years. What is happening this summer is different. Two decades of one culinary identity are giving way inside a six-month window, and the operators moving in are all making the same bet: that Lake Merritt itself, not just its address, is the neighborhood's most bankable asset.
If you live here, this is the field guide for the season.
The Block That Turned Over This Summer
The most talked-about departure is Enssaro. After operating on Grand Avenue near Lake Merritt for roughly two decades, Enssaro is relocating to Rockridge, with the new location opening Friday, July 31, and the family team of mother, daughter, and son staying intact. The new address is 5897 College Avenue, and the interior was designed by Kalu Gebreyohannes-Royster of Liyu Designs, who also designed Meski in San Francisco and Oakland's Lucy Blue. For neighbors who treated the injera platter as a default weeknight dinner, this is a real loss. It also opens up prime frontage across from the lake.
The arrival that fills the imagination in the other direction is Bar Skula. Maria Alderete and Rick Mitchell, the operators known for Luka's Taproom, took over the former Sidebar space on Grand Avenue for a new high-end seafood-focused eatery. The two are calling the project a Luka's remix, and the team behind the counter is the crew that worked together for close to two decades at the old spot. At launch the room is walk-ins only, with reservations coming once service pacing settles and the bar staying first-come, first-served.
The murals are the tell. Alderete started with a Google search for underwater Lake Merritt creatures, landed on a 2020 Oaklandside story about the bat rays, leopard sharks, and otters that have made their way into the lagoon, and then folded in the urban legend of the Lake Merritt Monster. Oakland muralist Pancho Pescador painted the results across ocean-blue walls.
That is a restaurant whose entire visual identity is a love letter to the body of water outside its front door. It is worth pausing on how unusual that is. For most of Grand Avenue's modern history, the lake has been scenery. Bar Skula is treating it as source material.
Why The Lake Is Suddenly The Main Character
Bar Skula is not doing this in a vacuum. There is a civic push behind it.
The Love Our Lake program, run from Memorial Day through Labor Day, is a coalition of Children's Fairyland, the Oakland Museum of California, the Oakland Public Library, Visit Oakland, the Oakland Parks & Recreation Foundation, and PG&E, all coordinating programming around the shoreline. This is the second summer of the initiative. It has moved the lake from a place people happen to walk around into a season with a calendar.
That calendar hit its peak this year on Saturday, June 27, when the 7th Annual LakeFest Oakland brought music, art, and roughly 20,000 attendees to the Sailboat House at 568 Bellevue Avenue. If you were downstairs at the farmers market that morning, you already knew: the neighborhood was going to be loud, in a good way, until sunset.
The Yemeni coffee wave is the smaller-scale version of the same story. Oasis Coffee opened in Adams Point, just across from Lake Merritt, serving fresh-brewed Yemeni coffee plus bagels and pastries. The address is 447 Perkins Street. It is a short walk from the lake path, which is precisely the point. New operators are choosing frontage that reads as lake-adjacent, not just Grand Avenue-adjacent.
A Saturday, Mapped
If a friend is visiting for the first time since last fall and asks what has actually changed, here is the walk to give them.
- Start at the Grand Lake Farmers' Market on the Splash Pad Park side. It has anchored Saturdays on this stretch of Grand for years, and it is still the best low-lift introduction to what people cook at home here.
- Cut across to Bar Skula for a mid-morning look at the murals through the front glass. Come back for dinner.
- Loop into Lakeside Park and the Gardens at Lake Merritt, a seven-acre collection of themed gardens ranging from bonsai to Mediterranean and edible plants. Most residents have walked past it a hundred times and been inside twice.
- If kids are in the group, detour to Children's Fairyland, a 10-acre park on the shores of Lake Merritt built for young children to create, imagine, and play. It is the same retro miniature theme park you remember, and that is the appeal.
- Coffee at Oasis on Perkins, or the Yemeni pour-over of your choice.
- Dinner at Bar Skula. Sit at the bar if the wait for a table looks long. Watch the murals do their work while you eat.
- End the night walking the perimeter under the Necklace of Lights, the '20s-era lampposts and thousands of cafe lights strung around the water's edge. A Dolce Vita gondola ride is available if the group is in that kind of mood.
That is roughly nine hours. You can shorten it by skipping either the gardens or Fairyland, but not both.
The Corners That Did Not Change (And Why That Matters)
The turnover story only reads as a story because so much of Adams Point has held steady.
Grand Lake Kitchen is still on Grand Avenue and still one of the reliable brunch reservations on the block. It was on the list of participating restaurants for Oakland Restaurant Week, which ran March 12 to 22, 2026, alongside more than 140 restaurants in a city Condé Nast Traveler named the #1 Best Food City in the U.S. in both 2024 and 2025. That kind of ranking usually gets rolled up into national coverage that flattens the neighborhoods it depends on. Adams Point residents already know which stretch of that ranking is theirs.
Grand Avenue Thai Cuisine is still open seven days a week, still doing the lemongrass tilapia lunch, still one of the best answers to what you actually want to eat on a weeknight. The Grand Lake Theater still runs its marquee messages. Whole Foods on Vernon is still the de facto neighborhood center. Kwik Way and Caña still hold the corner at Lakeshore and Grand.
The Camron-Stanford House, the Victorian house museum on the lake, is still one of the most underused cultural assets in the neighborhood. If you have lived here five years and never stepped inside, this is your reminder.
The point of the list is not comfort. It is contrast. The reason the Bar Skula opening feels like a genuine turn, and not just another restaurant story, is that the surrounding block has changed so little. When one anchor moves, it moves against a stable frame, and residents feel it.
What To Try Before Fall
A short list, keyed to the season and to what is actually new or newly relevant:
- Bar Skula for dinner in the first month, before reservations start.
- Oasis Coffee on a weekday morning, when the line is short and you can actually taste what Yemeni-style brewing does with the beans.
- The Gardens at Lake Merritt in early September, when the Mediterranean beds still look right and the crowds thin.
- A weekday walk under the Necklace of Lights after 8 p.m., which is the shoulder hour between joggers and late diners.
- One last visit to what remains of the pre-Enssaro Grand, before another turnover starts the next chapter.
By November the story will have shifted again. New signage. A different rhythm at the corners. That is what living in Adams Point has always felt like, only accelerated.
If you are thinking through what any of this means for your own block, whether you own here already or are watching values shift as the retail mix changes, the team at Red Oak Realty knows this stretch of Grand Avenue at the door-by-door level. Reach out when you want a conversation grounded in the actual neighborhood, not the version of it that shows up in national rankings.
