North Shattuck's Oldest Names Are the Ones Getting Bigger This Year

Jared Lempert was waiting in the bakery line at the Cheese Board Collective on a recent Friday when he said the thing every regular has been thinking since April: it's an improvement, and it was way too crowded before. He wasn't talking about a new restaurant. He was talking about a business that opened on Vine Street in 1967, moved to Shattuck Avenue in 1975, and just finished the first real expansion of its footprint since the Reagan administration.

That's the story that actually happened on North Shattuck this year, and it's a different story than the one you'd expect if you've been reading about vacant storefronts elsewhere in Berkeley. The four blocks between Rose and Cedar streets, still called the Gourmet Ghetto by out-of-towners even though the business association dropped that nickname from its own marketing years ago, didn't get colonized by a wave of new concepts chasing a hot corridor. It got bigger versions of the three names that were already there.

The Line That Got Shorter, Not the Business

The Cheese Board Collective took over the lease on the produce store next door at 1500 Shattuck back in 2018, with plans to knock out a wall and finally give its cheese counter and bakery room to breathe. Then the pandemic hit in March 2020 and the project sat untouched for years. Construction didn't get back to full speed until 2025, and starting in January 2026 the collective ran its retail operation out of a shipping container parked on the sidewalk while workers dropped the floor of the new space by eighteen inches to match the original building.

The doors reopened on April 10, 2026. The combined space now runs 4,600 square feet, roughly double what it was, with a separate entrance and exit so customers aren't funneling through the same narrow doorway they'd used since 1975. It also brought back something the pandemic had quietly erased: full cheese service, meaning a worker behind the counter can talk you through a wedge and hand you a sample, not just ring up whatever's pre-wrapped.

Eight years to double the size of a building the collective already owned outright is a useful number if you've ever wondered why a stretch of storefronts that's been full for fifty years still looks basically frozen in place. The Cheese Board owns its buildings and the ones next to them. Even that wasn't enough to make this fast.

The Bar Next Door Nobody Thought Would Open

A hundred feet south, the space that used to hold César sat empty for more than three years after that restaurant closed in July 2022, long enough that Nosh readers were still emailing the East Bay food press to complain about it as recently as this past winter. Alice Waters' team took over the space and opened Bar Panisse there on December 11, 2025, at first walk-in only and open four nights a week. By spring it had expanded to seven nights.

Chef Amelia Telc, who came from Tartine in San Francisco and Mission Chinese Food in New York, runs a short menu of small plates alongside a cocktail list built the way the restaurant next door builds its own ingredient list: lemon verbena from Seven Moons Farm, Meyer lemons in the gimlet, honey from the rooftop hives at Chez Panisse itself. Drinks run $12 to $14. Berkeley has plenty of bars, most of them built around beer and a student crowd, and Bar Panisse is one of the few genuine cocktail rooms the city has, a gap that's long made Oakland's drinking scene look more developed by comparison.

What matters for the neighborhood isn't that a new bar opened. It's that the bar sits inside the same three-year build-out that had left a storefront dark since 2022, and it's staffed and sourced by the same 55-year-old kitchen next door rather than by an outside operator trying to cash in on the address.

The Old Name Coming Back Downtown

The Riemann family opened the first Top Dog on Berkeley's Durant Avenue in 1966, the same decade Peet's and Cheese Board were getting started in Berkeley. For most of the last dozen years, the story of Top Dog has been contraction. The Hearst Avenue location closed in 2013. The Rockridge shop shut down in 2014 after 25 years. The Center Street location, open for two decades, closed in 2024. Most recently, the Lakeshore Avenue outpost in Oakland closed in October 2025 after 14 years, when a new building owner declined to renew the lease. By late 2025, the original Durant Avenue shop was the only Top Dog left standing.

That run of closures is what makes the current news worth noticing. Berkeleyside confirmed on August 31, 2026, that Top Dog is opening a second location at 2021 Shattuck Ave., between University and Addison, sharing the space with The BreakRoom, a two-floor cocktail and billiards bar. The new spot puts Top Dog within easy walking distance of both UC Berkeley and Berkeley High. It's being developed with BreakRoom owner August Wagele, who grew up in Berkeley and has his own long history with the hot dog stand. An employee confirmed the opening is expected sometime this month.

A business that spent over a dozen years losing ground is opening a second working shop again, and it's doing it in the same year that its two most famous neighbors up the street finally got more room of their own.

The Walk This Actually Adds Up To

Line these three up on a map and you get a straight shot down Shattuck Avenue: the newly doubled Cheese Board at 1500 and 1512, Bar Panisse at 1515 right across the street from it, and the new Top Dog roughly a mile south near University and Addison. It's a walkable stretch either way, and for the first time in years, all three anchors on it are either freshly renovated or freshly reopened rather than boarded up or under construction.

None of this means the corridor stopped adding genuinely new names, too. Fourth Street picked up a modern Turkish restaurant, Divan, which soft-opened for lunch service on June 22, 2026. The Epicurious Garden arcade at 1511 Shattuck got an ice cream shop, Serotonin Scoops, a few doors down from Dera Cafe. Those are real additions and worth a visit on their own. But they're not the headline. The headline this year belongs to three businesses that predate most of their customers, finally getting the physical space their decades of demand had already earned them.

If you've walked North Shattuck for years and assumed the corridor's oldest names were just holding on, that assumption is out of date. They spent 2025 and 2026 expanding instead.

Watching a corridor's oldest businesses invest in more square footage, rather than hand their leases to someone else, tells you something about a block's staying power that a listing sheet never will. If you're weighing what a stretch of Berkeley like this one actually means for a home nearby, Mark P. Choi tracks these blocks the same way he tracks comps, one storefront at a time.