The Villa's Hilltop and the Roadhouse on Guerneville Road Are Both Coming Back This Year
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Gaspare Bernardo spent nearly fifty years running the restaurant on the hill above what's now Trione-Annadel State Park. He retired in 2022 and closed the doors on The Villa, the retro Italian spot with the geometric sign that generations of Santa Rosa families used for prom nights, anniversaries and birthday dinners. The building sat dark for three years. On the eve of its reopening this past May, Bernardo showed up anyway. Now in his 80s, he sat with his family over a pizza in the same dining room he'd run for four decades, watching strangers eat in a space that had been his life's work.
That building is one of two long-shuttered Santa Rosa landmarks coming back this year. The other sits a few miles west on Guerneville Road, where a roadhouse that's changed names more times than most of us can count is about to change hands again. Neither reopening is a coincidence of timing. Put them side by side and a pattern shows up that has nothing to do with restaurant economics and everything to do with what the new owners chose to keep.
The hilltop restaurant's story goes back further than The Villa. It opened in 1962 as The Hilltopper, a mid-century destination for what was then called continental cuisine, serving lobster thermidor, abalone steaks and sole meunière for under four dollars a plate. Bernardo took it over in 1976 and ran it as an Italian restaurant for almost fifty years, through decades before farm-to-table and wine country cuisine reshaped what Sonoma County eating looked like. When he retired in 2022, the building's future looked uncertain enough that many assumed it would eventually be torn down.
Instead it was bought by a trio of Mill Valley restaurateurs, Liz and Dez Fiedler and their business partner Jimmy Simpson, along with pizza maker Jeff Krupman of PizzaHacker. The couple had been searching for a second location for their Mill Valley beer garden, The Junction, when they drove past the Villa's sign one day and saw the property almost by accident. After a year of planning and another of construction, the Santa Rosa outpost of The Junction opened on May 11, 2026.
What they built is not a quiet homage. The new space includes a 4,000-square-foot beer garden with a play structure and a live-music stage, a 150-seat dining room, 30 beers on tap, a bottle shop and, unlike the original Mill Valley location, a full bar. There's a game room near the entrance stocked with shuffleboard, foosball and vintage Skee-Ball machines, deliberately screen-free. Pine siding now covers the exterior, and the old floor-to-ceiling windows have been replaced with glass walls that open the dining room directly onto the patio and the view toward Annadel.
"Everyone who comes by has a story to tell us. People remember this place."
That's Liz Fiedler, describing what it's been like to run a restaurant inside a building the whole neighborhood already has memories of.
Nearly every interior surface at The Junction has been reworked. The faded 1970s finishes are gone, replaced by cleaner lines and more glass. But two things survived on purpose: the original retro-geometric Villa sign, restored rather than replaced, and the original front doors, still hanging at the entrance. Fiedler has said the team didn't fully understand how much the building meant to people until they started renovating it and locals kept stopping by to share memories.
That distinction matters. A full teardown-and-rebuild would have erased the one thing the building actually had going for it, which was that half of Santa Rosa already had a story about eating there. Keeping the sign and the doors while gutting the rest is a specific kind of bet: renovate the parts nobody will miss, and leave the parts that make longtime residents feel like the place is still theirs.
The Guerneville Road property tells a different version of the same story, because it never had a single fifty-year identity to protect. The building dates to 1944, and its list of past lives reads like a short history of Sonoma County dining trends:
Owner Stephen Hansel cited rising food costs and declining foot traffic when he made the decision to close. He'd clearly been putting it off.
"I don't mind supporting it, but at some point I have to stop and I said to myself a few weeks ago it's going to hurt whenever I do it, I might as well do it now."
A building that has reinvented itself roughly every decade since the Truman administration is a different kind of landmark than a restaurant one man ran for fifty years. There's no single identity to be nostalgic for. What survives instead is the site itself, a low roadside building on a busy stretch of Guerneville Road that Santa Rosa residents have been driving past their entire lives, regardless of what sign was hanging out front that year.
The new tenants are Lawrence and Stephanie Bondulich, a husband-and-wife team from New York who currently run Bin 71, an Italian enoteca-style wine bar on Manhattan's Upper West Side now in its 21st year, along with The Owl's Tail, a cocktail bar serving small plates in the same neighborhood. Their new concept, called Owl & The Vine, is slated to open at 3535 Guerneville Road by the end of summer 2026, according to the business's own site.
What's notable is the language they've chosen for a building they have no personal history with. The Bondulichs describe themselves as "putting down roots in Sonoma County" and bringing "this historic roadhouse back to life." That's not the language of a couple opening a new concept in a vacant commercial space. It's the language of continuity, borrowed by people who are, by any measure, complete outsiders to this specific building's past.
Put the two projects next to each other and the coincidence stops looking like a coincidence. The Junction's owners had every reason to gut The Villa completely. Instead they restored the sign, kept the doors, and let Bernardo walk through opening night as a guest of honor. The Bondulichs have no personal connection to Willowside Café or Zazu Kitchen + Farm or any of the other names that came before them, and they're marketing their concept in the same historical, continuity-minded terms anyway.
Neither choice was necessary. A restaurant sign is easy to replace. Marketing copy about "roots" and "history" costs nothing to skip. Both sets of owners made the decision anyway, in a county where two of its more visible empty buildings had become minor local landmarks simply by sitting there, dark, for years. The instinct wasn't nostalgia for its own sake. It was a bet that Santa Rosa residents were more likely to walk through the door of a place that acknowledged what used to be there than one that pretended the building was brand new.
The Junction is open now at 3901 Montgomery Drive, with hours running 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday, and 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday. The 14-inch Margherita pizza runs $22, the Forbidden Fruit (roasted pineapple, capicola and red onion) is $26, and the Kid's Cheese Pizza, described on the menu as arriving "lightly baked" with "Nothing Green," is $20. Parking on the steep driveway can get tight during peak hours, and an overflow lot down the hill helps, though the walk up is part of the deal.
Owl & The Vine doesn't have a confirmed opening date yet, only the Bondulichs' own target of late summer 2026, which puts it squarely on the horizon as of this writing. Worth keeping an eye on the Guerneville Road storefront over the coming weeks if you've missed having a wine bar in that stretch of west Santa Rosa.
Both buildings spent years as question marks for people who drive past them regularly. This year, they both got answered.
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