The Corner Of Bay Park Where San Diego's Next Restaurant Gets Its Start
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
On a Wednesday night at The Gärten, the picnic tables fill in around six. Someone's dog naps under the bench seating. A three-piece band sets up near the string lights, and the line for pizza wraps past the mead counter. If you live in Bay Park, you've probably done this exact evening a dozen times without thinking much about it. It's the beer garden on Banks Street, the one next to the brewery, the one where you can get a mead flight and a wood-fired pie and call it dinner.
What most regulars don't clock is that the guy who's been running that wood-fired oven for the last two years just left. And where he went, and what he took with him, says more about this stretch of Bay Park than any single night out ever could.
Pizza Cassette started in 2022 as a pop-up, and for most of its run it was the sole food vendor inside The Gärten. Founder James "Jimmy" Terwilliger built the whole operation around scratch cooking: grinding his own sausage, hand-forming meatballs, curing and roasting pastrami on site, working a Neapolitan-style dough with a shorter fermentation for a crust he describes as more floppy, more digestible, more about flavor than crunch.
After nearly two years of looking for the right space, Terwilliger found one on Garnet Avenue in Pacific Beach, in the former Hoboken Pizza storefront. Pizza Cassette opened there in April 2026, its first real walls and roof, with 60 to 80 indoor seats and a possible patio carved out of the back lot.
The number that ought to reframe how you think about that Bay Park pop-up: Times of San Diego reported that Pizza Cassette generated roughly $1.5 million in food sales in 2025, while it was still technically a tent operation on a shared patio, selling 1,200 to 1,800 pizzas a week and spiking to 2,000 during peak August traffic. That's not a hobby stand serving overflow drinkers. That's a restaurant that hadn't built its restaurant yet.
The one thing that changed on the move says something too. The wood-fired oven that defined the Gärten pies didn't make the trip to PB. Terwilliger swapped in an Italian electric oven instead, because open-flame permits are harder to secure on Garnet Avenue. Bay Park, in other words, gave him a permitting environment Pacific Beach couldn't match. The neighborhood didn't just host the test kitchen. It made the test kitchen possible.
Calling it "the beer garden" undersells the mechanics. The Gärten is a 2,500-square-foot shared space at 5322 Banks Street built around four separate, independently owned businesses: Deft Brewing, Lost Cause Meadery, Oddish Wine, and, until this year, Pizza Cassette. Guests order from whichever vendor they want and sit wherever there's room. It opened in October 2022, and it exists because of a 2019 change to California's alcoholic beverage control rules that, for the first time, let breweries and wineries co-license the same patio. Lost Cause and Deft were the first operators in San Diego County to use it.
Lost Cause Meadery isn't a minor player in that lineup. Founded in 2017 by Billy and Suzanna Beltz, it tied for the most medals at the Mazer Cup International, the world's largest mead competition, in both 2019 and 2020, making it one of the most decorated meaderies in the country two years running. That track record is part of why the company expanded its footprint on Banks Street rather than pulling back.
Beltz has described the whole project simply: "we saw how much customers loved the shared patio concept." That's the actual model. Four operators, one address, low overhead for anyone testing a new concept, and a built-in audience that shows up on a Wednesday whether or not there's a formal reason to.
A few blocks over on Napa Street, a completely different rhythm has been running for years with none of the turnover. Tio Leo's has hosted a Sunday Jazz Night, presented by Holly Hofmann, that regulars and reviewers alike have called one of the last true jazz lounges left in San Diego. The lounge has live music most evenings, but Sunday is the one night it's built entirely around jazz, and it's stayed that way while restaurant concepts a mile away were opening, closing, and reinventing themselves.
Put those two facts next to each other and you get a clearer picture of what Bay Park actually is on a weekly basis. Banks Street is where new ideas get tested cheaply and, if they work, get exported. Napa Street is where one thing has worked for long enough that nobody's trying to replace it. Same neighborhood, same week, two entirely different bets.
None of this happens in isolation from the neighborhood's other steady names, the ones that don't graduate anywhere because they've already found their footing:
These are the businesses that make Bay Park feel finished on any given night, the ones you don't think about because they're simply there. They're the counterweight to Banks Street's churn.
Bay Park doesn't read like a neighborhood built for launching things. It sits behind Mission Bay, off Morena Boulevard, not quite beach and not quite canyon, easy to describe only in terms of what it's next to. But the corner of Banks Street has now done this twice: Lost Cause Meadery built a national reputation there before it ever needed a bigger building, and Pizza Cassette used two years on that same patio to prove a concept that a $1.5 million pop-up year later, walked straight into its own PB storefront.
If you've spent a Wednesday night at The Gärten, you weren't just getting dinner. You were standing in the room where the next thing gets figured out, whether the sign out front says so or not.
We spend a lot of our own time on these same blocks, watching which spots turn into something bigger and which ones settle in for the long run. If you're ever curious what any of that means for a specific property near Banks Street, or you just want to talk through what's changing in the neighborhood, the Chris Love Team is easy to find and always glad to compare notes. And if a valuation on your own place is on your mind, we're happy to walk through that too.
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