In January, the dining room at 209 Forest Avenue went quiet. Max Muramatsu, the Tokyo-born, French-trained chef who had run Max's Grill out of that address for 22 years, closed the doors. For anyone who has lived in Pacific Grove longer than a season, that address meant something specific: a small, family-run room where the same two people, Max in the kitchen and his wife Yuko out front, had been feeding the same regulars since 2003.
What happened next is the part worth paying attention to, because it did not happen the way restaurant turnover usually happens in a small coastal town. The space did not sit dark for a year. It did not become a wine bar chain's fourth location or a fast-casual concept tested out on tourists. Within about six weeks, a new family moved in and started cooking.
The Room at 209 Forest Didn't Stay Empty Long
La Côte Bleue opened in March, and it is, in its own way, a mirror of what it replaced. Chef-owner Miguel Ponce runs the kitchen with his father Juan, who handles pastry, and his older brother Carlos, who started in the same Fisherman's Grotto kitchen on Monterey's Wharf at sixteen before spending a formative year working under Cal Stamenov at Cella Restaurant. It is, by every detail available, still a family operation in the same room, just a different family, with a different last name on the door and, on at least one early night, live pop-folk from a singer-songwriter performing in the corner.
Max and Yuko left their own note behind for the regulars who had followed them for two decades:
"It has been our greatest joy and privilege to welcome you into our restaurant here in Pacific Grove."
That is the kind of sentence that only means something if you know the address, the years, and the two people who wrote it. It is also, as it turns out, not an isolated story this year.
Down the Hill, a Different Kind of Restart
A short walk toward the water, Crema went through its own version of this. The café had built a following under owner Tamie Aceves, then went dark before reopening in April at a new address, 631 Ocean View Boulevard, with a limited menu and a limited schedule while the business waits on its liquor license to clear. It is not the same building Crema occupied before, but it is the same owner, the same name, and by all early accounts the same reason people missed it in the first place.
Here is what changed hands on the two blocks that anchor downtown dining, if you are keeping a mental map:
- 209 Forest Avenue — Max's Grill closed in January, La Côte Bleue opened in March
- 631 Ocean View Boulevard — Crema's new address, reopened in April, still awaiting its liquor license
- Lighthouse Avenue — Colette's, still a fairly recent arrival as downtown's first standalone ice cream shop
That third one is a different kind of story than the first two, because it is not about a restaurant closing and reopening. It is a story about something that, on paper, should have existed here all along and simply didn't.
The Ice Cream Problem Nobody Talked About
Pacific Grove is a beach town. It has a coastline, a boardwalk crowd, tourists who come specifically to walk Ocean View Boulevard and stop somewhere for a treat. And for years, it did not have a dedicated ice cream shop. Locals made do with Lucy's on Lighthouse, which scoops another town's brand, Marianne's Ice Cream out of Santa Cruz, and with the freezer case at Rite Aid, which closed for good when the chain went through its bankruptcy.
That gap closed when Nicole and Roy Ballesteros opened Colette's on Lighthouse Avenue, making their own ice cream on site. Roy trained at an ice cream school in Florida and later took a business-operations workshop in Boise before the two of them opened the shop, rotating through roughly fifteen flavors built around the classics, vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, plus rocky road and pistachio, with a dairy-free option always in the case. The opening was notable enough that it came up at a City Council meeting, where Councilmember Chaps Poduri told the room he was glad the town finally had one.
It is a small thing, an ice cream shop, until you notice what it says about the town around it. A place that markets itself as a beach destination went years relying on a drugstore freezer case for something as basic as a scoop of vanilla. That is not the kind of gap that shows up in a chamber of commerce brochure. It shows up when you actually live here and want dessert on a Tuesday.
What Didn't Change
While Forest Avenue and Ocean View Boulevard were in motion this spring, the one fixed point in Pacific Grove's food calendar stayed exactly where it has always been. The Pacific Grove Certified Farmers' Market still runs every Monday afternoon, 3 to 7 p.m. in summer, at the corner of Central and Grand, across from the library at Jewell Park, run by the nonprofit Everyone's Harvest. It still takes EBT, WIC, and Senior FMNP benefits, and it still matches EBT spending dollar for dollar on produce, up to $30 a day. If the restaurant scene spent early 2026 in motion, Monday afternoon at Jewell Park is the one thing that held still through all of it.
That contrast is the actual story here, more than any single opening or closure. Pacific Grove did not lose its character this year. It replaced one generation of independent owners with another, in the same buildings, on the same streets, without a single chain moving in to fill the gap. Max Muramatsu's 22 years passed directly to Miguel Ponce and his family. Tamie Aceves picked her own business back up rather than letting someone else take the name. And a town that had quietly gone without proper ice cream finally got a couple willing to make it themselves rather than wait for a franchise to notice the opening.
If you have lived here a while, you already know which of these four addresses you have walked past most. If you are new to the Peninsula and trying to get your bearings, this is the version of Pacific Grove that does not show up in a listing photo: a town small enough that a restaurant closing is neighborhood news, and stubborn enough that every replacement keeps it in the hands of somebody who lives here too.
For those thinking further down the road about property on this stretch of the coast, from Forest Avenue to Ocean View Boulevard and the quieter streets between them, Ryan Sherman has spent years watching this town's small storefronts turn over and its character hold steady. If you would like to talk about what owning here actually looks like, day to day, schedule a private consultation.
