Sonoma Plaza Is Trading One Kind of Business for Another This Summer

"We're a little too big and a lot too small to compete on the higher stage." That's how Gabe Luddy, the fourth-generation cheesemaker behind Vella Cheese Company, explained why his family's 94-year-old shop on Second Street East is closing production this month. It's a strange thing to hear about a business that survived Prohibition, the 1906 earthquake, and a fire that once gutted its building. What finally got Vella wasn't a disaster. It was math.

The same summer that math caught up with Vella, two of the Plaza's most anticipated new restaurants opened their doors within a few blocks of the cheese shop's storefront. If you've walked the square lately, you've probably noticed both. What you may not have noticed is the pattern connecting them, and what it says about who gets to occupy Sonoma Plaza's most visible corners right now.

The Corner That Used to Be Maya

For more than two decades, the building at First and East Napa streets belonged to Maya Restaurant, a Mexican restaurant that closed after its owners retired. In July, it reopened as Dead Letter, a modern California spot from Sondra Bernstein and John Toulze, the longtime partners behind The Girl & The Fig and Poppy. Head chef Jeremy Zimmerman is running a menu built around charcoal-fired dishes and shareable plates, from roasted carrots with raita and crispy ginger to sliced raw rockfish with strawberry aguachile. The decor plays on the building's history as a post office, and for months before opening, curious locals pressed against the windows trying to see inside.

Dead Letter didn't appear out of nowhere. It's the fourth concept from a restaurant group that already runs two established Sonoma properties. That matters more than it might seem.

Two Kitchens Under One Roof

A few blocks over, at 497 First Street West, the Taub Family Outpost building has become the Plaza's other big story. The restored 1910 Spanish Colonial bank went through extensive seismic upgrades before reopening in 2020 as a market and restaurant complex, and this May it added Smash on the ground floor and The Beacon, a speakeasy cocktail bar, upstairs. The team behind it includes chef Ari Weiswasser, a 2025 James Beard semifinalist who also runs Glen Ellen Star and Stella, along with managing partner Spencer Waite and Ashley Waite. Smash keeps its menu tight: smashburgers, fried chicken sandwiches, milkshakes, and a rotating list of cocktails available both upstairs and down, seven days a week for lunch and dinner.

Like Dead Letter, Smash is a fourth or fifth address for a group that already had two restaurants a few miles up the valley in Glen Ellen and Kenwood.

What These Two Have in Common

Here's the pattern. Both of the Plaza's headline openings this year came from restaurant groups that already had a foothold elsewhere in Sonoma Valley. Neither Weiswasser's team nor Bernstein and Toulze's team was starting from zero. They had existing staff to draw from, existing supplier relationships, and an existing customer base that already trusted their cooking at Glen Ellen Star, Stella, The Girl & The Fig, or Poppy. Opening a new spot on the Plaza was an expansion, not a leap.

Vella Cheese Company was the opposite kind of business. One location. One product line built around Dry Jack, the cheese that made the company internationally known. One family, now in its fourth generation, running the whole operation out of the same stone building near the Plaza since 1969. When co-owner Miranda Stoll talked about what finally broke the business, she didn't point to a single bad year. She pointed to a shift in how people buy food altogether.

"It still doesn't mean we can battle with the DoorDash and the Instacart and the Amazon of the world. We do things by hand and we're very small."

That's the mechanism worth sitting with if you live near the square. The Plaza isn't losing businesses because people stopped caring about good food. It's losing the kind of business that can only survive at one scale, in one building, doing one thing by hand, while gaining the kind of business that arrives already built for a second or third location. Vella's retail shop and wholesale warehouse are still open while remaining inventory sells through, though the family hasn't announced a final closing date. If you want Dry Jack, aged Monterey Jack, or a wedge for a picnic, the window is closing, not open-ended.

The One Thing That Isn't Changing

While storefronts turn over, one Sunday ritual on the Plaza has stayed exactly the same for three summers running. Sonoma Sundays on the Plaza, a free concert series produced by the nonprofit Music in Place with the City of Sonoma, runs every Sunday from 2 to 5 p.m. at the Grinstead Amphitheater, June 7 through October 4. This Sunday brings the eleventh show of the season: Marcos Silva, a Rio de Janeiro-born pianist who spent 24 years as musical director for Flora Purim and Airto Moreira, playing bossa nova and samba with his regular quartet.

The lineup for the rest of the season:

• August 30 — Marcos Silva, Brazilian bossa nova and samba
• September 6 — Sascha Jacobsen & Mark St. Mary, tango and zydeco
• September 20 — Tyler Lauren, indie singer-songwriter
• September 27 — Robert Dehlinger's Alpha Rhythm Kings, jump jive and swing
• October 4 — Sonoma Stealth Band & Joe Smiell Orchestra, closing the season with an Oktoberfest set

The series doesn't care who's leasing the corner buildings that week. It's civic infrastructure, funded by the Sonoma Community Center, the Dawn Redwoods Trust, and the McNeely Family Foundation, and it runs on a schedule that outlasts any single restaurant's opening week. If the churn on the storefronts is the Plaza's variable, the amphitheater on Sunday afternoons is its constant.

What It Means for a Sunday on the Square

None of this requires a decision from you beyond how you spend the next few weekends. A workable version of fall on the Plaza looks like this: pack a blanket for the 2 p.m. show at Grinstead, then walk over to Dead Letter or Smash before or after for dinner, since both are new enough that reservations aren't yet essential on a weeknight. If cheese has been part of your picnic routine for years, make the stop at Vella's Second Street shop sooner rather than later. Inventory is finite this time, and there's no factory behind the counter refilling it.

The bigger thing worth carrying with you isn't about any single restaurant. It's that the businesses winning space on Sonoma Plaza right now are the ones that already had a second address before they needed a first impression here. That's not a judgment on the food, which by all early accounts is good at both new spots. It's just a fact about how small commercial real estate on a historic square gets allocated in 2026, and it's the kind of thing you notice only if you're paying attention to more than the menu.

If watching the Plaza's storefronts change hands has you thinking about what's happening with property values or ownership in your own corner of Sonoma, Cherie Callander would love to talk. Let's Connect.