Downtown Napa Is Mid-Construction. It's Also Having Its Best Year for New Storefronts.

For nearly a year, the block at 1106 First Street looked like a loss. Don Perico, the Mexican restaurant that had fed downtown Napa since January 1994, through an earthquake, floods, and a pandemic, went dark in August 2025 when its building came down for the First Street Napa hotel and condo project. Regulars who had been eating fajitas there since the Clinton administration watched the space disappear behind construction fencing with no announced return date. Then, on June 6, 2026, Don Perico reopened a short walk away at 1300 First Street, in a bigger dining room, with the same kitchen staff, some of whom have worked there for twenty years, and a new vegan menu section championed by the owner's son.

That sequence, closure followed by a larger reopening rather than a permanent gap, is the story of downtown Napa this year, and it runs against what most residents assume when they see scaffolding. The instinct is to read construction as subtraction: something leaves, and the block gets quieter. What has actually happened between last fall and this summer is closer to the opposite. The businesses displaced by the $300 million First Street Napa Phase II project are not vanishing. They are trading a temporary closure for a permanent upgrade, and a separate wave of entirely new concepts is filling in around them on Main Street and inside the First Street retail corridor. Downtown has more open doors right now than it did a year ago, even with a crane parked over the old Kohl's site.

The Mechanism Behind Don Perico's Comeback

The reason Don Perico came back at all, rather than closing for good like so many small operators do when a redevelopment displaces them, is that the developer built the replacement space into the project itself. The city's own update on the redevelopment described it plainly: as the site cleared for construction, the team was also building a custom restaurant space for Don Perico immediately adjacent to its old footprint, with a grand reopening targeted for summer 2026. That is a different arrangement than a landlord simply terminating a lease. It is a negotiated trade: roughly ten months without a paycheck for the Castañeda family's staff, in exchange for a larger, purpose-built location inside a $300 million development instead of a scramble to find comparable rent somewhere else downtown.

The new space, at 1300 First Street, Suite 201, seats about 80 in the main dining room plus another 20 in a second area, with a bar that holds 12. That is a meaningfully larger footprint than the old address at 1106 First Street. Marco and Berenice Castañeda involved all 20 returning employees in the design process, down to kitchen layout, according to their own account of the relocation. The gamble paid off in real terms for the neighborhood too: a business with more than three decades of downtown history did not become a vacancy statistic. It became evidence that this particular construction cycle is structured to keep displaced tenants in the neighborhood rather than push them out of it.

What's New That Wasn't Displaced at All

Not every new business downtown is a relocation story. Some of what opened this year has nothing to do with the First Street Napa construction and everything to do with independent operators betting on downtown as a destination in its own right.

Normandie opened on Main Street on March 23, 2026, in a space that had sat empty for a while at 670 Main. It is a French-leaning restaurant built around a dedicated martini bar, tableside service, and a wine list that stretches from Champagne and Burgundy to Napa producers, assembled by sommelier Maggie Kalan, who holds a Court of Master Sommeliers certification. Co-owner Koray Yatkinoglu and Kalan pitched the place at locals as much as visitors, right down to a posted $25 corkage fee, a detail that only makes sense if you expect regulars to bring their own bottles on a Tuesday.

A few blocks over, inside the First Street Napa retail corridor, the additions have leaned retail and boutique rather than restaurant. Napa Fragrance opened in February 2026 at 1252 First Street, underneath the Archer Hotel, a home-fragrance line cofounded by vintner Jean-Charles Boisset and wine educator Ashley Pengilly. In June, Hopscotch & Bark opened in Suite 335, a boutique for children and their pets from local owner Susan Melendez, who also runs The Bennington a few doors down. Melendez now operates two storefronts in the same retail stretch, which says something about her read on foot traffic there even with a construction zone two blocks away. Lucchese Bootmaker, the Texas boot and leather brand founded in 1883, is set to open its first California store at First Street Napa's Suite 202 this fall, a genuine first-to-market opening rather than a relocation or a regional chain filling space.

The Part That Isn't Open Yet

It is worth being precise about what has actually arrived versus what is still under a tarp, because the two get conflated easily when a project this size sits in the middle of downtown.

The First Street Napa Phase II project, the hotel-and-condo development that displaced Don Perico in the first place, is not close to done. As of a construction update in July 2026, the project was roughly 40 percent complete. The two seven-story buildings topped out in May, which means the structural frame is finished and visible, but the interior work, the 161-room hotel, the 78 condominium units, the retail and restaurant space on the ground floor, is still months from tenant-ready. Developers are targeting a summer 2027 opening. That is a full year out from today. Anyone downtown right now is looking at a finished skeleton, not a finished building, and the retail mix that will eventually anchor that corner has not been announced.

One more piece of the corridor is still in transition rather than open: Treasury Wine Estates, the company behind several Napa Valley labels, is relocating its U.S. headquarters into the restored Gordon Building on First Street. That move places a substantial corporate presence in the middle of the retail district, which matters for daytime foot traffic in a way that tourist-driven restaurant openings do not, but it is an occupancy in progress, not a ribbon-cutting.

Reading the Corner Correctly

The useful way to hold both facts at once, the finished storefronts and the unfinished tower, is to separate the construction timeline from the tenant timeline. The building itself will not be done until summer 2027. The businesses that construction displaced, and the businesses that chose to open near it anyway, are running on a much faster clock. Don Perico's entire closure-to-reopening arc took ten months. Normandie went from empty storefront to open doors within a season. Hopscotch & Bark opened the same month construction crews were pouring concrete two blocks away. The tower is the slow variable. The street level is not waiting for it.

For anyone who has lived downtown through a previous redevelopment cycle, this one reads differently in an important way. The last major transformation of this corridor, the original First Street Napa build that replaced the old Napa Town Center in stages starting with the Archer Hotel in late 2017, took time to fill in and left storefronts dark for stretches while retailers were recruited. This time, the businesses filling the gaps are largely local operators making a fast bet rather than a slow institutional lease-up: a family restaurant rebuilding around its own displaced staff, a sommelier opening her own room, a boutique owner doubling her footprint two doors from her first shop. That is a different kind of construction-era downtown than most people expect when they see a crane.

If you are walking First Street this fall, the honest map looks like this: Don Perico is open and larger than before. Normandie is taking reservations on Main. Napa Fragrance and Hopscotch & Bark are both live in the First Street Napa corridor. Lucchese arrives by the end of the year. The hotel towers overhead are framed but empty, with another year to go before anyone checks in. None of that requires waiting. The construction fence is real, and so is everything now open on the other side of it.

If you're weighing what a stretch like this means for property near it, or you're trying to read a Napa neighborhood the way someone who actually walks it every week would, the Jeffrey Earl Warren team has been doing exactly that across three generations in this valley. Work With Us.