Drive down Old Town Front Street this month and you will pass at least four storefronts in some state of becoming something else. A boarded-up antique shop. A century-old bank building wrapped in plywood and permit notices. A sushi spot with signage up but no open door. On the surface, this reads as ordinary small-town churn, the kind every growing city goes through.
Look closer and a different story emerges. The restaurant about to open in that old bank building is being poured a wine that exists only because a Wine Country producer built it from scratch for that one address. Meanwhile, one of the valley's oldest wineries just did the opposite: it closed its stand-alone restaurant entirely and pulled its whole dining experience back onto the estate. Old Town is absorbing the vineyards at the exact moment a winery decided the vineyard was enough on its own. If you split your week between tasting rooms and Front Street dinners, both halves of that routine are quietly merging into one supply chain.
The wine with no home of its own
The building at 28645 Old Town Front Street, on the corner of Front and Main, has functioned as a restaurant since 1978 and sat empty for more than a year before Gaucho Grill, an Argentine steakhouse with existing locations in Buena Park, Downey, Pasadena and West Covina, signed on to take it over. The historic bank interior needed ADA updates and other modern retrofits while preserving its original character, and the opening date slipped from late 2025 to spring 2026. As of an April 2026 Patch report, no firm opening date had been announced, even as the restaurant began local hiring. A detail worth knowing if you have been eyeing that corner for over a year and wondering what the holdup is.
What makes this a Wine Country story and not just a downtown one is the wine list. PAMEC Winery, the Temecula Valley producer that pours natural wines at the Old Town farmers market most Saturdays and runs a patio a short walk away at 28522 Old Town Front Street, built a dedicated house wine specifically for this restaurant. It is called Cantina di Luce, described by PAMEC as a natural, minimal-intervention wine made to sit alongside wood-fired food. This is not a winery selling into an existing restaurant's list. It is a Wine Country producer building a product line around a specific Old Town address before that address has even opened its doors. There is also a personal thread running through it: the same Patch coverage notes the Temecula location matters to its owner because he lives near De Luz, just up the road from the vines that will eventually fill his wine list.
Gaucho Grill is not the only storefront in motion on that stretch. Here is where things actually stand as of this month:
- Rodeo Cafe (28636 Old Town Front Street #109) is open, serving breakfast and lunch in the space that formerly housed Rosa's Cantina and later Be Good Restaurants.
- Ten Hut, a Korean-style fried chicken pub, is open in the former Soro's Mediterranean location at 28464 Old Town Front Street.
- It's Tabu Sushi is returning to the former Devilicious space at 28693 Old Town Front Street. As of a July 2025 report, the business-to-business liquor license transfer was still in process, with no opening date announced.
- Tecovas, the Western boot and leather goods retailer, is slated to open at 28601 Old Town Front Street #D in summer 2026, in the space vacated by Old Town Antique Faire.
Four storefronts, four different timelines, all within a few blocks of each other. If you have driven past any of them wondering what happened to the antique shop or when the sushi place is finally opening, this is the current answer, straight from the same Patch coverage that has been tracking each one.
A winery pulling the other direction
While Old Town absorbs a new wine identity, one of the valley's founding wineries just walked away from having a restaurant at all. Carol's Restaurant, run by Phil and Carol Baily at their La Serena Way tasting room, closed last September after 25 years, hosting a final lunch before shutting its doors for good. The tasting room at that same location poured its last glass at the end of that month, and the property itself sold. Baily Vineyard & Winery, founded in 1986 and among Temecula's oldest continuously family-owned wineries, consolidated everything, including tastings, into its original production facility at 36150 Pauba Road, just above the De Portola Wine Trail. The move coincided with what the family called their 40th harvest, and it came with a name change, from Baily Vineyard & Winery to Baily Family Vineyards, reflecting a business now carried forward by three generations of Bailys, including son Patrick and grandson Alex assisting with the winemaking.
Carol Baily, for whom the restaurant was named, put it simply in comments reported by Patch:
"We've had 25 great years serving you at Carol's Restaurant, and we will miss all the friends we've made."
The Baily family's own account frames the move as a return to their roots, trading a separate restaurant and visitor center for a tighter focus on the winemaking facility itself, with new plantings and replantings of the vineyard now underway. If you have been circling back to Old Town for that steakhouse or the returning sushi spot, this is the flip side of the story: right as Old Town picks up a bespoke house wine of its own, one of the valley's original wineries decided that a stand-alone dining room was no longer part of its future.
What it actually means for your week
If you live here, this shift changes where the full sit-down, wine-paired meal happens and where the quicker, more casual night out happens. A working-vineyard dinner with a view is still available at wineries like Leoness Cellars, Mount Palomar's Bistro 1969, and Thornton's Café Champagne, all of which continue to run restaurant service alongside tastings. What Baily's move signals is that not every winery treats a restaurant as core to the business, and the ones that keep dining rooms open are becoming a more deliberate choice rather than a given.
Old Town, meanwhile, is where the newer, more casual options are landing, and now some of them will pour wine that did not exist a year ago. Once Gaucho Grill opens, a Saturday that starts at the farmers market on Sixth Street, where PAMEC has poured most weekends, can end at a table a few blocks away drinking a wine made for that exact restaurant. That is a tighter loop between the vines and the table than Old Town has had before, and it is worth knowing before you plan around a restaurant that, as of its last public update this spring, still had not announced an opening date.
Baily's 40th harvest was the backdrop for last fall's closure. This year's harvest across the AVA, arriving in the coming weeks, is the backdrop for everything currently happening on Front Street. If you want the fuller picture of what late summer looks like across the AVA this season, our Wine Country harvest calendar maps out what to expect week by week. And if you are simply keeping tabs on how the neighborhood itself is evolving, our Wine Country neighborhood guide is a good place to start.
Old Town and the vineyards used to feel like two separate errands: one for dinner, one for wine. This season is the clearest sign yet that residents who live here are watching those two errands become one.
If you are weighing what any of this means for a property in Wine Country, whether you are evaluating a vineyard-ready parcel or simply want a read on how these shifts affect value on your street, Andrea Lynn Duncan is glad to talk it through. Call me for a private consultation.
