Order the Wagyu brunch burger at Drake's on San Carlos Avenue, then walk one block over to Groovy Goose for an oat milk latte, and you have just done business with two brothers without realizing it. Keep walking to Esnaf for dinner and you're eating at a restaurant that exists because its owner used to wait tables for the guy who taught her the business. This isn't a coincidence that shows up once. It's the actual shape of how downtown San Carlos got fed over the past five years.
Most towns fill new storefronts with a mix of chains, first-time owners testing an idea, and the occasional local who's been dreaming about it for years. San Carlos has almost none of the first category downtown and surprisingly little of the second. What it has instead is a small, tightly wound group of people who trained each other, worked for each other, or grew up two blocks from each other, and who kept opening places along San Carlos Avenue and Laurel Street until it started to look like a scene.
Two Brothers, Three Restaurants, One City Block
Christian Conte grew up in San Carlos and started bussing tables here at 17, working his way through every job a restaurant has to offer before he ever owned one. In 2021 he opened Drake's in the historic building at 1101 San Carlos Avenue, on the corner of El Camino Real, a site once occupied by an AT&T store and, before that, tied to Frederick Drake, the developer who shaped the city in the 1900s and coined its slogan, "the city of good living." Conte named the restaurant after him on purpose. He told the Peninsula Foodist that he wanted the building's history visible in the finished space, down to the arches along the avenue that still carry Drake's initial.
Two years later, Conte opened a second spot, SC Noodle House, in the former San Carlos Bar & Grill space at 648 El Camino Real, just down the street from Drake's. It debuted in November 2023 with an international noodle menu and a karaoke machine, and it came from the same instinct that built Drake's: Conte telling the Peninsula Foodist that he saw a gap in the city's food options and grabbed the space himself rather than wait for someone else to fill it.
Meanwhile his brother, Nathan Conte, had been working his way up to general manager at Drake's. In August 2023, Nathan and his wife Siera opened Groovy Goose Coffee at 1221 San Carlos Avenue, a full-service roastery a block from the restaurant he'd been running for his brother. Daily Coffee News covered the shop's opening, noting that Nathan had returned to his hometown after years of restaurant work to build something of his own, just far enough down the block to still feel like family territory.
That's three restaurants, one street, two brothers, in a span of about two years.
The Server Who Got a Restaurant of Her Own
The other thread runs through Pranzi, a Northern Italian restaurant on Laurel Street owned by Sedri Gundogdu. In 2019, Gundogdu hired a recent college graduate named Cansel Tok as a server. Tok had just arrived from Turkey to improve her English. The two started talking about the fact that San Carlos didn't have a single Turkish restaurant, and Gundogdu told her something that turned into a business plan: find a location and we'll do it together.
Five years later, in June 2024, Esnaf opened in the former Cuisinett space at 1105 San Carlos Avenue with Tok and Gundogdu as co-owners. The Palo Alto Online coverage of the opening traces the whole arc back to that first serving job, down to the limestone-washed walls and imported Turkish ceramics Tok chose herself once she finally had a restaurant of her own to design.
A quick map of who connects to whom:
| Restaurant | Address | Owner(s) | Connection |
|---|---|---|---|
| Drake's | 1101 San Carlos Ave | Christian Conte | San Carlos native, opened here first |
| SC Noodle House | 648 El Camino Real | Christian Conte | Same owner as Drake's |
| Groovy Goose Coffee | 1221 San Carlos Ave | Nathan & Siera Conte | Nathan is Christian's brother and former Drake's GM |
| Pranzi | Laurel Street | Sedri Gundogdu | Trained Cansel Tok before she opened Esnaf |
| Esnaf | 1105 San Carlos Ave | Cansel Tok & Sedri Gundogdu | Tok was Gundogdu's server starting in 2019 |
| Pazzo | 1179 Laurel St | Andy Gambardella | Also owns Gambardella's in Menlo Park |
Not Every New Menu Comes From a Stranger
Pazzo, the New Haven-style pizzeria at 1179 Laurel Street, isn't run by a San Carlos native or a former Pranzi server. It comes from Andy Gambardella, who already runs Gambardella's in Menlo Park. That's a different kind of connection than blood or apprenticeship, but it's still the same underlying pattern: a known operator with an existing track record bringing a proven concept into San Carlos rather than an unfamiliar name testing the market cold.
Christian Conte summed up his own approach to the business in a way that applies just as well to his brother and to the Pranzi-Esnaf pairing:
"I consider myself in the people business, and it's all about the experience."
That's not a marketing line. It's closer to a description of how the whole downtown corridor actually fills its storefronts. Nobody here is opening a restaurant on a hunch about a market they don't know. They're opening it because they already worked the block, already knew the regulars, or already had someone standing behind the bar telling them to go for it.
What This Actually Tells You About the Town
If you've eaten around downtown over the past few years, you've probably felt something without naming it: a new place opens and it already feels like it belongs, staffed by people who seem to already know the neighborhood's rhythms. That feeling has a mechanical explanation. Most of what opened between 2021 and 2024 wasn't new to San Carlos at all. It was existing local knowledge splitting off into a second location, a sibling's project, or a mentee's turn.
That matters for anyone who cares about what this town feels like to live in. A restaurant scene built this way tends to hold its shape differently than one built by outside investment chasing a hot location. The people who opened Drake's, SC Noodle House, Groovy Goose, and Esnaf all had years of runway in this exact market before they signed a lease. They weren't guessing what San Carlos wanted. They already worked here.
I've spent close to two decades paying attention to how this city actually runs, not just what the listings say about it, because the two are rarely the same story. The restaurant scene downtown is a small example of something I see constantly in the housing side of this market too: San Carlos rewards people who already understand its particular rhythm, and it's often the neighbors, not the newcomers, who see the next opportunity first.
If you're the kind of person who wants that same level of inside knowledge about what's actually happening with home values in your part of San Carlos, whether you're thinking about a move now or just want to understand where your street sits in the bigger picture, Bob Bredel is a call away. I've been mapping this town block by block for a long time, and I'm glad to walk through what I'm seeing in your neighborhood specifically.
