Some mornings this fall, before the tasting rooms up and down Highway 12 have even flipped their signs to open, there's already a short line forming outside a converted gas station in the middle of Kenwood. People are waiting for a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich on a bagel and a cup of Intelligentsia coffee, served out of a walk-up window in front of Golden Bear Station. The man working the window is Joshua Smookler, the same chef who once ran a Long Island City ramen shop that earned a two-star write-up from the New York Times and got called the best ramen in America by Eater. These days he's flipping breakfast sandwiches on Sonoma Highway in a town of 686 people, under a pop-up he and his wife Heidy He call SPK.
It would be easy to file this under "new business opens in Kenwood" and move on. But it isn't a new business. It's the same couple who already own Golden Bear Station, adding a window in front of the restaurant they built two years ago. And once you start looking at everything else that's changed in Kenwood this year, that pattern keeps repeating. The winery that closed in the spring didn't get bought by an outside investor. The restaurant that switched hands did so between the people who already worked there. The newest Italian spot in town came from a family that already runs one of the best-known kitchens down the road in Glen Ellen. Nothing genuinely new has arrived on this stretch of highway. What's arrived is more of what was already here.
The Same Owners, One More Window
Golden Bear Station opened in late 2023 in the old Tips Roadside space at 8445 Sonoma Highway, a building that takes its name from the Golden Bear Service Station that stood there in the 1930s. Smookler and He weren't scouting Kenwood as a market opportunity. They already lived there. Explaining the decision to the Press Democrat when the restaurant was announced, Smookler put it simply.
"We were specifically looking at Kenwood because we live here, and we really like this neighborhood."
The couple had just closed their fine-dining restaurant Animo in Sonoma, the Basque-Korean spot that landed on Esquire's Best New Restaurants list and drew a Michelin guide nod, and opened something more casual and more local in its place. Golden Bear Station's menu leans into wood-fired pizzas and house-made pasta, a long way from the whole turbot Animo was known for, but the DNA is the same operators doing the same kind of obsessive work. Smookler has told food writers he tested nearly a hundred pizza doughs before settling on the crust he wanted.
SPK is the latest extension of that same project, not a separate one. It's morning-only, grab-and-go, and by the account of local food coverage, it's already drawing a line. The menu Golden Bear Station posted in mid-August still shows the dinner side of the operation, frisée and lardons, maitake mushrooms with yuzu sesame, a 40-ounce bone-in ribeye. The breakfast window is a small addition bolted onto a restaurant that was already the anchor of that block. Nobody had to lease a new space or negotiate a new deal with the county. They just opened earlier.
The Winery That Left and Came Home
Kenwood Vineyards has been part of the town's identity since 1970, when John Sheela and brothers-in-law Mike and Marty Lee bought the old Pagani Bros. site on Highway 12 and turned it into a serious wine producer. Gary Heck, owner of Korbel in Guerneville, took a 50 percent stake in 1996 and bought the rest by 1999, growing the label to more than 600,000 cases a year. In 2014 he sold the whole operation, brand, inventory, facilities, and four vineyards, to the French spirits conglomerate Pernod Ricard for a reported $100 million.
That relationship ended abruptly this spring. On March 23, 2026, Pernod Ricard filed a state WARN notice announcing a total closure of the winery effective March 31, with all 14 employees laid off by the end of April. Days later, public records showed the 33-acre home property at 9592 Sonoma Highway had sold for $4 million to a company called Kenwood Winery Land LLC, led by Heck himself. The tasting room's own signage called it "temporarily closed," while the layoff notice said permanent. Local coverage described it as a town left in limbo over whether this was a goodbye or a homecoming.
It turned out to be the second one. The tasting room reopened May 15, 2026, under Heck family ownership, and the winery's own announcement leaned hard into the framing of a return rather than a relaunch, describing the moment as Kenwood coming "full circle" back to local family stewardship. What's notable is how much smaller the transaction was than the one that sent the brand away twelve years earlier.
| Year | Transaction | Buyer | Price | What changed hands |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | Heck sells to Pernod Ricard | Pernod Ricard | ~$100 million | Winery, brand, inventory, four vineyards |
| 2026 | Pernod Ricard sells to Heck's LLC | Kenwood Winery Land LLC | $4 million | 33-acre home property only |
The 2014 deal moved a national brand with four vineyards and a full inventory. The 2026 deal moved one parcel of land and the buildings on it. Nobody in local coverage has said what happens to the Kenwood Vineyards name itself going forward. What's certain is that the physical home base, the barn building on the original Pagani site where winemaking on this spot goes back more than a century, is back with the family that ran it longest.
Kitchens Passing Between Neighbors, Not Strangers
Salt & Stone, the seafood and outdoor dining spot with the koi pond patio that regularly gets voted Sonoma County's best, changed hands in March 2024. But the new owner wasn't an outside buyer. He'd managed the restaurant for nearly five years before he purchased it from founders David and Diane, who'd opened it in 2017. Owner Todd Lake and executive chef Enrique Alcaraz have kept the format that made the place a local gathering spot, the flagstone patio, the koi pond, the seasonal menu that runs from crab cakes to a salmon and couscous plate. A recent Sonoma County cocktail roundup singled out the restaurant's Apple Cider Old Fashioned, built on High West Double Rye and apple syrup, as one of the region's better versions of the drink. It's the same bar, under the same roof, just with the person who already knew the regulars now holding the keys.
Stella, the wood-fired Italian restaurant that's newer to Kenwood's short restaurant row, didn't arrive from outside the valley either. It comes from the team behind Glen Ellen Star, the well-regarded restaurant a few miles south. Rather than a chain or an outside group testing the market, it's an established Sonoma Valley kitchen extending its footprint one town over.
What a Breakfast Line Actually Tells You
None of this is dramatic on its own. A breakfast window, a winery sale, an ownership transfer, a sister restaurant opening nearby, each one reads as a small local update. But add them up over a single year in a town this size and the pattern is the point. Every change that's touched Kenwood's commercial strip in 2026 has come from someone who was already rooted here, whether that's the couple who moved to Sonoma County to open one restaurant and then built a second, the Korbel family reclaiming the property where they spent nearly two decades, or a neighboring restaurant group extending down the highway rather than a national brand parachuting in.
That matters for how the town holds together going into harvest season, when Kenwood becomes a thoroughfare for people heading to the Valley of the Moon Vintage Festival in its 129th year, the Sonoma Plein Air Festival, and October's Weekend Along the Farm Trails. The businesses those visitors stop at, the winery, the restaurants, the breakfast window, are run by people who were already fixtures before this year started. In a town of 686 people, that continuity is the actual infrastructure. It's not that nothing changes here. It's that the changes keep coming from the same hands.
If you're the kind of Kenwood regular who already knows which morning to time your Salt & Stone reservation or which Saturday the Farm Trails weekend lands on this year, you've probably clocked most of this already. If you're newer to the neighborhood and wondering who's actually behind the counter at these places, that's exactly the kind of local detail Del Fava | Parker likes talking through with anyone curious about how this stretch of Sonoma Valley actually works.
