Harley Gray Kitchen & Bar poured its last lobster night on Friday, December 19, 2025, after twelve years anchoring the corner of West Washington and Goldfinch. Owner John Ealy wrote his own goodbye rather than let a press release do it, telling regulars the closure wasn't really an ending for him. He's kept Ideal Bar & Grill in Santa Cruz and Zelda's in Capitola, opened The Anvil Gym in Hillcrest earlier in the year, and is reportedly working on a book. "Hillcrest and Mission Hills are my home," he wrote. "I'm not going anywhere."
He wasn't wrong about the neighborhood, either. What replaced him wasn't a stranger with a moving truck full of new equipment. It was the couple who already run the restaurant across the street.
The corner didn't go up for sale. It went across the street.
Merritte and Hailey Powell opened the Mission Hills location of La Puerta in 2021, in the former Patio on Goldfinch space just steps from Harley Gray's front door. When Ealy decided to sell the 902 West Washington building, the Powells didn't just bid on it, they filed the liquor license, brought on architect Mark Bausback, and started planning a full seven-day operation covering lunch, brunch, happy hour, and late night. The concept doesn't have a name yet. What's already clear is what it isn't: not a second La Puerta, not a chain replacement, and not owned by anyone who has to learn the neighborhood from scratch.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A restaurant closing on a commercial strip usually reads as a warning sign to whoever's watching the block. A restaurant closing and reopening under owners who already have a stake fifty feet away reads as something closer to succession planning. Mission Hills' Restaurant Row has been quietly running the second version for the better part of two years.
Three more doors down, the same pattern is playing out
At 901 West Washington, on the corner across from the old Harley Gray space, a 54-unit residential building called The Sasan opened two restaurants in late 2024: Paradis on the ground floor and Communion on the rooftop. Both came from Jacquee Renna Downing, who spent years running La Quinta Cliffhouse and Pacifica Seafood in the Coachella Valley and previously owned Pacifica Del Mar with her late husband, Kipp Downing. She's not a Mission Hills local in the residential sense, but she's spent a career inside San Diego's dining scene, which is its own kind of local knowledge. Communion has since become one of the more talked-about additions to the corridor, largely for the view from its rooftop over the rest of the neighborhood.
Down the block, Serafino is set to open this fall as an all-day cafe and wine bar. The beverage program is being led by Amanda Sarich, a San Diego native who already lives in Mission Hills, and the founding team is a reunion of people who worked together fourteen years ago before scattering across hospitality, wine, and culinary careers. That's a specific kind of return trip: not new money discovering the neighborhood, but people who left it professionally and are now building something inside it again.
Then there's Mon Chourie, which is set to move into Kairoa Brewing Company by the end of 2026. Owner Kelly Kim didn't come from a restaurant group. She started selling Korean-style cream puffs at farmers markets and pop-ups around town, working spots like Pizza Kaiju and Pho Ga Go before landing a regular Wednesday table at Michi Michi Bakery. San Diego Magazine readers voted Mon Chourie the city's best pop-up this year. Her move into a permanent Mission Hills address isn't a company opening a location. It's someone who built a following on folding tables finally getting a kitchen.
Here's the shape of what's changing on the corridor right now:
| Address / Space | Who left | Who's moving in | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 902 W. Washington St. | Harley Gray Kitchen & Bar (John Ealy, closed Dec. 19, 2025) | Merritte and Hailey Powell (La Puerta) | Unnamed concept in planning |
| 901 W. Washington St., The Sasan | New residential building | Paradis (ground floor) and Communion (rooftop), Jacquee Renna Downing | Open since late 2024 |
| TBD, Mission Hills | New all-day cafe/wine bar | Amanda Sarich and founding team | Opening fall 2026 |
| Kairoa Brewing Company | Existing brewery | Mon Chourie, Kelly Kim | Opening by end of 2026 |
What isn't moving at all
None of this reads as a neighborhood in flux if you look at what's staying put. Izakaya Masa has been serving what a lot of locals consider the best tonkotsu ramen in the city for over two decades, out of a wood-paneled dining room with maybe a dozen tables that still fills up on a random Tuesday. The Red Door, chef and owner Luciano Cibelli's farm-to-table Italian spot, still shops daily and bakes its own bread and pasta, with the Beef Wellington still doing the work of convincing people to come back. Jo's Diner, which Ric Libiran opened in 2017 inside a former French bistro space, is still turning out the bacon-wrapped meatloaf and wine-braised short rib Benedict that got it a spot on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, and it's still the restaurant most visitors to the neighborhood haven't found yet. Venissimo Cheese is still the place people walk into planning to buy a wedge and walk out with a full board for a Balboa Park picnic.
These aren't holdouts waiting to be bought out. They're the reason the corridor can absorb this much ownership turnover without losing its identity in the process. A neighborhood food scene that only had one kind of business, either all legacy or all new money, would feel different from this one. Mission Hills currently has both operating on the same three or four blocks, at the same time, without either side treating the other as a threat.
The one night a year the whole corridor shows up together
Taste of Mission Hills, held annually along Stockton Drive, Goldfinch Street, West Washington Street, Reynard Way, and India Street, is the closest thing the corridor has to a group photo. Last year's lineup included both sides of the current transition at once: Harley Gray and La Puerta, Communion and Paradis, Fort Oak, Cardellino, Farmer's Bottega, and Venissimo Cheese all pouring and plating within walking distance of each other. A continuous trolley loop runs guests between venues.
A few logistics worth knowing if you haven't been:
- The route covers five streets, all within easy walking distance of the Washington and Goldfinch corner
- A free trolley loop typically runs from 5 to 9 p.m., connecting venues along the route
- Participating restaurants rotate slightly year to year, but the corridor's anchors are consistently on the list
Last year's event happened to be one of Harley Gray's final public appearances before its December closure. This year's version will be the first without it, and very likely one of the first with the Powells' still-unnamed concept in some stage of buildout across the street.
What this actually means if you live here
The easy read on a restaurant closing after twelve years is decline. The harder, more accurate read in Mission Hills right now is that the corridor is doing something most commercial strips don't manage: replacing itself from the inside. The Powells didn't need to scout Mission Hills, they already had a lease on it. Sarich didn't move to the neighborhood for Serafino, she already lived there. Kim didn't need to build a following, she'd been building one at farmers markets for years before Kairoa gave her a permanent counter.
That's a different kind of stability than "nothing ever changes here." It's closer to a neighborhood that changes constantly but never has to start over, because the people replacing each other already know the corner they're standing on.
If you've watched this corridor evolve from your own front porch and start wondering what that kind of steady, self-renewing demand has done to your own property's value, Markus Feldmann offers a confidential valuation built on the same local read as this piece, not a generic algorithm.
