Old Towne Orange Turned Over Six Storefronts And Its Event Organizer In The Same Year

The corner that held Felix Continental Café for decades on the Orange Plaza doesn't have a Felix's sign anymore. The space is being prepared for Sabor a Cuba, a new Cuban restaurant stepping into a location that's carried Cuban food for as long as most current residents can remember. That single swap looks like a footnote. It isn't. Walk two blocks in any direction this fall and you'll find five more storefronts that changed hands in 2026, plus a sixth that's still just a liquor license filing away from opening. What's easy to miss, because the Labor Day weekend fair and the Saturday market still look exactly the way they always have, is that the group actually running Old Towne's three biggest annual events changed too.

Six Storefronts, But Only Two New Ideas

Line up this year's arrivals and the pattern isn't "everything is new." It's that most of what reads as new is either an existing concept expanding into Old Towne or an old concept continuing under different ownership.

Centro & Storico Café opened at 208 E. Chapman Avenue with a full-day Italian menu, avocado toast and scrambles in the morning, half and full-size pastas and pizza by dinner, wine and beer from Pozzuoli Family Winery on the list. It's a second location. The original Centro sits in Tustin, so this isn't a brand discovering Orange County. It's a brand that already knew the market extending its reach four miles west.

Garrahan Hat Company took the storefront at 109 W. Chapman Avenue, and the detail that matters is what it didn't do. Rather than launching a new hat brand, Garrahan acquired the longtime D Bar J Hat Company operation and moved its hat-making tradition into Old Towne. The craft didn't arrive this year. The name on the door did.

Two additions are genuinely new to the region. Bluestone Lane, the Australian-inspired coffee and all-day breakfast concept, opened at 114 N. Olive Street as its first Orange County location, serving the avocado toast and specialty coffee format the brand is known for elsewhere. And Oak & Poppy, a piercing and fine jewelry studio, opened its first Orange County location and third overall at 117 N. Olive Street, built around a team that has worked together for more than two decades and has served high-profile clients. That's a real first for the district, not a satellite of something already down the street.

Round out the list with Paradis Ice Cream, a Danish-inspired shop churning its ice cream in-house directly on the Plaza at 30 Plaza Square, Culinary Dropout bringing lunch, dinner, cocktails and weekend brunch to 191 N. Orange Street just north of the Circle, and Jim's Original, the long-running Los Angeles hot dog and Polish sausage name, opening at 214 N. Tustin Street. Six storefronts changed in a matter of months. Only two of them are ideas Old Towne hadn't already tried in some form.

The Vacant Radiator Shop At Chapman And Lemon Is The Real Test

If you want the one address that will actually tell you something about how much Old Towne can absorb, it isn't any of the six above. It's 237 W. Chapman Avenue, the former radiator shop at Chapman and Lemon that has sat empty for years at one of the district's main entrances.

A California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control license application filed under Win Orange LLC identifies a proposed business called "The WinDow and a Bar" at that address, seeking a Type-47 on-sale general eating license, the kind restaurants use to serve alcohol on site. The WinDow is a Los Angeles walk-up burger stand known for $4.50 smashburgers, fried chicken sandwiches and hand-spun shakes, founded in Venice in 2019 and now operating across Santa Monica, Silver Lake, Hollywood, West Adams, Long Beach, Santa Barbara and The Grove under the American Gonzo Food Corporation umbrella, the same group behind American Beauty, Superba and Pitfire Pizza. The proposal on the table isn't a simple counter-service swap. It calls for adaptive reuse of the property into a walk-up restaurant, a bar, and an extensive outdoor dining and activity area, at one of the literal doorways into the historic district.

Nothing here is confirmed open yet. It's a pending license filing, not a ribbon cutting. But it's worth watching precisely because every other 2026 opening slid into an existing storefront somewhere inside the Circle. This one would be a ground-up buildout at a gateway corner that has stood vacant for years, and it would be The Win~Dow's first Orange County address after six years of expanding one Los Angeles neighborhood at a time.

The Names Running The Calendar Changed Too

Storefronts aren't the only thing that changed hands in 2026. For decades, the City of Orange produced Treats in the Streets directly. Then Orange International Street Fair, Inc. took over production under a multi-year agreement with the city. This year, a new nonprofit, Orange Plaza Traditions, Inc., assumed production and financial responsibility for all three of Old Towne's anchor events: Treats in the Streets, the Orange International Street Fair, and the Christmas Market and Tree Lighting.

From the sidewalk, none of that shows. The 53rd Annual Orange International Street Fair still ran its familiar three days over Labor Day weekend, September 4 through 6, with the same $4 wristband fee for alcohol sold at the four entrances along Chapman and Glassell, the same eight stages, and food representing 14 countries and cultures from Australia to Switzerland. What holds that format together is a structure most attendees never think about: every food and drink booth at the fair is staffed by a local nonprofit rather than a caterer or food truck operator, and more than fifty community organizations depend on that single weekend as one of their largest fundraisers of the year. The Old Towne Preservation Association runs Irish Street's beer booth, funding the same group that works to keep the district's historic housing stock intact the other 362 days of the year. A new organizer took the wheel this year. The fundraising engine underneath the format didn't change with it.

What Actually Held Still

Set against all that turnover, a few things in Old Towne didn't move at all. The Orange Home Grown Farmers and Artisans Market still runs every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., rain or shine, at the corner of Cypress and Palm, still organized as a nonprofit that prioritizes certified California growers and food artisans, and still hosting the live music, cooking demos and kids club that have been part of the market's rhythm for years.

The Old Towne Burger Fest just had its second year, running September 13 at Chapman Crafted Beer, presented by El Brewjo Burgers with five competing Orange County pop-ups and a People's Choice vote decided by physical ticket at the door. One year doesn't make a tradition, but a second year at the same venue, with the same format, is exactly how Old Towne's other calendar fixtures got their start.

Mark two more dates before the year is out. Treats in the Streets returns to the Plaza on Thursday, October 29, from 4 to 7 p.m., with a full Plaza closure from 1 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. and Chapman Avenue closed from Lemon Street to Grand Street for the day. The Christmas Market and Tree Lighting follows on Sunday, December 6, with the market running 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and the Tree Lighting and Christmas Program from 5:15 to 7 p.m.

The corners keep changing hands. The organizers behind the biggest weekends changed hands too, this year specifically. And the two fixtures that didn't change, a Saturday morning at the farmers market and a Friday afternoon burger crawl at Chapman Crafted, are the ones worth building a routine around, because they're the part of Old Towne's identity that isn't currently up for a lease renewal.

If you're the kind of person who notices when a storefront on your own block changes hands before it hits any roundup, Cassie French tracks Old Towne Orange the same way, one corner at a time.