For half a decade, Aubriana Kasper drove past the same olive-tinted building on Woodside Road and wondered why the doors stayed shut. The wood sign out front still read "since 1902," a holdover from the building's first life as a general store, but the space itself had been dark to the public for years, most recently doing quiet duty as a test kitchen for the protein-bread brand Hero Bread. Kasper's husband, Rowan MacNiven, is a Woodside native and runs Buck's of Woodside. The couple raises three kids in town. She kept coming back to one idea: the building needed to be something people could walk into again.
Last September, it finally was. Kasper and co-owner Gena Winter reopened the space as The Little Store, a flower shop and cafe on Woodside Road, and brought in chef Sierra Hazel, who came from the two-Michelin-starred Birdsong in San Francisco, to run the kitchen. It now serves breakfast and lunch Wednesday through Sunday, with a menu built around things like a harvest bowl on herbed yogurt, a tater-tot burrito with chipotle crema, and a French ham sandwich the menu calls the jambon.
That is a nice story on its own. What makes it worth paying attention to is what it means for a town this size. Woodside's entire eating-out roster, the kind of list you could recite from memory, currently runs to about ten names: Alice's Restaurant, The Mountain House, Buck's, Firehouse Bistro, The Village Bakery, Alpine Inn, Woodside Roadhouse, Portola Bistro, MAZRA, and now The Little Store. In a town of a few thousand residents with almost no commercial zoning to speak of, that list barely moves from year to year. When it does move, it is worth asking what changed and why.
What's Actually Open Right Now
Here is the current lay of the crossroads, for anyone planning a week of meals without leaving town:
| Business | What it's known for | On the map since |
|---|---|---|
| Roberts Market | Butcher counter, deli sandwiches, an extensive wine and spirits selection | 1889 |
| The Village Pub | One Michelin star, contemporary Californian cooking rooted in French and Mediterranean technique | 2001 |
| The Mountain House | Game meats and a three-course prix fixe inside a red roadhouse cabin under the redwoods | A longtime fixture |
| Firehouse Bistro | French comfort food and a full bar, open Tuesday through Saturday evenings | Several years running |
| The Little Store | Flower shop and cafe, kitchen led by a chef out of Birdsong | Reopened September 2025 |
Firehouse Bistro's own website still calls itself "Woodside's newest restaurant," a claim that was already circulating in local business directories back in 2023. That is not a knock on the place. It is a fair measure of how rarely anything new opens here. Until last fall, nothing had, for years.
Not Quite a Restaurant, Not Quite a Shop
The interesting part of The Little Store is that it did not simply refill a restaurant-shaped hole. Kasper and Winter, who previously ran the San Francisco coffee and flower shop Marigold together, built something that splits the difference between a florist and a cafe. Walls went blue, a long bench got new pillows, and a central table now holds flowers, cards, and small gifts alongside the espresso counter. There is patio seating, but by Kasper's own account it is the window nook that has become the spot regulars claim first.
"Our initial idea was just to flip your traditional flower shop on its head."
That is a different kind of business than the crossroads has seen in a while, and it matters for the same reason a single new business always matters in a town with only ten total: there is no way to add capacity here without also changing the character of what is already there. A new restaurant in a downtown with forty options is noise. A new hybrid concept in a town with ten is the whole conversation.
The Plan That Hasn't Caught Up Yet
Here is where the timing gets interesting. Woodside is in the middle of formally rewriting its Town Center Area Plan, the document that will guide what the commercial crossroads is allowed to become. The town spent the past year gathering input through pop-up events, an online survey that drew more than 500 responses, and a public open house, all aimed at shaping land use, parking, and public gathering space around the center. A second round of feedback closed on August 31 of this year, and the project's own phase timeline runs Phase 2, the vision-setting stage, through July of this year, with a draft plan and environmental review not expected until early 2027 and formal adoption sometime after that.
In other words, the town's official answer to "what should our tiny commercial center become" will not exist for at least another year. The Little Store didn't wait for it. It opened, found a chef, painted the walls, and started serving breakfast a full year before the plan even reaches its draft stage. Whatever the eventual Town Center Area Plan decides on paper, the crossroads has already started answering the question in practice, one reopened building at a time.
Flowers Keep Showing Up This Season
There is a small, unplanned thread running through Woodside's fall calendar. The Little Store built its whole concept around flowers alongside food. A few miles up the road, Filoli is running Fleurs de Villes THE GILDED AGE through September 18, a floral exhibition featuring mannequins built around the aesthetic of the HBO series, before the estate shifts into its main fall programming.
That fall programming is worth planning around if you haven't already. Filoli's Nightfall, the estate's after-dark Halloween experience, returns September 26 and runs nightly through November 1, closed October 8, with hours from 5:30 to 10 p.m. and last entry at 8:30. Alongside it, Autumn Days brings giant pumpkins, cider, and churros across the gardens during daylight hours, the kind of outing that works for a family afternoon before the estate turns spookier after dark.
Trail Season Starts Now
Cooler weeks also mean the two big parks on Woodside's edges start filling back up. Wunderlich County Park, tucked into the hills above town, holds about 15 miles of developed trail through redwood forest, open meadow, and the restored Folger Stable, once part of the Folgers coffee family's ranch and now home to a small museum in the old Carriage Room. Most of the park runs on old fire roads, with the exception of the Bear Gulch and Redwood Trails, and it is closed to bikes and dogs, which keeps it quieter than some of the multi-use parks nearby.
Huddart County Park, just down the road, hosts the Woodside Ramble each December, a trail race through both parks with distances from 10K up to a full 50K along the Crystal Springs and Skyline Trails. This year's edition runs December 19. Even for anyone with no interest in racing, it is a useful marker for when the trails are busiest and when they quiet back down.
The Real Story of the Season
None of this fall calendar is unusual on its own. Filoli runs a Halloween event every year. The parks fill up every autumn. What is unusual is that a building on Woodside Road sat closed for years, then reopened as something the town's formal planning process has not yet gotten around to deciding it wants. The Town Center Area Plan will take another year or more to reach adoption. The crossroads did not wait around for permission. It just opened its doors again.
If you live here, that is worth knowing before the next council meeting or planning survey lands in your inbox. The plan is still being written. The crossroads is already being rewritten, one storefront at a time.
If you are weighing a move within Woodside or the wider Peninsula and want a read on how a corner like this one actually functions day to day, not just what a listing says about it, the Lyn Jason Cobb Team has spent decades watching towns like this change from the inside. Schedule a consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
