Stand in the Bank of America parking lot at 1245 Lincoln Avenue on a quiet Tuesday and you can see both ends of the story at once. Walk north toward Willow Street and the corner is dominated by a two-story building with a colorful mural, a rooftop patio, and a line that still forms most weekend nights. Walk south toward Minnesota Avenue and you pass Hicklebee's, the longtime children's bookstore, and next to it sits a lot that has been waiting for its restaurant since before most people started noticing construction fencing as a neighborhood feature.
That same parking lot is where Glen Fest sets up this year. The third annual edition of Willow Glen's largest community event runs Saturday, September 26, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and if you've been to the first two, the format will feel familiar. What's changed is everything around it, and that's worth understanding before you head down there with a folding chair and an appetite.
What's Actually Happening on the 26th
Glen Fest is organized by the Willow Glen Business Association and fills the Bank of America lot with local food vendors, beer and wine, live bands, and a kids' court with bouncy houses and face painting. It's a one-day event, no ticket required to walk through, and it's built around the same stretch of Lincoln Avenue that hosts the neighborhood's Wine Walk, Beer Walk, and Holiday Bubbly Walk throughout the year.
A few practical notes if you're planning your Saturday around it:
- The Willow Glen Farmers' Market runs every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Willow Glen Elementary, rain or shine, which means the morning before Glen Fest gives you a second stop a few blocks away before the festival tents fill up.
- Free parking is available in the Bank of America lot itself when it's not hosting the event, along with street parking up and down the avenue.
- The festival draws from the same pool of Lincoln Avenue restaurants that operate every other day of the year, so if you want a sit-down meal instead of a food truck plate, your options are the same ones you'd have on any Saturday night here.
That last point matters more this year than it has in the past two, because the two restaurants that have defined the recent conversation about this street are not on the same footing at all.
Two Restaurants, Four Years Apart
At the Willow Street end of the avenue sits Copita Tequileria y Comida, the modern Mexican restaurant backed by celebrity chef Joanne Weir and the father-son team of Larry and Michael Mindel, who also own Il Fornaio. Weir and her partners spent two and a half years and went millions of dollars over budget before Copita finally opened on November 1, 2023. Executive chef Azari Cuenca-Maitret, who trained in Michelin-starred kitchens in France and Spain including the three-starred Arzak in San Sebastian, led a kitchen team that grew to more than 90 people before the doors even opened. On opening night the line stretched three blocks and some guests waited an hour for a drink.
"It was booming," Michael Mindel told SFGATE. "People were very excited."
Nearly three years later, Copita is no longer a novelty, it's a fixture. Yelp shows more than 600 reviews as of this year, and the restaurant now serves lunch and dinner daily plus weekend brunch, a schedule expansion from the dinner-only service it opened with. The rooftop patio, built to face west toward the Santa Cruz Mountains, is the kind of detail that made this project take so long in the first place, and it's also the detail that made it worth the wait for the people who show up now on a Tuesday for happy hour.
Head the other direction on Lincoln Avenue and you find the site of Luke's Rooftop Beer Garden and Restaurant, a project first pitched to San Jose city planners back in 2022. The plan calls for a two-story building at 1093 Minnesota Avenue, replacing a shuttered convenience store, with a ground-floor dining room and brewing space and a rooftop terrace serving as the main dining area. Russ Fukushima, who also co-owns Water Tower Kitchen in Campbell and previously ran Blush Raw Bar Lounge at San Pedro Square Market for nearly a decade, is behind the concept. The vision, according to reporting at the time, was a restaurant that's kid-friendly downstairs and a date-night spot upstairs, with 18 to 20 rotating beers on tap.
The special use permit finally cleared a San Jose Planning Director's hearing in 2024, two years after the project was first proposed, following concerns raised at the hearing by Hicklebee's owner Laura Gahrahmat about the six parking spaces planned for what could become a busy restaurant. That approval was the last public milestone. No opening date has been announced since, and there is no indication construction has wrapped.
Copita: about two and a half years from concept to opening night. Luke's: already past four years and still without a date. Both projects promised a rooftop, both needed to clear the same kind of city review, and both sit at opposite ends of the same downtown Willow Glen commercial strip. The gap between them is the clearest evidence you'll find that a restaurant opening on this street has very little to do with how good the idea is and almost everything to do with how the site, the permitting, and the neighbors line up.
What Else Moved While Those Two Sat
The two rooftop projects get the attention because they're big and visible, but they're not the only things that have shifted on Lincoln Avenue recently. Braise, the New American restaurant that had been part of the same wave of culinary attention that put Willow Glen on the map alongside The Table, closed its doors in August 2024, citing inflation and rising food costs after surviving the pandemic shutdowns that closed so many other restaurants around it.
More recently, Gussied Up Dog Boutique, at 1310 Lincoln Avenue, announced in December 2025 that it would close once its remaining inventory sold through. The store's landlord had declined to renew the lease, citing the cost of major plumbing repairs to the building. It's a smaller story than a stalled two-story restaurant, but it's the same underlying pattern: a storefront's future here can turn on a landlord's repair bill as easily as on foot traffic or reviews.
None of this makes the avenue feel unstable when you're actually walking down it. More than 250 independent businesses still line Lincoln Avenue, and the sidewalk cafes, boutiques, and coffee shops that show up in every Willow Glen writeup are still there. But the churn underneath that stability is real, and Glen Fest weekend is one of the few times of year when enough people are walking the full length of the street at once to notice both what's thriving and what's missing.
Walking It on the 26th
If you're heading to Glen Fest this year, the practical version of all this is simple. The festival itself covers food, drinks, and music in the parking lot, same as the last two years. If you want a sit-down meal before or after, Copita is open and full, now serving lunch as well as dinner, so you don't need to plan around a dinner-only window anymore. If you were hoping to check out Luke's Rooftop while you're in the neighborhood, that's still not an option, and there's no public opening date yet to build a future visit around.
What you're really seeing, if you walk the whole avenue that Saturday, is a street that looks finished from the sidewalk and isn't, not entirely. One end got its ambitious rooftop project. The other end is still waiting on its permit-cleared, still-vacant lot to become something. Glen Fest fills the space between them for one day a year, which is as good a reason as any to walk both directions instead of just one.
If you're already living in Willow Glen and keeping half an eye on what your place might be worth while all of this settles out along Lincoln Avenue, KL Real Estate Team can put together a free home valuation whenever you're curious, no festival required.
