"So we just decided to give up on the location." That's how Dasbierhauz co-owner Mehmet Vural explained the end of Redwood City's only daily beer garden, a business that poured its last liter boot on June 30 after two years on Middlefield Road. Vural said the closure came down to a business partner moving away, not a lack of customers. The final shift, he added, turned out to be one of the busiest the team had ever worked.
Just under three months later, none of that history is visible from Broadway. Today the festival tent at Courthouse Square sits empty, the one scheduled dark day tucked into the middle of Oktoberfest Downtown Redwood City's ten-day run. Tomorrow it fills again with the smell of pretzels and the sound of an accordion. If you live in the blocks around the square, you already know the tent went up last Friday. What you may not have connected is that the city's biggest annual celebration of German beer culture arrived the same year its only place to get that culture on a random Tuesday closed for good.
The Last Round on Middlefield
Dasbierhauz wasn't a Redwood City original. The concept started in downtown Mountain View in 2020, when Vural and his brother merged it with their Olympus Caffe & Bakery. Vural expanded into Redwood City with help from Savas Basumli, owner of Cobani Gyro & Kebab, taking over 830 Middlefield Road for a menu built around pretzels, bratwurst, schnitzel, and a wide draft list served in the traditional 1-liter boot.
For two years it was the answer to "where can I get a beer and a schnitzel tonight" in downtown Redwood City. Then the partnership behind the Redwood City location came apart when one partner moved away, and Vural chose to close rather than keep the outpost running solo. He's said he'd like to open more locations eventually. For now, the original Mountain View restaurant remains open. Redwood City's does not.
That leaves Gourmet Haus Staudt as the only German restaurant left in the city, a fact every outlet that covered the Dasbierhauz closure noted almost in passing. It's a strange thing to have to note at all, in a city about to run a ten-day Bavarian festival on its main square.
Ten Days, One Tent, No Daily Equivalent
Oktoberfest Downtown Redwood City runs September 18 through 27, dark on the 21st, presented by Redwood City Parks, Recreation and Community Services with backing from the Redwood City Parks and Arts Foundation. More than 2,000 feet of family-style bench seating fills Courthouse Square under a Munich-inspired tent, and the sponsor list includes Spaten Beer alongside Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, a detail that says something about how this event has grown since its early years as a modest one-weekend gathering.
The live music rotates by day. Golden Gate Bavarian Club plays the opening weekend and closes out the run September 25 through 27. Deutscher Musikverein and Alpine Sound Band cover the quieter weeknight happy-hour seatings on the 22nd and 23rd, and The Internationals bridge the gap through the final weekend. Tickets range from $10 to $27 for non-drinkers of any age, $16 to $35 for anyone 21 and over, and $250 for a weekend VIP table for six.
None of that infrastructure exists the other 355 days of the year. The tent, the bench seating, the imported Munich staging, all of it gets built for ten days and struck again. What used to fill the other 355 days, at least on Middlefield Road, doesn't anymore.
What Fills the Rest of the Corridor
The space that Dasbierhauz vacated didn't stay empty long. Gangsan, a modern Korean restaurant, moved into 830 Middlefield with a menu built around galbijjim, a braised beef short rib dish, and seolleongtang, an ox bone soup, alongside kalguksu noodles and sizzling bibimbap. Appetizers run $15 to $24, the beef soups $19 to $32, and shareable plates for two or three people land between $65 and $85. It's already staffed and seating guests, which means the fastest-moving replacement for Redwood City's lost beer garden wasn't another beer garden at all.
A few blocks over on Veterans Boulevard, the former Sizzler space became Reef Zaman in late June, a 280-seat Mediterranean restaurant from restaurateur Faris Alqabass, who also runs Mandi House in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The kitchen is led by Chef Mohammed Al-Omari, who came over from nearby Mazra. Alqabass has said of his chef's cooking:
"I've eaten in so many places, and I never tasted a lamb chop the same that he makes."
A 2,000-square-foot patio was expected to add another 300 seats within a few months of the restaurant's opening, which would put total capacity near 580, a scale almost no other restaurant on the Peninsula operates at.
The rest of the corridor has kept building around those two anchors. Mazra reopened on Broadway in October 2024 after a kitchen fire that June, and remains the default for wood-fired kebabs and shawarma. Limón, the Peruvian spot, opened its Redwood City location the same month. Bay Burgers, a smashburger counter from Redwood City native Xavier Pereznegron, opened its first brick-and-mortar at 976 Woodside Road in March after two years running as a pop-up out of a tent, not walkable from the square but worth the five-minute drive. DeVine Wine & Beer took over the former BottleShop space at 2627 Broadway in October 2025 under owner Ingrid Campos, pairing food with what's in the glass. Fireside Books & More opened at 2421 Broadway in February 2025, the kind of independent bookstore downtown had gone without for years, and The Baker Next Door on Main Street has been the morning stop since August 2024 for a green-olive-asiago-thyme boule.
If you're parking downtown for any of this, the three city garages, 750 Marshall, 850 Jefferson, and 900 Jefferson after 5pm, all offer 90 minutes free, enough time for a walk between the tent and whichever kitchen isn't on a wait.
Why the Party Outgrew the Pantry
Downtown Redwood City's other big weekly ritual, Music on the Square, wrapped its 20th season on September 4, two weeks before Oktoberfest's tent went up. For fourteen Fridays from late May through Labor Day weekend, that series was the thing that structured a downtown evening. Now that it's over for the year, the festival isn't competing with a Friday habit. It's filling the space that habit left behind, at the exact moment the neighborhood's German food identity thinned down to a single restaurant.
That's the part worth sitting with if you live here. A downtown doesn't typically let a category of food quietly disappear. It either replaces it fast, the way Gangsan moved into 830 Middlefield within weeks of Dasbierhauz's last pour, or it ritualizes what's left once a year with a bigger tent and better sponsors than the version that used to run daily. Redwood City did both in the same twelve months. The daily beer garden didn't survive a partnership falling apart. The ten-day festival, backed by the city and a roster of sponsors that includes some of the Peninsula's better-known names, just got its biggest bench-seating footprint yet.
Neither fact explains the other on its own. Together they say something about how this particular downtown handles loss: not by leaving a gap, but by either filling it with something entirely different or turning it into an event. If you're heading to the square this weekend for the closing stretch of lederhosen and Spaten, that contradiction is worth carrying with you past the tent flap, along with an appetite for wherever you land afterward, because on Middlefield Road, that's not a beer garden anymore.
If watching this downtown reshuffle its restaurants and its rituals has you wondering what it means for your own address nearby, the team at Notarianni Real Estate Group knows these streets block by block. Reach out anytime for a free home valuation and a conversation about what's actually happening on your corner of Redwood City.
