Ask someone in San Carlos where they're going on a Friday and the answer comes fast: Laurel Street. Dinner at one of the new spots, a walk down the pedestrian-friendly block, maybe a chair at Burton Park if Music in the Park is still running that week. It's the correct answer often enough that almost nobody asks the follow-up question, which is what's happening two blocks east, on the stretch of town zoned for cabinetry shops, tire warehouses, and building supply.
The answer is wine. Also beer. Also, on the third Sunday of most months, a parking lot full of Ferraris.
The District Nobody Put a Sign On
Industrial Road and the blocks around Washington Street were never meant to be a destination. The zoning still says light industrial, and the businesses that fill most of the storefronts still do exactly what the name promises: cabinetry, ironwork, contractor supply. But over the years, a handful of small, family-owned wineries and breweries moved into the same footprint, close enough together that people started calling the cluster the Mid Peninsula Wine Trail, a loose map of tasting rooms packed into roughly a one-block radius of Industrial Road.
The anchors, if you've never made the turn off El Camino to find them:
- AutoVino Wine Garden, 380 Industrial Road, a wine bar and event space built around a working car showroom
- Woodside Vineyards, which runs its own tasting room inside that same AutoVino building, open weekends, no reservation required
- Devil's Canyon Brewing Company, 935 Washington Street, a working brewery with a covered patio and a running calendar of tastings and comedy nights
- Domenico Winery, a family-owned producer working in Cal-Italia varietals for more than two decades, with its own ticketed event calendar
None of these are secret in the sense of being hard to find. They're secret in the sense that a homeowner can drive past this corridor for years on the way to the hardware store and never register it as somewhere to actually go.
The Friday That Doesn't Involve Laurel Street
AutoVino runs a weekly Friday Night Happy Hour from 4:30 to 7:00 p.m., wine, live music, wood-fired pizza, wings, and charcuterie, inside a wine garden that shares the building with an actual car museum. You can get a glass of something from Woodside Vineyards, whose tasting room sits inside the same address, and wander past the showroom floor without buying a ticket to anything. It's the kind of Friday that wraps before the dinner rush even starts, parking is not a fight, and nobody is competing with you for a table the way Laurel Street tends to fill up once the last Music in the Park set lets out and the block empties into restaurants at once.
That contrast matters more this time of year than most. The 2026 Music in the Park series runs its final Friday on August 28, and the crowd it dumps onto Laurel Street afterward is part of the reason downtown feels tight on a summer evening. Industrial Road runs on its own schedule, indifferent to whatever is happening at Burton Park.
A Sunday With Exotic Cars in It
Every third Sunday, AutoVino hosts Cars & Cabernet, and the description undersells itself a little: rare and exotic cars parked in the lot and displayed inside a showroom that doubles as a museum, wine and food service running the whole time, free admission, dogs welcome. It's not a car show in the roped-off, admission-fee sense. It's closer to a neighborhood open house that happens to have a Lamborghini in it. Families wander through, and people who own none of the cars on display strike up conversations with people who own several, all before the afternoon is over.
The Beer Side of the Same Block
Devil's Canyon Brewing Company runs a parallel calendar on the beer side: comedy nights, tastings, themed events that don't require the crowd density of a downtown Friday to feel worth showing up for. Earlier this month, the brewery hosted its GREATest Cookie Swap across two sessions, an early-birds slot at 10 a.m. and a second seating at 2 p.m., the kind of small, specific, slightly odd community event that doesn't get press outside the neighborhood but fills a room anyway. Domenico Winery runs something similar on its side of the trail with a monthly comedy show called Grapes & Giggles and an Annual Orphan Barrel Tasting each spring that draws a steady crowd on a Sunday afternoon.
None of this is loud programming. It's the kind of calendar you only notice if you're already looking at this corridor as somewhere worth checking, rather than somewhere you drive through to get your fence repaired.
Why the Corridor Looks Like This
The transformation wasn't accidental, even if it also wasn't planned by anyone in particular. San Carlos city officials, the Chamber of Commerce, and the business owners along Industrial Road and Washington Street have spent years trying to give this stretch an identity that matches what it had already become, discussing things like better street signage and a coordinated marketing push to help visitors find a corridor that still looks, from the road, like a working industrial park.
The Devil's Canyon owner put it plainly when a local paper asked him about it: "Where we are is kind of understated and it's aged." He'd watched the area shift in the years since opening his doors, from a stretch of the city people drove through to a place where they might stop at two or three different businesses in the same afternoon without meaning to plan it that way.
That's still the honest description of the place. It doesn't look like a destination. It looks like where you'd go to get lumber cut or a tire patched, right up until you notice the wine garden next to the loading dock.
The Weekend Math
Here's the part worth sitting with if you've lived in San Carlos for a while and never made the detour: this city is running two separate Friday nights at the same time, in two parts of town zoned for completely different things, and most residents have only ever experienced one of them. Laurel Street does what a downtown does, it gets crowded, it fills up around events, it rewards showing up early. Industrial Road does something else. It's quieter by design, not because it's less worth visiting, but because almost nobody has told the rest of the city it's there.
If you've been defaulting to the same two or three spots on Laurel for years, the corridor a few blocks east is sitting there most Fridays and every third Sunday, mostly uncrowded, mostly unadvertised, and entirely inside a city you already know well enough to think you'd noticed everything in it.
You hadn't. That's the point.
If you're the kind of San Carlos resident who likes finding out what else the city has been quietly building, or if a friend asks you someday what it's actually like to live here, Marylene Notarianni has been paying attention to this market long enough to have answers that go past the median price. Reach out anytime you want to talk about what's happening in San Carlos, whether that's a Friday night detour or a serious conversation about your home's value.
