The Sprinkles Were Still Wet When Capitola Village Caught Fire. Two Comebacks Later, Both Finish This Fall.
On the night of March 9, Andrea Guajardo was on a ladder inside the empty storefront next to Mijo's Taqueria, painting sprinkles and ice cream drips on the walls of a shop she and her husband Anthony hadn't opened yet. They'd named it Sandie Scoops, after Andrea's grandmother, and had a flyer taped to the window announcing a Friday debut. She left that evening still holding a paintbrush. Hours later, a fire broke out in the two-story home next door on Monterey Avenue, jumped the alley, and blackened the side of the building that housed both the unopened ice cream shop and the taqueria that had fed Capitola Village for nearly a decade.
If you live within walking distance of the Esplanade, you already know some version of this. What you may not have connected is that the fire's recovery and the Capitola Wharf's long-delayed future are now running on the same calendar. One is a family business trying to reopen two storefronts. The other is a City Council vote on what gets built at the end of the pier. Both were set in motion by something nobody chose (a fire, a series of winter storms) and both are scheduled to resolve within the same few months. This fall isn't just the season the fog lifts and the crowds thin. It's the season Capitola Village finds out what its own downtown looks like next.
The building at the center of the fire held more than a taco counter. Geisha Japanese Restaurant and Tea House occupied the second floor. Soul Portal Surfers, a surfboard storage business, shared the ground level. And the storefront that used to house Souza's Ice Cream & Candy, then LG Meats Capitola, was mid-transformation into Sandie Scoops when the flames reached it.
The damage wasn't uniform. Mijo's took the brunt of it. Smoke and water soaked the space where Anthony Guajardo had built his menu of Baja fish tacos and carnitas burritos since founding the restaurant in 2016. The building was red-tagged, meaning the Guajardos couldn't even go back in for their own appliances while insurance adjusters worked through an assessment. Nine days after the fire, Andrea told Lookout Santa Cruz that repairs could take up to a year in the worst case.
Sandie Scoops fared better. The side of the building where Andrea had been painting sustained comparatively minor smoke and water damage, and the couple held out hope that the ice cream shop could open well before the taqueria did. That's the detail worth sitting with if you've been wondering why one sign might reappear on Monterey Avenue before the other: the fire didn't touch both halves of that building equally, and the reopening timelines split accordingly.
"From our daughters' school to the business association in Capitola, we've felt the desire to come back and come back strong."
That's Andrea, talking to Lookout about the wave of community support that followed, including a sold-out fundraiser. It's the kind of thing that shows up in a lot of these stories. What doesn't always show up is what "coming back" costs in actual months.
By late spring, Mijo's Yelp page listed a target reopening date of August 1. That's a specific number, and it's worth being honest about what it represents: an optimistic target set months before the insurance assessment was even finished, not a confirmed date backed by a permit or a posted sign. Fire recovery involving red-tagged commercial space usually runs through several sequential steps: an insurance settlement, structural inspection and sign-off from the city, then buildout, before a health department reopening inspection. Any one of those can push a date back without anyone doing anything wrong.
If you're walking past that stretch of Monterey Avenue this month and the storefronts are still dark, that's consistent with the timeline the Guajardos themselves described in March, not a sign that the recovery has stalled. If Sandie Scoops has already reopened while Mijo's hasn't, that's also consistent with what we know: two different damage levels inside one building tend to produce two different reopening dates, even when the people running both businesses are the same two people.
The wharf's story started earlier and moves slower. Here's the sequence that got Capitola to where it is now:
Three and a half years between the first storm and a finished master plan is not an unusually slow pace for coastal infrastructure that requires environmental review, but it does mean that "the wharf is getting a restaurant" has been technically true, in some form, since the summer of 2025. What's changed is that the city now has actual proposals in hand and a fall council date attached to them.
Here's the detail that tends to get lost when a headline says a project "moved forward." The council's fall vote will adopt a master plan, not approve construction or sign a tenant. According to the city's own staff estimates from mid-2025, a full restaurant build on the wharf would cost between $5.2 and $6.2 million. City funding was expected to cover up to $3 million of that. The rest has to come from private investment, meaning whoever wins the RFP still has to find financing and clear permitting after the plan is adopted, not before.
Capitola Reef shop owner Devon Salter, who told a local reporter last year that he walks the wharf almost every morning, isn't alone in wondering whether a restaurant is even the right call for a structure that's absorbed two separate rounds of storm damage in under a year. That tension between wanting the wharf to feel finished and being wary of building something the ocean can take apart again is baked into every version of this plan the city has floated. A fall vote settles the design direction. It does not put tables on the wharf by Thanksgiving.
The Capitola Art & Wine Festival returned to the Esplanade on September 12 and 13 this year, the way it has every September since 1982, drawing more than 150 artists and the usual wine tasting crowd along Capitola and Monterey Avenues. It's the kind of fixed point that makes it easy to measure everything else against it. This is the same season the Guajardos are watching a red tag, and the same season the council is expected to finally vote on a plan that's been in motion since before most of the current storefronts changed hands.
Gerry Jensen, who chaired the community fundraising effort that helped pay for the wharf's benches and lighting, put it simply when the rebuilt wharf reopened two years ago: the wharf is the heartbeat of the whole area. The same could be said of a taco counter that's fed the same families for a decade. Neither one needed to be fully finished to matter to the people who live three blocks away. But this fall, for the first time since the storms and the fire, both of those unfinished stories are actually close enough to an ending that it's worth paying attention to which one lands first.
If you're watching either story because you're thinking about what your own place near the Village is worth, or because a home two doors from all of this just came on your radar, that's a conversation Room Real Estate has every day. We're in Capitola as often as we're in Felton, and we'd rather talk you through what a season like this actually means for a block than let a headline do it for us.
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