The Redwood City Oktoberfest Is Arriving With Half Its German Kitchens Gone
"It was one of the busiest days ever," Mehmet Vural told the Mountain View Voice about June 30, the last night his beer garden Dasbierhauz poured a pint on Middlefield Road. The crowd showed up. The restaurant closed anyway, a casualty of a business partner moving away rather than a lack of customers. Two and a half months later, Downtown Redwood City opens Oktoberfest with fewer German kitchens standing than it has had in years, and the timing is worth understanding if you live within walking distance of Courthouse Square.
This is not a story about a neighborhood losing its character. It is a story about a festival calendar and a restaurant scene that used to move at the same pace and are now, for one specific stretch this fall, moving at different speeds.
Dasbierhauz arrived in Redwood City in 2024 as an offshoot of a Mountain View original, paired with the Vural brothers' Olympus Caffe & Bakery and built out with help from Savas Basumli, owner of Cobani Gyro & Kebab. For two years it held the beer garden slot in a downtown that was otherwise reorganizing itself around Mediterranean and Korean kitchens. Then, at the end of June, it shut its doors on Theatre Way for good.
The replacement moved fast. Gangsan, a contemporary Korean restaurant serving galbijjim and seolleongtang, had signage up and a menu in the window within weeks, and by August it had soft-opened, according to reviews posted on its Yelp page. If you have walked past 830 Middlefield Road recently and noticed the German flag replaced by a Korean one, that is what happened, and it happened quickly.
What that leaves standing, though, is the detail that matters going into September. With Dasbierhauz gone, Gourmet Haus Staudt is now the only German restaurant left in the city, a fact confirmed by local food coverage this summer. One kitchen, for a downtown about to host a nine-day, city-run Bavarian festival under a tent on Courthouse Square.
It is worth separating two things that get talked about as though they are the same thing. Oktoberfest Redwood City, running September 18 through 20 and again September 22 through 27, is a ticketed civic event: a Munich-style tent with more than 2,000 feet of bench seating, weekend festival seatings running $15 to $37 depending on age and drinking status, and weekday happy hour seatings priced lower. It is produced by the city's own Parks, Recreation and Community Services department, and it shows up once a year for a set run of dates.
That is not the same thing as the neighborhood having a German food scene. The tent brings brats and steins for nine days. The rest of the year, if you want pretzels or schnitzel on a random Tuesday, Gourmet Haus Staudt is now your only option inside city limits. A festival can paper over a gap in the everyday dining map for exactly as long as the festival runs. Residents who assumed the German kitchen count downtown was stable because the city still throws an annual party under a tent are working from an outdated picture.
There is a second timing mismatch worth flagging, and it involves the restaurant most likely to absorb Oktoberfest's overflow crowds: Reef Zaman, the Mediterranean grill that soft-opened June 29 in the old Sizzler space on Veterans Boulevard.
Reef Zaman's interior seats about 280 people, already one of the larger dining rooms on the Peninsula. Owner Faris Alqabass has plans for a 2,000-square-foot patio that would add another 300 seats, and in reporting published mid-July he estimated that addition at roughly three months out. Count forward from mid-July and that patio lands somewhere in mid-October, which puts its likely debut after Oktoberfest closes on September 27 and closer to Port Fest, the October event whose exact date the city has not yet announced.
The practical read: if your plan for Oktoberfest weekend involves overflow dinner reservations at Reef Zaman's patio because the tent is packed, that patio probably is not open yet. The 280-seat interior room is real and running now. The extra 300 seats are not a September fallback. They are more likely a Port Fest one.
Summer downtown and fall downtown ask different things of a resident's planning, and the shift is sharp enough to catch people who have gotten used to the free, weekly rhythm of the past fourteen weeks.
| Summer Series (May 29 to Sept 4) | Fall Calendar (Sept 13 to late Oct) | |
|---|---|---|
| Number of dated events | 14 weekly Fridays, plus Wednesday and Thursday series | 3: Fiestas Patrias, Oktoberfest, Port Fest |
| Cost | Free | Ticketed (Oktoberfest runs $10 to $37 depending on seating and age) |
| Commitment | Walk up whenever | Advance purchase recommended, seatings sell out |
| Span | 14 weeks | About 6 weeks, front-loaded |
Music on the Square asked almost nothing of you: show up on a Friday, find a spot on Hamilton Avenue, leave whenever. Fall asks for a calendar check. Fiestas Patrias runs a single afternoon, September 13, 2 to 8 p.m., with a flag ceremony conducted by the Consul General de Mexico and Ballet Folklorico on Courthouse Square. Oktoberfest runs specific seatings across nine days, and the city's own event page warns that if a seating shows no tickets online, that slot is sold out. Port Fest lands in October at the Port of Redwood City, with a date the city has not finalized as of this writing.
None of that is a complaint about the programming. It is the same city department, Parks, Recreation and Community Services, running a different format for a different season. The point is that a resident who treats fall the way they treated summer, showing up without a ticket and expecting a table, is going to be surprised twice: once by the door and once by the wait.
If you are mapping a fall evening downtown, here is what you can count on as of late August. Gangsan on Middlefield is serving, per its own site and recent reviews, with galbi-jjim, hand-cut kalguksu noodles and sizzling bibimbap on the menu. Reef Zaman's 280-seat interior on Veterans Boulevard is open daily from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., serving flame-grilled kebabs, branzino and lamb chops, a menu that chef Mohammed Al-Omari brought over after time at nearby Mazra. Mazra itself, on Broadway, has been back since October 2024 after a kitchen fire the previous June. Bay Burgers, the smashburger spot that started as a pop-up at Hoover Park, opened its Woodside Road storefront this spring, a five-minute detour from a Wednesday Music in the Park set at Stafford Park if you want a milkshake on the way home.
What you cannot yet count on is the extra 300 seats on Veterans Boulevard, or a second German kitchen anywhere downtown. Those are the two gaps this fall's calendar is going to expose.
If you are heading downtown for Oktoberfest, the city's own parking guidance still holds: the garages at 750 Marshall and 850 Jefferson run all day, 900 Jefferson opens up after 5 p.m., and the first ninety minutes are free at all three. Caltrain drops you three blocks from Courthouse Square, which is worth remembering on a night when the tent seatings alone are likely to fill the closer street parking.
Downtown Redwood City is not shrinking. It replaced a beer garden with a Korean restaurant in about six weeks and it is about to add 300 more restaurant seats before the year is out. But the sequence matters. For the next several weeks, the neighborhood's dining capacity and its festival calendar are not moving in lockstep, and the gap lands squarely on the one holiday built around German food. Plan Oktoberfest night around what is actually open, not around what the tent implies about the rest of downtown.
If you are watching this stretch of Redwood City because you are thinking about buying or selling here and want a read on how a neighborhood's day-to-day amenities are actually shifting, not just how they are marketed, Jerylann Mateo has spent two decades tracking exactly this kind of on-the-ground change across the South Bay. Let's connect.
Stay up to date on the latest real estate trends.
Jerylann’s clients enjoy her thoughtful attentiveness and appreciate her high touch and compassionate care. It is truly her joy to ultimately fulfill their request throughout the transaction and graciously serve them. Her immediate accessibility, answers to timely questions and tenacious resolve makes her invaluable. Delivering responsive, confident results with a personal touch are all part of the design that allows Jerylann to provide exceptional representation and outstanding personal service.