Forty-five people showed up for their shifts at Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery on a Tuesday morning in July 2025 and were told, that same day, that the restaurant was closing for good. The brewpub had held its corner of the Pruneyard for about 30 years, long enough that most Campbell residents under 40 had never known that spot as anything else. Then it was gone, with no warning to the staff and, for a long stretch afterward, no word on what would replace it.
When the Laughing Monk deal was announced in January 2026, Campbell Chamber of Commerce executive director Ken Johnson said spaces in Campbell "aren't left vacant for long," pointing to the city's reputation and its entertainment areas. That holds up along much of East Campbell Avenue, where storefronts often turn over quickly. The Pruneyard's biggest sit-down restaurant space shows how much the timeline can vary from one lease to the next. It sat dark through the rest of 2025 with no new operator announced.
A Deal Took Six Months. Opening Took Another Seven.
Laughing Monk Brewing didn't sign its lease with Regency Centers, the Pruneyard's retail landlord, until around January 2026, roughly six months after Rock Bottom's doors closed. Even then, neither the brewery nor the landlord would commit to an opening date. It wasn't until May 2026 that Laughing Monk's own reporting confirmed a target of late summer 2026 for the Campbell location, meaning the corner by the movie theater will have sat empty for something like thirteen months by the time the doors actually open.
What's coming is a full remodel of the concept, not a quiet reopening. Laughing Monk is building out a 10,000-square-foot gastropub with about 160 seats inside and 40 outside, a wood-fired pizza oven, and 20 taps, sized to match its Sunnyvale location. Owner Sam Ghadiri grew up in San Jose and has said he spent birthdays and weekends at the Pruneyard as a kid, which is part of why he moved on the space once it became available. The flagship burger on the menu, a smoked gouda and cheddar patty topped with a whole fried jalapeno, runs $24. Wings come in buffalo, lemon pepper, or mango habanero.
None of that changes the basic math of the vacancy. The Pruneyard has, by its own landlord's account, been steadily filling other openings over the same period, including a last-minute lease that kept Pruneyard Cinemas running. Filling a 10,000-square-foot restaurant space is a bigger match to make than filling a downtown storefront, and this one took more than a year from closure to opening.
Three Minutes Away, the Clock Runs Differently
Walk from the Pruneyard toward historic downtown and the turnover pace on East Campbell Avenue tells a messier story than a simple "downtown moves faster" line would suggest.
Opa! closed in fall 2025 after a bankruptcy filing, and the Mediterranean chain Elia had renovations underway within weeks, targeting a late January to early February 2026 opening at 276 E. Campbell Avenue. That's the fast case: a closed restaurant becomes a new one in a matter of months, and Elia's fourth Bay Area location (after Pleasanton, Walnut Creek, and San Carlos) is now serving weekend brunch and shareable Greek and Turkish plates from the same address.
But the corner at 220 E. Campbell Avenue tells the opposite story. Rocket Fizz, the candy shop that had held that spot for about a decade, closed in 2021, and the storefront sat vacant for roughly three years before Doppio Zero, a Southern Italian concept from Naples-born restaurateur Angelo Sannino, opened there in May 2025. City Manager Brian Loventhal called the vacancy a "noticeable" one at the time, and it lasted longer than the Pruneyard's Rock Bottom space did.
A few doors down, the old Liquid Bread Gastropub space spent months mid-renovation before reopening as Il Sogno, a new concept from the owners of Vin Santo, sharing the building with Campbell Brewing Company. So the honest version of the pattern isn't that downtown fills fast and the Pruneyard fills slow. It's that Campbell's dining map has had at least four of its anchor corners change hands inside the same twelve to eighteen months, on both ends of the corridor, at wildly different speeds, for reasons that have more to do with individual leases and operators than with which side of Highway 17 the space sits on.
What's Actually New to Try Right Now
For anyone who's been out of the loop, here's what's changed hands and opened recently:
- Elia (276 E. Campbell Ave.) - Mediterranean small plates, weekend brunch, in the former Opa! space
- Doppio Zero (220 E. Campbell Ave.) - wood-fired Neapolitan pizza and house-made pasta, where Rocket Fizz used to be
- Il Sogno - new concept from the Vin Santo team, sharing a building with Campbell Brewing Company
- FLIGHTS - comfort food served tapas-style, three preparations per order, meant for sharing
- The Vesper - recently named among Eater's top new restaurants for the South Bay
That's a lot of movement for a downtown that's only a few blocks long, and it's worth knowing which places on your usual walk have actually changed since last year.
What Hasn't Moved
Against all of that churn, Komatsu Japanese Cuisine has been serving from the same slightly out-of-the-way corner of downtown Campbell since 1977. It has outlasted the Pruneyard's multiple ownership changes, the retail center's full renovation in the late 2010s, and every one of the restaurants that have opened and closed around it since. Sushi Confidential, whose owner Randy Musterer was recognized by the Silicon Valley Organization for his community work, has built a similar kind of staying power a few blocks over.
A downtown corner can sit empty for three years or fill in a few months, and a Pruneyard flagship can go dark for more than a year before a new operator opens its doors. Komatsu's sign has stayed put through all of it.
If you've been meaning to check out what's new, this is a good season for it. Between Elia's brunch menu, Doppio Zero's pasta, and Laughing Monk's eventual opening at the Pruneyard, downtown Campbell and the shopping center behind it are both worth a second look, even if you've lived three blocks away for years.
I grew up watching these storefronts change hands, and I still keep a running list of what's worth trying next. If you want to compare notes on the new spots, or just talk about what Campbell looks like these days, reach out to Lindsay Hogan.
