Change is coming to San Geronimo’s landmark Two Bird Café. The restaurant has a new owner and menu and will soon be rebranded with a new name. Andrew Giacomini, a prominent Marin lawyer and board member of the Marin Agricultural Land Trust, bought the restaurant and inn in December for $2.5 million. Along with the restaurant, he plans to reopen the adjoining motel, and has given the long-term tenants four months’ notice to move out.
“The Two Bird has been an institution out here for a long time,” Mr. Giacomini said. “We wanted to keep it going, build on the foundation that it established, and maybe spice it up a little bit.”
Former owner Tony Miceli first bought the 1.2-acre property, home to the Two Bird and the motel-style Valley Inn next door, in 1996, after founding the original café 15 years earlier in Forest Knolls. The San Geronimo property has been a restaurant for nearly 100 years. When the pandemic put the business under financial stress, Mr. Miceli temporarily converted its five rooms into monthly rental units for locals in need of housing.
The restaurant chugged along, but Mr. Miceli has been looking to sell and retire. He’ll continue to live in his house on the property as a rental from Mr. Giacomini. “My input has gone as far as it will go,” Mr. Miceli said. “It’s basically just stand back and watch at this point. Andrew’s a local guy, I’m sure he’s going to continue in a way that will continue what I have been doing.”
Mr. Giacomini, who owns multiple residential parcels in the valley, laid out some of his plans but stayed tight-lipped about others. After he finalized the purchase just before Christmas, the restaurant closed for initial renovations, and reopened in January with a simpler, more locally focused menu. The Two Bird serves beer and wine at lunch, but Mr. Giacomini is applying for a full liquor license and will hire bartenders and expand the kitchen staff. In April, he’ll hold a grand reopening under a new name, and the restaurant will start serving dinner.
“The food vibe will be farm-to-table—not some particular cuisine—featuring local producers,” Mr. Giacomini said. “The vibe is not changing a lot, except that we’re going to amp it up in terms of music. There will be music here more often.” He envisions music on the patio in the summer and indoors on colder evenings, but won’t make any changes to the restaurant’s use permit, which requires the place to close by 11 p.m.
He’ll also make changes to the building itself, with help from his building designer, Steve Kinsey. The restaurant will likely get an outdoor patio with a fire pit, but the biggest change will come for the inn’s five monthly tenants: Mr. Giacomini plans to renovate their rooms and re-open them for hotel guests this summer. He gave them four months to leave.
“I met with all of them and told them this was our plan, but we’d be flexible,” Mr. Giacomini said. “Someone said yesterday they think they found a new spot.” He said the rooms were temporary stopgaps for the tenants, since they don’t have kitchens. He declined to say what he or Mr. Miceli charged for rent.
The Two Bird sale could have gone another way. In 2020, the San Geronimo Valley Affordable Housing Association quietly considered buying the property from Mr. Miceli and converting it into permanent affordable housing. The nonprofit would have used county and federal subsidies to keep the rental units affordable, and it even secured a $23,000 predevelopment grant from the county’s Measure W community housing fund.
But by last year, the association realized it couldn’t offer enough to buy the place from Mr. Miceli. S.G.V.A.H.A. communications coordinator Owen Clapp said it never reached the stage of discussions with the current tenants. “We didn’t make it too far, unfortunately,” Mr. Clapp said.