If you pull up the Town of Ross's official page for its seasonal outdoor dining event, it names five food purveyors on Redwood Drive: Crown & Crumpet, Marche Aux Fleurs, Tony Tutto, Trattoria Fresco, and Village Corner. Two of those five are now closed. Trattoria Fresco, the twenty-five-seat Italian bistro at 13 Ross Common, has permanently closed, according to its own Yelp listing and independent reviews on Restaurantji and RestaurantGuru. Village Corner, the small storefront at 3 Ross Common, shows the same status on Yelp: closed.
The town's list is one snapshot of Ross Common this fall. Ross also has a trail up Lagunitas Road, a garden campus that's been running programs since 1945, and town-sponsored gatherings.
The Five Names on the Town's List
The Downtown Ross Outdoor Dining page on townofrossca.gov describes a pandemic-era format, with Redwood Drive closed at Ross Common so tables could be spaced to follow COVID-19 health guidelines. It names five downtown food purveyors: Crown & Crumpet, Marche Aux Fleurs, Tony Tutto, Trattoria Fresco, and Village Corner. Restaurant openings and closings tend to move faster than event pages, so the storefronts open today are a subset of that list.
Two Closed Kitchens
Trattoria Fresco opened in 1998, run by a chef named Marco who came to Ross from Florence and built his menu around organic, Tuscany-Mediterranean cooking and a house-made flatbread called pinsa. Reviewers described a quiet, twenty-five-seat room with the owner greeting tables personally, the kind of place where parking was tight and the prices ran high for the neighborhood, but the food justified the wait. Multiple listings now mark it permanently closed.
Village Corner, at 3 Ross Common, has closed as well. Their closures leave three of the five food purveyors on the town's list operating.
What's Open on Redwood Drive
Three names on the town's list are still active. Marché, at 23 Ross Common, describes itself as a French and Italian-inspired, California contemporary farm-to-fork restaurant, sourcing produce, meat, and seafood from local purveyors and pouring a wine and beer list built around small production wineries. Crown & Crumpet Cafe, a second location of the San Francisco original, serves breakfast, lunch, and afternoon tea alongside pastries with a British lean, and pours coffee and tea from Bay Area roaster Equator Coffee.
Tony Tutto Pizza is the third name on the town's list. It's one of the food vendors at the town's August 2026 Live on the Common concert, alongside Taqueria Marin, Riley's Food Truck, HopMonk Tavern, Curveball Food Truck, 6oz Wine Bar, and Kona Ice.
Phoenix Lake and Lagunitas Road
Phoenix Lake sits on Marin Municipal Water District land at the base of Mount Tamalpais, one of seven reservoirs the district built starting in 1912. The main loop around the lake runs a shaded, mostly flat 2.8 to 2.9 miles, according to both AllTrails and Map & Boots, an easy hour or so for most walkers. Hikers who connect onto the Gertrude-Ord Trail or continue past the dam report full outings closer to four miles, and TripAdvisor accounts describe the whole loop, out and back, taking around an hour and forty-five minutes.
Access runs through Natalie Coffin Greene Park, at the end of Lagunitas Road, where the small parking lot fills fast. Marin Mommies advises arriving before 11 a.m. on weekends or planning to wait for a spot, and 7x7 Bay Area notes that when the lot is full, the workaround is to park down at Ross Town Center and walk in, which stretches the outing to 5.8 miles round trip. Leashed dogs are permitted on the trails, bikes are allowed on the fire roads, and horses share the route as well. The trail offers another way to spend a weekend in Ross alongside the restaurants on Redwood Drive.
What's on the Fall and Winter Calendar
The Marin Art and Garden Center, at 30 Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, has been operating on its campus since 1945 and carries the bulk of Ross's seasonal programming into the colder months. Its calendar for this fall and winter includes Foraged-Style Thanksgiving and Winter Holiday Tablescapes, Holiday Cookie Decorating with Babaloo Bakes, a session to Decorate Holiday Village Houses, and a Seasonal Sound Bath in the studio. None of these require a restaurant reservation. They require showing up at a campus that's been a fixture since well before most of the current Ross Common tenants existed.
The town itself runs its own calendar of gatherings. The August 21, 2026 Live on the Common concert brought out Super Diamond for the music and that same rotating cast of food vendors and trucks. The annual Ross Town Dinner, free for residents, is built around live music from LaTiDo playing Latin jazz, a KRUU photo booth, lawn games, and a silent disco run by JoyLab. The events are sponsored by the town, the Ross Property Owners' Association, and the Ross Auxiliary.
Ross Dining and Community Gatherings
Ross has always described its own commercial footprint as deliberately limited. This fall, three of the five food purveyors on the town's list remain active, alongside the lake, the garden center, and the town-sponsored calendar. The trailhead at the end of Lagunitas Road and the Marin Art and Garden Center's events calendar offer additional ways to experience Ross this season.
Sherry Ramzi tracks these small, easy-to-miss shifts across every Marin enclave she works in, not just the ones with a home currently for sale. If you're curious what else has changed on the ground in Ross or in any of the other towns she covers, Marin Exclusive Homes is a good place to ask.
