Pruneyard Campbell Fall 2026: New Restaurants and Events
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
Walk the loop past Trader Joe's toward the cinema and you will still pass a storefront with the lights off. It has sat that way since last summer, when Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery closed without warning after roughly 30 years in that spot, telling its roughly 45 employees the morning the doors shut for good. A dark anchor space for a full year is the kind of thing regulars notice every time they walk by.
A new tenant is lined up for the former Rock Bottom space, bringing a Bay Area-rooted operator to The Pruneyard.
Laughing Monk Brewing has signed the lease. Regency Centers confirmed the deal earlier this year, and reporting since has filled in what the buildout will look like: a 10,000-square-foot gastropub with about 160 seats inside and another 40 outside, 20 taps, and a wood-fired pizza oven. That's a bigger footprint than a typical Pruneyard tenant, closer in scale to Laughing Monk's existing Sunnyvale location than to a quick-service spot.
The menu leans into the kind of food that fills a room on a Thursday night rather than a quick lunch crowd: wings in Buffalo, lemon pepper, or mango habanero, an 8-ounce burger with smoked gouda, sharp cheddar, and a whole fried jalapeno, and a flat-iron steak with garlic mashed potatoes that the brewery's founder has called one of his own favorites on the menu. This isn't a downsized concept squeezed into leftover square footage. It's a full buildout meant to anchor that end of the center the way Rock Bottom once did.
What makes the choice interesting is who's behind it. Laughing Monk is run by Sam Ghadiri, a San Jose native who has said plainly that he grew up spending birthdays and weekends at The Pruneyard and, as Palo Alto Online reported, considers the center "iconic." He already knew the property before signing the lease, and Laughing Monk has built a connected Bay Area footprint that includes Sunnyvale, Scotts Valley, two San Francisco locations, and, as of this spring, a bar inside Los Altos's State Street Market. Campbell is the next planned addition to Laughing Monk's Bay Area footprint.
The opening has been targeted for late summer, which puts it squarely in the window residents are living through right now. Neither Laughing Monk nor Regency Centers has published an exact date, so the honest answer for anyone timing a visit is to watch for it rather than pencil in a weekend.
The Rock Bottom vacancy wasn't the only close call at The Pruneyard this year. Pruneyard Cinemas, the reclining-seat theater with in-seat food and drink service that regulars have leaned on for date nights and rainy Sundays, stayed open only because of a last-minute lease deal. It's easy to miss that kind of news when the theater never actually closed, but it means the multiplex that reopened with those roomy reclining seats a few years back came closer to shutting down than most moviegoers realized.
The theater is bringing live comedy back to its stage on August 29. The comedy event and Laughing Monk buildout are two notable developments at The Pruneyard in 2026.
As Palo Alto Online reported, Ghadiri said: "There's nostalgia, but also I think The Pruneyard is iconic. And so when I heard that there was an opportunity to get in there, we jumped right in."
That's Ghadiri's own framing of why he took the lease, and it's worth sitting with for a second. A center that spent a year with its highest-visibility storefront dark isn't necessarily in trouble. The former Rock Bottom space is now slated to become a gastropub led by an operator who grew up visiting The Pruneyard.
If you've been treating The Pruneyard as a Trader Joe's run and a walk past the fountain lately, the calendar is about to give you more reasons to linger. None of these require planning around downtown Campbell traffic or parking, since they sit on the Bascom Avenue side of town:
Downtown Campbell has its own fall lineup running at the same time. The 2026 Fall Wine Walk takes over Historic Downtown Campbell on Thursday, September 17, starting at 6 p.m., and the 31st Annual Campbell Oktoberfest lands on Saturday, October 17. Those are downtown events built around Campbell Avenue's storefronts and Orchard City Green, a different circuit than the one forming at The Pruneyard. If you live east of Bascom, you now have a real choice between the two rather than defaulting downtown because that's where the activity has historically been.
It would be easy to lump all of this into a generic "Campbell is adding restaurants" story, but that misses what's specific about this particular stretch of vacancies. Downtown Campbell's recent additions have mostly been restaurant groups expanding a regional footprint into a new storefront. The Pruneyard's biggest fall story is a bit different: its most visible space remained empty for about a year before Laughing Monk signed a lease, while the cinema stayed open after a last-minute lease deal.
The opening is notable in part because Sam Ghadiri grew up visiting The Pruneyard and Laughing Monk has built a Bay Area footprint. For residents who've watched that corner sit empty, the planned gastropub will be a new addition to the center.
If you've been wondering whether it's worth building fall routines back into The Pruneyard rather than defaulting to downtown, the last twelve months answered that question before the first pint gets poured. Laughing Monk's planned opening and the cinema's continued operation give regulars two reasons to return to The Pruneyard. That's worth walking past the dark storefront one more time to see for yourself before it isn't dark anymore.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home near Campbell Avenue or the Pruneyard corridor, or you're simply curious how neighborhood momentum like this tends to show up in local market conversations, Renovato & Co. is always glad to talk through it. Let's Begin.
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