Point Reyes Station's New Restaurant Scene Has One Landlord in Common

"Within reason, the idea is to somewhat arbitrarily freeze the town in the mid-20th century. You can't fight change, but you can slow it down."

That's Chris Hulls, talking about Point Reyes Station to the Press Democrat back in March. If you've walked Main Street or Highway 1 through town this year, you've already seen what he means, even if you didn't know his name yet. The dive bar reopened looking almost exactly the same. A seafood restaurant appeared in a building that sat empty for years. Somewhere across Tomales Bay, a longtime Inverness restaurant changed hands too. Three separate storefronts, three separate headlines if you were only half paying attention. One owner, if you were paying full attention.

The Same Name Keeps Showing Up

Hulls grew up in Point Reyes Station and graduated from Tomales High School. He now lives in San Anselmo with his wife, Annika, and their two school-age kids, and drives a Rivian pickup into town four days a week to run a project he calls the Point Reyes Good Luck Fund. Its motto is blunt: if you are lucky to have Point Reyes, make Point Reyes lucky to have you.

Here's what that's meant in practice over the past year and a half.

None of these three moves made headlines together anywhere I could find. Each one got covered as its own local news item. Lined up, they read differently.

What $15 Million Actually Buys

The Good Luck Fund's stated goal, according to its own materials, is to buy, lease, restore, and operate key local businesses and properties so the town keeps serving the people who live and work there and not just visitors and vacation homeowners. That's a mission statement you'd expect from a community land trust with dozens of donors behind it. It isn't. Hulls has put roughly $15 million of his own money into the fund. Outside donations, as of the Press Democrat's reporting this spring, added up to about $10,000.

That gap matters for anyone trying to understand who actually decides what downtown Point Reyes Station looks like next. Right now it isn't a council, a co-op, or a market of competing buyers. It's largely one person's checkbook, guided by a stated hope that other wealthy West Marin residents will eventually match his contribution once the fund has, in his words, a few points on the board.

The Saloon That Didn't Change Much

Ask a Point Reyes Station local what the Old Western Saloon is supposed to feel like and you'll hear some version of the same answer: unpretentious, a little rough, the kind of bar where a rancher and a weekend cyclist end up at the same rail. The building closed in January 2026 for the health and safety renovations the county requires whenever a bar changes hands, then reopened in March under Jeremy D'Antonio, a member of the West Marin roots-rock band San Geronimo, who's overseeing day-to-day operations for the fund.

The drink menu stayed old-school on purpose. D'Antonio has described it as a shot-and-a-beer type of place, with five rotating taps that mix local pulls like Lagunitas and Hen House alongside Modelo and Pabst Blue Ribbon. Food is still limited to snacks while the team works through the permitting for a food truck. The one visible addition is out back: a new beer garden with wine barrel tables, string lights, and milled benches that can hold up to 150 people, with a margarita program that's set to pull Grand Marnier and fresh lime from trees planted right there on the property.

If you've been inside since March, you've probably noticed what didn't change more than what did. That's the point.

The Building Nobody Knew What To Do With

The other side of this story starts in 2023, when a rent increase pushed Station House Café out of the space it had occupied for more than three decades and back across the street to its original 1964 location at Third and Main, the corner where owner Sheryl Cahill said her heart skipped a beat on the café's first day back. That move gave Point Reyes Station its long-running Station House Café again, now with a rebuilt bar from local woodworker Richard Vacha and a menu partly rewritten by chef Aaron Wright.

It also left the old building at 11180 Highway 1 without an anchor tenant for the next few years. That's the space Hulls bought for $1.8 million, and it's where Bar Auklet opened on July 2, 2026.

The restaurant belongs to Shannon Gregory, who already owns the Marshall Store, the roadside oyster shack that the New York Times once named one of the country's best restaurants, along with Route One Bakery & Kitchen in Tomales and the takeout spot Out the Door. Chef Anthony Paone, previously of the now-closed Campanella in Sebastopol, runs the kitchen. The oysters come from Tomales Bay Oyster Company, which happens to be run by Gregory's sister, so the seafood arrives without a distributor in between. The menu leans into the wood-fired grill: a mortadella skewer with hot honey for $8, squid with lemon ketchup and fermented cayenne for $19, grilled mushrooms with polenta for $24, a shareable ribeye with pickled ramp butter for $90, and a huckleberry kuchen with creme anglaise for dessert.

It's a different kind of restaurant than Point Reyes Station has typically had, closer to what you'd find in San Francisco than what's traditionally sat along Highway 1. That's exactly what Gregory told the Chronicle he was going for.

The Part That's Not About Restaurants

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Twenty years ago the National Park Service took over the last dairy farm at the edge of town. More recently, a dozen ranches inside Point Reyes National Seashore have been winding down, a shift that's displaced as many as 150 people, many of them Latino ranch workers and their families, and reshaped the agricultural economy that's defined this stretch of coast for generations. Hulls has said that watching the ranches disappear is part of what pushed him toward this project in the first place.

Not everyone in town is convinced the fund is the right answer. Some longtime residents are watching and waiting, hoping the same money that's restoring saloons and storefronts eventually turns toward the area's affordable housing shortage too. That's a fair question to sit with, and it's one the fund's own track record will answer over the next few years, not this one.

If You're Walking Through Town This Fall

None of the history above changes what you can actually do downtown right now. The Point Reyes Farmers Market still runs Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. outside Toby's Feed Barn, same as it always has. Station House Café hosts live music at its new corner spot on Sunday afternoons with no cover. The Old Western Saloon's weekend lineup is back, and if you keep driving you'll find the same rotation continuing at Smiley's Saloon in Bolinas, Rancho Nicasio, and the Papermill Creek Saloon out toward Forest Knolls. Bar Auklet is taking reservations for dinner and running a lighter lunch service out of the same building where you probably remember eating Station House's popovers a few years back.

The buildings changed hands. The rhythm of the town, so far, mostly didn't. Whether that stays true is worth watching, because right now it's being decided by one person's money more than by the usual push and pull of who can afford the rent.

If you're thinking about what a changing Point Reyes Station or the wider West Marin coast means for your own plans, whether that's a long-held family property, a place you've been eyeing for years, or just understanding how a town like this holds its character while everything around it shifts, Zamira Knows Marin has spent more than two decades paying attention to exactly this kind of local detail. Start your Marin home journey with a conversation, not a listing sheet.