Walk El Camino del Mar toward the Lands End trailhead on any weekend morning and you pass the same shuttered building you've been passing since December 31, 2020, the day the sign came down and the lights went dark. For most of the past five years, "the Cliff House is reopening" was a sentence Sea Cliff residents had learned to discount on arrival. The building was supposed to reopen in late 2022. Then the date slid to 2024. Then it slid again to "this year," meaning 2025. Each time, nothing visible happened at the site itself, just another headline with a new year attached to it.
That pattern is what makes this fall different, and it has nothing to do with the date. It has to do with what's now standing in front of the building.
The Deal That Actually Moved Things
For most of the closure, the real obstacle wasn't money or permits. It was a name. The Hountalas family, who ran the Cliff House for decades until the 2020 closure, held the trademarks to the name itself, along with the original recipes, the sign, and the domain names. Without their sign-off, the building's new leaseholder, attorney and San Francisco native Alexander Leff, could restore the structure but couldn't legally call it the Cliff House when he reopened it.
That changed on a Saturday in early November 2025, when the Hountalases donated the entire trademark package, name, sign, recipes, social accounts, and memorabilia, to the Western Neighborhoods Project, a small nonprofit that has spent years documenting the history of the city's western neighborhoods. Executive director Nicole Meldahl described the arrangement as one that protects the Cliff House's history and name "from whatever business interests are at play," a pointed line given how many operators have cycled through the site over the decades.
The agreement did two things at once. It guaranteed the building would keep its name and its rooftop sign when it eventually reopens, and it cleared the last real legal snag standing between "someday" and an actual construction schedule.
What the Fence Actually Means
Within thirty days of that announcement, construction fencing and scaffolding went up around the building for the first time since 2020. That's the detail worth paying attention to, more than any target date. Phase one of the work, which began in December, covers the parts of a building that don't show up in a press photo: a new roof, new elevators, repaired facade, windows, doors, waterproofing, HVAC, and fire alarm systems. None of it is glamorous. All of it is expensive, and necessary, since a building left vacant on an oceanfront bluff for five years deteriorates the way a car does when it sits in a garage without being started, exposed the entire time to salt air and wind.
The estimated cost of that work has roughly doubled since the project was first floated, from around $10 million to somewhere between $20 million and $25 million, according to Leff. Leff's own target for a full reopening is still late 2026. Even the Hountalases, who have every reason to want the building's next chapter to succeed, have called that timeline "very hopeful." Photos taken at the site as recently as May 2026 show the fencing still up and work still visibly underway, which tracks with a project of this size rather than contradicting it.
The one piece that might land sooner than the rest is small: a coffee and pastry counter planned for the old gift shop space at street level, which Leff has floated for a summer 2026 debut. As of this writing there's no confirmation that counter has opened. If you're walking the loop and want the earliest possible read on progress, that storefront, not the main dining rooms, is the one to watch.
When the building does reopen, the plan is four separate food and drink concepts under one roof, run in partnership with Hi Neighbor Hospitality Group, the team behind local restaurants Trestle and The Vault. The current lineup under discussion includes a family-style spot with burgers and outdoor seating on the back patio, a seafood-focused restaurant, the coffee counter mentioned above, and a fourth concept that hasn't been announced.
What You'll Actually See on the Loop This Fall
If you're doing the Lands End walk this month, here's the honest inventory of what's changed and what hasn't:
- Construction fencing now wraps the Cliff House building itself, visible from both the Point Lobos Avenue side and the trail below.
- The rooftop sign is still absent. It's part of the new agreement and expected to return, but no installation date has been set.
- The Lands End Lookout visitor center, with its café, park store, and restrooms, remains open and unaffected by the Cliff House work. It's still the most reliable place to warm up or use a bathroom on a foggy loop.
- The Sutro Baths ruins and the USS San Francisco memorial overlook, both a short walk from the Cliff House, are unchanged and still open.
A Smaller Project That Already Finished
While the Cliff House saga plays out in slow motion, a much smaller project just a few blocks away at Lincoln Park quietly wrapped. The children's play structure there had been damaged by an arsonist, and the city spent roughly $600,000 replacing it and refreshing the surrounding playground at Clement Street and 35th Avenue. The new version debuted on December 19, right next to the golf course and the open hillside that climbs toward the Legion of Honor.
It's a useful contrast to keep in mind. Not every project in this corner of the city moves at Cliff House speed. Some of them just get done, with far less fanfare, and residents notice only when they happen to walk past and see it finished.
The Quiet Corner That Hasn't Changed
Not everything nearby is under a fence. Lincoln Park Golf Course, which shares a fence line with the Legion of Honor and sits directly on the same walking loop, is still one of the least crowded pieces of ground in the neighborhood. A recent count during a Monday afternoon found just three golfers teeing off over the course of an hour, on a course whose 17th hole looks straight down the fairway at the Golden Gate Bridge. Whatever changes are coming to the Cliff House down the trail, this stretch of cliffside parkland remains as uncrowded as it's been for years.
What to Actually Watch For
If you've stopped believing "the Cliff House is reopening" as a headline, that instinct has served you well for five years. What's different now isn't a press release, it's a fence, a construction crew, and a completed legal agreement that removed the one obstacle that had stalled every previous attempt. The realistic signals to watch for from here are physical, not promotional: scaffolding coming down, the sign going back up on the roofline, and that small coffee counter in the old gift shop opening its doors before the rest of the building does.
For residents who've watched this corner of the neighborhood sit dormant for half a decade, that's a different kind of news to walk past on a Saturday morning.
Jeff Marples has spent more than two decades working the Sea Cliff and Marin County markets and keeps close tabs on the local changes that shape daily life here, not just the ones that show up in a listing description. If you'd like to talk through what any of this means for your own plans in the neighborhood, you can request a personalized market consultation directly through Jeffrey Marples.
