On University Avenue, the Longest Line This Summer Wasn't Outside the $5 Million Restaurant

"You become one of us, you become part of the wolf pack." That's how Kalani Millsaps describes what happens when someone walks through the door of the bar she opened with Kerry Pierce and Patricia Sebold on July 16. The line to get in that first night wrapped around the block on University Avenue. Not for the restaurant with the Parisian interior and the $5 million buildout two blocks away. For a sports bar with a wolf on the sign and a menu that still leans on coal-fired pizza.

If you live in North Park, you already know the address. 3085 University Avenue was URBN Coal Fired Pizza for fifteen years, since 2010, back when the neighborhood was just starting to turn into the dining destination it is now. URBN closed out by the end of 2025. What moved in is San Diego's first sports bar built entirely around women's athletics, and the way it landed says something about this neighborhood that the restaurant openings alone don't.

The One Thing That Carried Over From URBN

One of Us didn't erase what came before it. The team kept coal-fired pizza on the menu as a nod to the building's history, so the same style of pie that drew crowds for fifteen years is still there for a room full of people watching the NWSL instead. That's a small detail, but it tells you the founders were thinking about continuity on a stretch of University that has seen a lot of turnover, not about wiping the slate.

The bigger story is how they got there. Millsaps, Pierce, and Sebold didn't start with investors or a lease. They started with a phone. Millsaps has described sitting in a bar, unable to get a women's game put on a television with the sound on, and eventually "propping my phone up on my drink" and cranking the volume until a crowd gathered around her to watch anyway. That was the entire business model in its earliest form. They didn't start pursuing an actual location until after the San Diego Wave FC home opener in 2024, once a year of pop-up watch parties, mostly hosted at 619 Spirits in North Park, proved the demand was real.

North Park Already Had a Playbook for This

Here's the part that doesn't show up in the coverage of the opening weekend: North Park has run this experiment before, and it worked the same way the first time.

Bluefoot Bar, also in North Park, has spent twelve years building itself into a clubhouse for European football fans. It started with three or four regulars watching matches together. Today it hosts more than a dozen supporters' groups, Arsenal, Liverpool, Borussia Dortmund, Chelsea among them, alongside local fans of San Diego FC and Wave FC, and it draws hundreds of people on a given match day.

"We're top 10 in America. We have fans from all over the world coming here."

That's bartender Rodney Styles, describing the recognition Bluefoot picked up from the podcast Men in Blazers. Nobody built Bluefoot with a marketing plan either. It grew because a small group of people wanted somewhere to watch games together and a bar was willing to let them.

That's the pattern worth naming. North Park's most durable hospitality wins over the past decade haven't come from restaurant groups with buildout budgets. They've come from bars that let a fan community organize itself and then got out of the way. One of Us is the second time this has happened here, not the first, and that context changes how you should read everything else opening on these blocks right now.

The Money Is Chasing a Different Bet

Because there is real money moving through North Park this year, and it isn't chasing fan communities. It's chasing chef pedigree.

À L'Ouest opened in February at the corner of 30th and University, a French brasserie from Trust Restaurant Group that cost roughly $5 million to build out and seats 200 people across 5,400 square feet, with an interior designed by Studio Rallou. Trust now runs 13 restaurants across the city with about 500 employees and projected 2026 revenue near $51 million. That's an institutional bet on North Park as a dining destination, not a neighborhood hangout.

A few blocks over, Bacari took the two-story building that sat empty after Urban Solace closed, a restaurant that had helped define North Park's food scene for years before it shut down. Bacari opened there in February, bringing its Los Angeles-born Mediterranean small-plates format to San Diego for the first time. SONO opened in March from Ocean Mohamadi and chef Nino Cusimano, the couple behind brunch favorite Flora North Park.

More is coming before the year is out. Labora Cafe is targeting a fall opening next to The Observatory North Park, built around ceremonial-grade matcha sourced from Kyoto and Kagoshima. B's Bodega, a New York-style deli concept led by chef Rob Brouillard, is aiming for September in the old Gluten Free Baking Company space on 30th Street.

Every one of those is a serious, professionally financed bet on the neighborhood. None of them pulled a line around the block on opening night. One of Us did, and it did it with three founders, a menu that kept the old coal-fired pizza style, and a year of watch parties as its only market research.

The Weekend That Made the Case

Opening weekend had some help. One of Us landed on a Thursday that lined up with a Wave FC match on Friday, the third-place FIFA Men's World Cup match on Saturday, and the Spain-Argentina final on Sunday, so the crowds that first weekend were never going to be a clean test on their own. The ribbon-cutting itself pulled in athletes from Wave FC and the USA Rugby Eagles, along with proclamations from the North Park Main Street Association and Assembly Member Chris Ward. Three Division I women's basketball head coaches from around the city showed up too, SDSU's Stacie Terry-Hutson, fresh off being named Mountain West Coach of the Year, USD's Blanche Alverson, and UC San Diego's Heidi VanDerveer, along with 1999 World Cup champion Shannon MacMillan.

What answers the harder question is what happened after the confetti settled. By early August, One of Us had quickly become the spot to watch Wave FC games, the kind of place where the team's supporters group, the Sirens, now show up as a matter of course. San Diego resident Carol Kuck tried to get in on opening weekend and couldn't, the crowd was too deep, so she came back the following Thursday for a women's basketball game instead. She described the feeling of finally having a place where women's sports get the room's full attention rather than a corner screen with the sound off. That's a return visit on an ordinary Thursday with nothing on the calendar to inflate it, which tells you more about whether this sticks than the opening weekend does.

What This Actually Tells You

If you already live here, the takeaway isn't which new restaurant to try first. It's that University Avenue is quietly becoming the county's clubhouse strip, and the businesses earning that reputation aren't the ones with the biggest buildout number attached to them. Twelve years ago it was a handful of soccer fans and a bartender willing to put the right match on. This year it's three friends who got tired of watching games on a phone. Both bets paid off in the same neighborhood, using the same basic model, while the professionally financed concepts around them are still proving themselves one dinner service at a time.

That's not a knock on À L'Ouest or Bacari or what's coming from Labora and B's Bodega. North Park can support all of it. But if you want to understand what actually makes this neighborhood distinct, watch which door has the longer line on an ordinary Thursday when there's no World Cup final to explain it.

If you're curious about anything else changing in North Park this year, or you just want to talk through what's happening on your own block, The Foley Group is always glad to connect. Let's Connect.