"The majority of our board is originally from Orange and love this city."
That line comes from Megan Penn, the board president who helped bring the Orange Home Grown Farmers and Artisans Market to life back in 2011. It took her group about two years to get a Saturday market onto a Chapman University parking lot at Palm and Cypress. Fifteen years later, that same instinct, people who already live here building something for the people who live here, is showing up again this September, just in a different aisle of the neighborhood.
Old Towne Orange has two big things on the calendar over the next three weeks: the Orange International Street Fair over Labor Day weekend, and the second annual Old Towne Burger Fest the Saturday after. They look like a matched pair of neighborhood events, but they tell almost opposite stories. One is a 53-year-old institution big enough to shut down blocks and suspend residential parking rules. The other is a single-venue gathering in its second year. Sitting between them is a quieter fact that says more about where this neighborhood is headed than either festival does: the restaurants opening around the Plaza right now aren't new arrivals chasing foot traffic. They're already-local operators opening their second and third locations two or three blocks from where they started.
Two Saturdays, Two Very Different Footprints
The Orange International Street Fair runs Friday, September 4 through Sunday, September 6, filling Old Towne Orange and the Circle with 14 international food streets, eight stages, and crowds that have been building since 1973, when the first fair drew 50,000 people to celebrate the city's centennial. It's been an annual tradition ever since, which puts this year's fair in roughly its 53rd run. It's produced by Orange Plaza Traditions in partnership with the City of Orange, and the scale shows in the logistics: Chapman Avenue closes completely from Lemon Street to Grand Street, Glassell Street closes from Almond Avenue to Maple Avenue, and permit parking restrictions across the Old Towne area are suspended from Friday through Sunday so fairgoers can use residential streets. Chapman University opens its lots for a fee, usually cheaper than the public structures, and the OCTA and Metrolink station sits just two blocks from the action for anyone who'd rather skip parking altogether.
That's a lot of civic machinery for one weekend. Compare it to what happens the following Saturday, September 12, when the second annual Old Towne Burger Fest sets up at Chapman Crafted Beer starting around 11 a.m. No street closures, no suspended permits, just one brewery hosting a burger competition. Last year's inaugural event featured El Brewjo Burgers, a family-owned pop-up known for its Chingonas Burgers, working the crowd at the same venue. It's a fraction of the size of the street fair, and that's exactly the point: it doesn't need the city's help to happen. It's small enough to run on its own momentum, which is a decent metaphor for what's happening with the neighborhood's restaurants right now.
The Locals Doubling Down
If you wanted evidence that Old Towne Orange's dining scene is growing from familiar hands rather than outside investment, this summer supplied it in three separate filings and openings.
At 109 S. Glassell Street, a concept called Sabor y Ole' Fusion filed for an on-sale beer and wine license with the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, signaling a full-service Spanish and Latin-inspired restaurant moving into the space that Tabu Shabu vacated. That's not a chain scouting a tourist corridor. That's someone reading the churn in a specific storefront and betting they can do better in it.
A few blocks over, Centro & Storico Cafe opened its second location inside Old Towne, bringing the same family-owned Italian format that's working somewhere else in the county: avocado toast and scrambles for the morning crowd, half and full pastas plus antipasti and pizza for lunch and dinner, wine from Pozzuoli Family Winery, and panini built on focaccia baked in house. A second location means the first one is already proven. This is expansion, not exploration.
Just down the street, Orange also welcomed the third location of a local Thai favorite, Thai Towne Eatery, at 152 N. Glassell. Three locations from an operator that started somewhere in the county and kept choosing to come back to blocks like this one is a pattern, not a coincidence.
None of these are outside capital discovering Old Towne because of a street fair or a food festival. They're operators who already know this six-block radius, some from a prior spot in the same building, some from a sister restaurant across the county, choosing to put a second or third bet on the same streets rather than take their next location somewhere new. Adding a piercing studio like Oak & Poppy to the mix, whose partners specifically say they chose Old Towne for its aesthetic, rounds out the picture: the businesses moving in are choosing this place on purpose, not passing through it.
What Holds the Calendar Together
Underneath both festivals and all three restaurant openings sits the one piece of Old Towne's routine that hasn't changed: the Orange Home Grown Farmers and Artisans Market, running every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 303 W. Palm Avenue, rain or shine, on land Chapman University has donated to the market since 2011. It's a nonprofit operation, sourcing from Southern California farms holding a California Certified Producer's Certificate, with food artisans selling bread, cheese, oils, and dips under a Temporary Food Facilities permit from the Orange County Health Care Agency. It accepts EBT and Market Match, and it's been the same weekly fixture through fifteen years of everything else in the neighborhood changing around it.
That contrast is worth sitting with. The market has been quietly doing the same thing every Saturday for a decade and a half while the businesses around it turn over, expand, and occasionally close. It's the base layer the newer openings get to build on top of, not compete with.
| Event | Dates | Location | Scale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Orange International Street Fair | Sept 4–6, 2026 | Old Towne Orange & the Circle | Multi-block, city-coordinated, street closures and suspended parking permits |
| Old Towne Burger Fest (2nd Annual) | Sept 12, 2026 | Chapman Crafted Beer | Single venue, no closures |
| Orange Home Grown Farmers & Artisans Market | Every Saturday, year-round | 303 W. Palm Ave. | Weekly, unchanged since 2011 |
How to Actually Spend the Next Three Weekends
- Saturday, August 30: A normal market Saturday at Orange Home Grown, before the fair traffic starts. Good week to go early if you want to beat the pre-Labor Day crowds.
- Friday through Sunday, September 4–6: The Street Fair. If you're driving, budget extra time for Chapman University lot access or plan to walk in from the Metrolink station two blocks away. Permit parking rules are suspended neighborhood-wide for the weekend, which means visitor cars will be parked closer to your block than usual.
- Saturday, September 12: Old Towne Burger Fest at Chapman Crafted Beer, starting around 11 a.m. Smaller crowd, no street logistics to plan around.
- Ongoing: Sabor y Ole', Centro & Storico's second location, and Thai Towne Eatery's third location are all within a few blocks of each other on or near Glassell Street, worth working into a normal week once the fair traffic clears.
The Actual Story
The easy version of this post would just be a calendar: fair this weekend, burger fest next weekend, some new restaurants in between. The more useful version is noticing what that calendar reveals. A festival that started with 50,000 people in 1973 still needs the city to shut down two streets and waive parking rules to hold it. A festival in its second year doesn't need any of that, because it's built to the scale of one brewery and the people who already show up there. And the restaurants filling in around both of them aren't chasing either crowd. They're already-local operators who know this neighborhood well enough to bet on it twice.
That's not a small distinction if you're trying to understand where Old Towne Orange is actually headed versus where a festival flyer might make it seem headed. Growth that comes from operators doubling down on blocks they already know tends to be sturdier than growth that shows up because of one big weekend a year.
If a night out in Old Towne ever turns into a bigger question, like what it would take to actually own a piece of this neighborhood, Adrian Langley has spent his career connecting property decisions in Orange County to the financing and long-term strategy behind them. You can schedule a consultation whenever that conversation makes sense, or browse more on what's happening around Orange in the meantime.
