Looking to connect with local business owners to identify possible opportunities for collaboration, Whole Foods Market on Miller Avenue is hosting a Business-to-Business Meet + Greet on Monday, September 8 from 6pm-8pm at the O'Hanlon Center for the Arts.

"Whether it be catering or floral arrangements for an event or coming up with a range of ideas on how we can work together, we want to be a resource for our local business community," said Brownlie Raffaini, the store's marketing and community relations team leader.

The event will feature a bevy of great food and soft drinks, as well as a drawing for a $100 Whole Foods gift card. Attendees are encouraged to bring their business cards for the drawing. 

The 411: Whole Foods Market on Miller Avenue is hosting a Business-to-Business Meet + Greet on Monday, September 8 from 6pm-8pm at the O'Hanlon Center for the Arts. Free.

Beginning September 2 at 9am, motorists will encounter some lane closures in both directions of Miller Avenue between Sunnyside Avenue near downtown and Almonte Boulevard near Tamalpais High School as the City of Mill Valley begins the initial phase of the Miller Avenue Streetscape Project. This first phase of the project is designed to improve parking, traffic and pedestrian safety. 

The right lanes of both inbound and outbound sections of Miller Avenue will be closed periodically on weekdays between 9am and 5pm from September 2–22. The lane closures will not impact the entirety of Miller Avenue simultaneously, as contractors will move from section of the road to another throughout the project.

Click here for the full story.

As Melora Johnson saw it, summer in Mill Valley was the perfect time to open her new Juice Girl shop.

With everyone seemingly out of town for long stretches of time, she’d have plenty of time to get settled before the school year started and throngs of Tam High and Middle School students descended in droves on her shop – located in the 45 Camino Alto building in the space that formerly housed Jamba Juice.

But while Johnson’s Juice Girl opened quietly right before school let out in June, business has boomed, apparently feeding a hefty appetite for her products that had built up over the past nine months when she was selling them out of the Yolo Yogurt Lounge on Miller Avenue. From Mean Green and Clean Green juices to Dandy Apple and Blueberry Detox smoothies, Juice Girl has hit a nerve, despite an increasingly crowded juice space in the 94941, from Urban Remedy to the soon-to-debut Nekter in Strawberry Village.

“Business has been really great,” Johnson says. “We’ve been getting loads of traffic – and it’s all been word of mouth.”

Being busy right out of the gate – all while dealing with the myriad logistics of getting a new business off the ground – has meant 14- to 16-hour days for Johnson.

“It’s been truly exhausting,” she says.

And rewarding – in addition to the fans she brought over from her days at Yolo, Johnson, a native of New Hampshire, has recently welcomed a bevy of new faces, including a group of Mill Valley firefighters – and even a movie star. Colin Firth, whose 2010 film, The King’s Speech screened on opening night of the Mill Valley Film Festival and later garnered Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Actor, stopped into Juice Girl last weekend to have a juice, as they were staying with Johnson and her family.

“They’re dear friends of ours,” she says.

Firth and his wife Livia Firth, a well known advocate for environmental causes in the fashion industry, are close friends of Melora and her husband Rod, as their children went to school together in London, where the Johnsons lived for eight years before they moved to Mill Valley in 2012.

Rod Johnson, a longtime Oracle executive, was transferred to the Bay Area and now makes the Mill Valley-to-Silicon Valley commute. As Melora Johnson adjusted to life with three kids (ages 9, 13 and 14) in a brand new town (“we just fell in love with the place,” she says), she was drawn to the idea of Juice Girl.

“I was appalled by the diets of a lot of kids and teenage kids – I was shocked,” she says of her first few months in Mill Valley. “In some ways, this is my attempt to fight that and show that food can be really good and still be good for you.”

Surprised that Mill Valley didn’t “have a really good, fresh, organic juice bar” at the time, she bought a pricey press to do cold-pressed juices, and connected with Karen Kauh. Johnson began renting Kauh’s kitchen in the early mornings.

Word of Juice Girl at Yolo spread quietly but steadily.

“We developed a very loyal following,” she says. “The location was funny – you had to really know I was there to know I was there.”

As Johnson was preparing to move her operation over the Sweetwater Music Hall & Café in the spring, she got word that Jamba Juice was closing, and she leapt at the chance.

“I signed a lease almost right away,” she says.

Since opening, Johnsons says she’s received plenty of feedback, much of it from kids about making the menu more affordable. She’s made some minor tweaks to do so without compromising the quality of the products. She's also added food items like avocado on toast and the "Nutty Banana Square," bread lathered in almond or peanut butter with sliced bananas and cinnamon.

“I’ve tried to strike that balance between not wanting to feed them junk but wanting them to afford what I have,” she says. The minor changes have included expanding the menu of fruit smoothies, which are less expensive to make than green smoothies.

With the school year set to start, Johnson is catching her breath for a minute and readying herself for the onslaught of students.

“It’s been amazing so far,” she says.

The 411: Juice Girl is located at 45 Camino Alto, Suite 104. It’s open Mon.-Fri. 8am-5pm, Sat.-Sun. 9am-5pm. 415.322.6160. Click here for more info and click here for the daily menu.    

BooKoo, the popular four-year-old Asian street food restaurant at 25 Miller Ave. downtown, has unveiled its expanded space along with a dazzling new interior design that includes 10 craft beer taps.

BooKoo owner Matt Holmes had been looking to expand the restaurant’s 680-square-foot space almost since its inception. The closure of Henry's Toyshop in the adjacent space in late 2013 provided the perfect opportunity, he says. The expansion more than doubles the restaurant’s square footage to 1,400 and its number of seats to 48.

The expansion also provided BooKoo with an opportunity to change its interior design. Gone are the bright hues that Holmes says were much needed in the previously tiny space. Those pastels and bright colors would’ve made the larger space seem “like the inside of a coloring book,” he says.

“With the expansion of Boo Koo, we had the opportunity to tear away from the pastel hues and multi-colored walls and introduce much broader design elements consistent with our Mill Valley roots and our Asian Street Food style,” says owner, Matt Holmes. 

The new design incorporates the work of San Francisco artist Adam Feibelman, whose “unique ceiling art and bar mural marry the elements of street art, playful themes, and restaurant design” Holmes says.  

Holmes also reached out to San Francisco husband-and-wife team of interior interior designers Parisa O'Connell and Clinton Miller, who sought to transform “the space into a rustic, yet modern attraction, with highly textural elements suggestive of a bustling gritty Bangkok alley.”

To do so, Holmes procured some salvaged barn wood and sheet metal from now-defunct Mill Valley garden retailer Smith & Hawken. The refreshed wood and metal now adorn the new BooKoo’s walls, tabletops, and 26-foot bar/countertop. 

"We wanted to bring a fresh urban appeal to the new space in fun unique way". An oversized custom light fixture was added as well, “fusing together the ever so bright red logo color along with concrete stains and white hex tile to create a beautiful and welcoming Asian-inspired restaurant experience.”

The expansion was critical, Holmes says, to putting all of BooKoo’s operations under one roof. He says “the logistics of running this business were so hard” because of the tight quarters, with him storing paper products in his house and “running out of food almost every day.”

Holmes says that in addition to paving the way for BooKoo’s craft beer program, the larger space allows for an expanded kitchen and thus a soon-to-expand menu that will include organic handmade artisan dumplings and the return of their popular line of Asian chicken wings.

“In the next few months, you’ll see a big step in our culinary innovation,” he says. “We’re really excited about it.”

The Asian street food restaurant first opened in December 2010 in the former Ino Sushi space as Charlie Hong Kong, a second location of Darryl and Carolyn Rudolph’s popular Santa Cruz restaurant of the same name. In August 2011, the restaurant broke away from that partnership and went through a name change and a tweak of its menu. The BooKoo name is a play on the French “beaucoup” (plentiful, bountiful) and has roots in Vietnamese slang. 

As BooKoo is only taking a portion of the former Henry's Toyshop space, Holmes is looking for a subtenant for the rest of it. Interested parties can contact Holmes, a principal at Retail West, by clicking here. 

The sub-leased space was temporarily occupied by Carolina Boutique, the retail shop owned by Carolina Loiacono, which moved into the space for a few months during a renovation of the building that included Carolina and Sofia Jewelry.

The 411: BooKoo is located at 25 Miller Avenue. It is open Mon.-Tue., 11am-8pm and Wed.-Sun., 11am-9pm. Click here for more info.

One of the most iconic athletes of all time and one of the most vilified actors ever take the stage together at the Marin Theatre Company beginning August 14, as the venerable local theater kicks off its 48th season with a production of Fetch Clay, Make Man.

The historical drama draws its inspiration from a peculiar event from the Civil Rights Era: a press conference at which heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, né Cassius Clay, introduced his “secret strategy man” – the former Hollywood comedic actor Stepin Fetchit, né Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry.

The play was written by San Francisco native and hip-hop theater pioneer Will Power and directed by Derrick Sanders (MTC’s Fences, April 2014). The latest collaboration between MTC and Sanders is the play’s West Coast premiere as part of a bi-coastal co-production with Maryland’s Round House Theatre, where the play will continue after it ends its MTC run on September 7.

“We are delighted to welcome back to Mill Valley Derrick Sanders, the incredible director who helmed our fantastic production of Fences last season,” MTC Artistic Director Jasson Minadakis says. “He has brought together a wonderful cast of actors to tell San Francisco native Will Power’s story of Ali and Step and the powerful battle that raged in the mid-1960s, both inside the ring and outside in the world.

Fetch Clay, Make Man examines black identity in the U.S. through the unlikely friendship between two African-American icons who became inseparable from their public personas. Ali, “The People’s Champion,” was viewed as a racial hero for embracing black pride (and white antagonism); Fetchit, “The Laziest Man in the World,” as a racial traitor for his “chitlin’ circuit” vaudeville and minstrel show character (that was so popular he became the first black actor to receive a featured screen credit).

Fetch Clay, Make Man takes place in the run-up to the controversial 1965 rematch between Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston, which famously ended after Liston went down less than two minutes into the first round after a “phantom punch” that few saw delivered by Ali. The play puts that infamous fight in the background, with the imagined drama taking place in Ali’s dressing room at the fore.

From the shadow boxing of personalities between Ali and Stepin Fetchit, whom Ali has brought in to teach him heavyweight champion Jack Johnson’s “anchor punch,” to the struggle of Ali and his wife with their new life in the Nation of Islam, “plenty of verbal punches are thrown” in this “eye-popping [and] intriguing” (The New York Times) new play that is also a “fascinating [and] bracing look at the politics of identity” (Backstage.com).

Fetch Clay, Make Man premiered in 2010 at the McCarter Theatre Center in New Jersey and received its second production at New York Theatre Workshop in August 2013. Born in Harlem and raised in San Francisco’s Fillmore district, playwright Will Power “has been hailed by critics as ‘the best verse playwright in America’ and is known for bridging the gap between contemporary hip-hop and performance theater” (Dallas Magazine).

The 411: The production of Fetch Clay, Make Man will run for a limited engagement of 29 performances from August 14 through September 7. Opening night is Tuesday, August 19. Marin Theatre Company is located at 397 Miller Avenue in Mill Valley. Click here to buy tickets.    

Like many Mill Valley business owners, when Erin Seavey and Dave Tint sought inspiration for their newly expanded and newly named business, they simply looked up – to Mount Tamalpais.

In mid-July, the pair are launching Mt. Tam Dog Company at 6 Miller Ave., where Seavey has owned the Alpha Dog retail shop for more than two years. The new moniker is a reflection of an expanded business that includes a dog walking service and sees the Sleeping Lady as its muse and its playground.

“We’re using Mount Tam as the backdrop for everything we believe in for people and their pets,” says Seavey, a Marin native who grew up in Novato. “We’re all about the health and fitness of dogs, love of the great outdoors. On the mountain’s hiking trails, we have the ability to be out in nature with our dogs.”

Under the new model, Seavey is the “den mother” of the retail shop and Tint is the “pack leader” of the dog walking business.

Tint, a Tiburon resident who’s been walking dogs for years, says he’s “all about bringing accountability to the dog walking business,” namely by using GPS to map out every route he takes dogs on – mostly fire roads – allowing clients to know “where your dog has been and what kind of exercise they had.” The dog walking service will include a maximum of six dogs at a time, on leash, primarily on fire roads.

Clients can also have input into the process, as Tint has categorized all of the trails he uses just like ski resorts do with ski trails, from “bunny slopes to double black diamonds.”

“I always tell people that my job wouldn’t be the same if I lived in Texas,” he adds.

That focus on accountability, Tint says, was inspired by its antithesis: he recalls seeing dog walkers with 10 dogs at a time in San Francisco, sitting on a bench and drinking a latte while the dogs scurried about.

As for the retail shop, Seavey says longtime Alpha Dog customers will still be able to find their favorites, especially custom doggie beds and custom collars. But they’ll also notice a clear shift toward being an “mini REI for dogs and people,” with a heavy emphasis on dog products like travel food bowls, doggie boots for the desert and life jackets for four-legged seafarers.

“We’re all about reflecting an outdoor passion for nature and staying fit, both for dogs and people,” Seavey says.

The 411: Alpha Dog retail shop will close on July 9, and Mt. Tam Dog Company plans to reopen one week later. 6 Miller Avenue. 415.389.6500. Click here for more info.

Much like its brethren in the music and news businesses, the business of renting and selling physical DVDs and videos has been in a downward spiral for a decade.

Silver Screen Video, which opened at 459 Miller Avenue in 1997, lasted longer than most, staying alive as its direct competitors like Blockbuster went by the wayside.

But for Almonte resident Scott Lafranchi, who opened the first of eight Silver Screen Video Centers in the Bay Area 28 years ago with his brother Rick, it’s time to close the Mill Valley shop, as well as their store in Terra Linda.

Silver Screen Video on Miller Ave. will close on August 24, with a storewide sale of all of its 20,000 titles beginning on July 21. The store will stop renting videos on August 1.

“The video business has been going downhill for a while now,” said Lafranchi, who plans to keep his Silver Screen shop in Oakland open – for now. “In the meantime a lot of competition went out of business, which actually kept us going for a bit longer. We’re among the last ones. But there are just too many other options for people’s time, not only for video but with the Internet and with live sports.”

While competition in the DVD market from the likes of Redbox and technology powerhouse Netflix hurt the business in the 2000s, the 2010s have been all about streaming services and a rapidly dwindling  DVD market overall, regardless of the provider. With Netflix and Amazon and Hulu and myriad, cloud-based streaming services, as well as a seemingly limitless number of ways to stream video, even including video-game consoles such as Xbox One and the Playstation 4, people simply don’t need to leave their homes inn making a spontaneous decision about entertainment for the night.

In 2003, there were 25,042 establishments that focused primarily on DVD, video game and VHS rentals, and industry revenues were $11.9 billion according to IBIS World, a Los Angeles-based research firm. In 2010, revenues dropped to 17,369 stores with revenues of $7.8 billion. In its latest report on the market in May, the firm said industry revenues were at just $4 billion.

 “We’re really appreciative of our loyal customers for the past 17 years,” Lafranchi said. “We’re the last video store in the area. No hard feeling – the whole business is just really tough right now.”

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The 94941's day-long event of the year kicked off with the Mill Valley Volunteer Firefighters Association's annual Pancake Breakfast and a remembrance service at Lytton Square and ended with the Kiddo! Carnival, Concert on the Green and Community Celebration – with a massive Memorial Day Parade thrown in for good measure. Check out photos from throughout the day below.

In addition to the photos above, here's a fantastic video from Mill Valley filmmaker Gary Yost about the Greenwood School's entry in the 2014 Mill Valley Memorial Day Parade:

BooKoo, the popular three-year-old Asian street food restaurant in the small space at 25 Miller Ave. downtown, has been looking to expand almost since its inception.
Now owner Matt Holmes says BooKoo is on the cusp of doing so, expanding into part of the adjacent space occupied by Henry's Toyshop, which closed in late 2013. Holmes says he hopes to complete the expansion, which will double the restaurant's seating and allow for the installation of a dozen craft beer taps, in June.
The Asian street food restaurant first opened in December 2010 in the former Ino Sushi space as Charlie Hong Kong, a second location of Darryl and Carolyn Rudolph’s popular Santa Cruz restaurant of the same name. In August 2011, the restaurant broke away from that partnership and went through a name change and a tweak of its menu. The BooKoo name is a play on the French “beaucoup” (plentiful, bountiful) and has roots in Vietnamese slang. 
As BooKoo is only taking a portion of the former Henry's Toyshop space, Holmes is looking for a subtenant for the rest of it. Interested parties can contact Holmes, a principal at Retail West, by clicking here. 
The sub-leased space will become available on July 1, as Carolina Boutique, the retail shop owned by Carolina Loiacono, is moving into the space for a few months during a renovation of the building that includes Carolina and Sofia Jewelry (which has relocated a portion of its inventory into the Room Art Gallery a few doors down).

Want to know what's happening around town? Click here to subscribe to the Enjoy Mill Valley Blog by Email!

The following post comes from the folks at Equator Coffee & Teas, who are set to open a new downtown coffee shop later this year:

Back in October of last year, Equator Coffee and Teas accepted the key to 2 Miller Avenue, officially taking over the space that was, until that point, home to La Coppa—Arnold Spinelli's longstanding café. While Equator worked to secure building permits, the company set up a mobile coffee cart to jumpstart their mission— fueling Mill Valley, the beginning of many a bike ride, and the corner that would soon host their flagship café. Now, the permits have officially been granted and build out is slated to begin soon.

Though Equator Coffee and Teas has been around for over 18 years, 2 Miller will be the company's second retail location. The first, in the Proof Lab surf shop at Tam Junction, is nearly one year old. Equator spent the intervening years seeking out direct relationships with farmers, partnering with social enterprises in coffee producing countries, sponsoring various women's empowerment initiatives, and growing a diverse network of wholesale accounts. In the beginning, Equator was a small roasting operation, born in a garage in Corte Madera, and has since grown to a beacon of social responsibility, bolstering the connection between quality coffee and the quality of farmers' lives.

The buildout will blend the old and the new, the traditional and the modern. Redwood salvaged from Mill Valley's surroundings will comprise some features as well as the café ceiling, coupled with a few copper accents and the classic Equator black and red. The space, designed by Boor Bridges Architecture, will be open and inviting, clean and warm, and ready to open its doors in August.

Gary Scheuenstuhl is getting ready for one of his busiest days of the year for his Mill Valley Music shop on Miller Avenue.

But the customer service-minded record store owner is also bracing himself for having to tell his loyal customers the five words he hates to utter: “I ran out of that.”

Record Store Day 2014 – a celebration of independent record stores like Scheuenstuhl’s – is set for Saturday, April 19, and Scheuenstuhl admits he has “a love-hate relationship” with the event that produces one of his best sales days of the year but also has him unable to fulfill some customer requests.

Record Store Day started as a grassroots campaign in 2007 to support independent record stores that were facing extinction in an increasingly digital music business. The event features hundreds of musicians appearing and performing at independent stores across the country, and issuing special vinyl and CD releases to mark the occasion. It has grown immensely over the years. In 2008, there were 10 special Record Store Day releases. In 2014, there are more than 425 special RSD releases, the list of which fills more than 10 pages, from the Allman Brothers to the Zombies.

With that growth, it’s become harder and harder for shops like Scheuenstuhl’s to get their hands on some of the most limited releases. For instance, a reissue of Garcia, Jerry Garcia’s first solo album on white vinyl, is a surefire seller in the town where the late Garcia spent many nights at venues like the old Sweetwater. But with only 1,500 copies being released nationwide, Scheuenstuhl only received a single copy of Garcia for Record Store Day.

“By making these releases so limited, instead of celebrating independent record stores, you’re creating an instant collectible that immediately goes up on eBay,” says Scheuenstuhl, who opened his store after his former boss John Goddard closed his downtown Village Music shop in 2007.

That being said, Scheuenstuhl said Record Store Day remains a great way to celebrate stores like his that are forever trying to retain their longtime customers in a world where Amazon Prime makes anything and everything available at customers’ fingertips with near-instant gratification.

He uses RSD as a way to remind customers about his fantastic inventory, holding a storewide sale – 20 percent off new items and 30 percent off used items – to reward those who come to the shop on Saturday.

The 411: Record Store Day 2014 is Saturday, April 19. Mill Valley Music is located at 320 Miller Ave., (415) 389-9090. Click here for more details, and click here for a full list of Record Store Day releases nationwide. 

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One of Mill Valley's most prominent and divisive pieces of land heads back to the spotlight when the Mill Valley Planning Commission holds an April 14 hearing on a new mixed residential and commercial development project at 500 Miller Avenue. The application comes on the heels of a purchase of the land in 2013 by developer Daniel Deibel's Upworth Real Estate from longtime owner Al Von der Worth, who received approval for a development project there in 2010.

Von der Worth first proposed his project in June 2005, and it was the subject of more than a half-dozen study sessions and multiple hearings before the commission's approval. The approved project was a mixed residential and commercial development comprised of a 14,276 square foot building of 9 attached, single-family residential units with a 12,217 sq. ft. parking garage below and a separate two-story 4,948 square foot commercial building. 

Deibel's new application is for 9 attached single-family townhouse-style residential units totaling 23,502 square feet built as two buildings with 11,962 sq. ft. of parking incorporated at the rear first floor of the buildings, and a separate two-story 3,000 square foot commercial building with a separate parking lot. 

Click here for more info on the project. The hearing will be streamed live and archived on the city's website here.

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