Top Scripps Ranch Things to Do for Food and Local Flavor

In 2018, Sudberry Properties told Scripps Ranch to expect a Whole Foods, a luxury movie theater, and a 140-room Element Hotel by Marriott on the corner of Scripps Poway Parkway and Scripps Highlands Drive. Groundbreaking was set for early 2019. Opening day was supposed to be fall 2020. Eight years later, the anchor grocer for that project, Jimbo's, has a signed lease and a construction timeline that still says "planned for 2026." Site visits logged by Scripps Ranch News have found the lot largely undisturbed.

Meanwhile, one mile away, the neighborhood's actual food scene got built without asking anyone's permission on a schedule.

The corner that already flipped once

Before there was a Livia complex at 10380 Spring Canyon Road, that address hosted the old Scripps Ranch Farmers Market, folding tables and all, every Saturday morning from 9 to 1:30. At some point that market closed. The listing still sits online marked simply "CLOSED." New construction went up on the lot. And in February 2026, after more than a year of buildout, a different kind of neighborhood gathering spot opened its doors there: Buon Cibo Italian Specialties.

The lot didn't sit empty waiting for a big-box anchor. It just changed what kind of Saturday it hosted.

What moved into 10380 Spring Canyon Road

Buon Cibo is the work of Tom Tarantino, who co-founded RoVino in Little Italy back in 2016 with Antonia Buono and Vincenzo Bruno, and later opened a short-lived deli spinoff, RoVino The Foodery, in East Village before closing it in 2023. This time Tarantino built his own concept, and he built it in the community his family has called home for more than four decades.

The deli case runs on rotation. Sugo Sunday, the summer preorder tradition of family-recipe meat sauce, gave way this August to Lasagna Sunday, a quarter tray of pasta, meat sauce, and melted cheese with garlic bread on the side, picked up rather than cooked. There's also a running Friday Dinner for Two program, $35, order online by Thursday evening, pick up Friday between 4 and 7. And for anyone who wants to taste before they commit, Wine Captain Thomas D'Acquisto runs blind tastings this August pairing Chardonnay, Cabernet, Syrah, and a surprise bottle against a full Italian dinner menu, no wine knowledge required.

None of that reads like a placeholder business waiting for a mall to open next door. It reads like a business that assumes it's the destination.

The gastropub the neighbors financed themselves

A few minutes away at the Scripps Ranch Marketplace, a different kind of local investment played out. When Pizza Rev left its space unexpectedly, a group of Scripps Ranch friends and neighbors, including Mike Adamson, Brock Flint, John Lancia, and a dozen other residents with kids ranging from elementary school to recent high school graduates, pooled resources to open Public House 131. It opened its doors this August.

"We want it to be like Cheers in Boston, where everybody knows your name."

That's Lancia, describing the goal for the gastropub's marketing. The restaurant runs 22 rotating craft taps and sources ingredients locally where it can, including a pig farmer in Bonita and beef from Escondido. The commitment to families isn't incidental. Adamson has said the priority is families first, with a full teen menu alongside the kids' menu, and high chairs are already a fixture in the dining room.

Two new food businesses, both opened in 2026, both owned by people who already lived in the neighborhood before they opened anything. Neither one needed The Watermark to exist first.

How the week actually runs now

Put the pieces together and a realistic Scripps Ranch week looks less like waiting on a mall and more like this:

The market that picked up and left

That Thursday market at Newtopia Cyder isn't the same market that used to run Saturdays at 10380 Spring Canyon Road. It's the replacement. Organizers rebuilt it during the pandemic specifically to give the community a new gathering point after the old one folded, and it landed at the cidery's parking lot rather than back at its original address, which by then was on its way to becoming Livia.

The current version runs every Thursday, 3:30 to 7:30 pm, with more than 50 rotating vendors, a dog-friendly layout, covered seating for six eight-foot tables, and a DJ working the crowd. It's not nostalgia for a market that disappeared. It's evidence that when one neighborhood fixture closes, another one tends to show up somewhere else within walking distance, on its own timeline, without needing a master-planned retail center to greenlight it.

The lake didn't need any of this

Through all of it, Lake Miramar hasn't changed. The reservoir was built in 1960 as part of the second San Diego Aqueduct project, and its water arrives from both the Colorado River Aqueduct and the California Aqueduct. The paved loop around it runs 4.92 miles, wide enough for strollers and wheelchairs, with Evans Pond and the Scripps Miramar Ranch Library sitting near the trailhead.

The land carries an older story too. When the property was purchased in 1890, there were no buildings yet to block the view of Mount Soledad and the Pacific, which is why it was named Miramar, Spanish for sea view. The stretch of trail that crosses the dam was fenced off after September 11 for security reasons and didn't reopen until 2007. Boat rentals run weekends only, 6 am to 6 pm, first come basis, no reservations, and the whole park closes the first Tuesday of every month for maintenance. None of that has anything to do with what's happening at the Watermark or the Marketplace. It's just still there, doing what it's always done, while the rest of the neighborhood's food scene rearranges itself around it.

Meanwhile, six years past the original deadline

The Watermark's own timeline is worth sitting with for a second, if only because it's the counterexample to everything above. Sudberry's original pitch in 2018 promised a Whole Foods, a luxury theater, and an Element Hotel opening in fall 2020. That didn't happen. Jimbo's signed on as the new anchor grocer, a 25,000-square-foot store at 10190 Scripps Gateway Court, with construction anticipated to start in 2025 and a grand opening planned for 2026. As of the most recent site checks reported by Scripps Ranch News, the grounds showed no construction underway.

That's not a knock on the project. Large retail developments take time, and Sudberry has other Scripps Ranch work further along, including The Hub, a 260-unit apartment complex with Starbucks as a retail tenant that reached the leasing stage years ago. But it does mean the neighborhood's actual weekly rhythm, the Thursday market, the Friday pickup window, the new gastropub with the teen menu, got built by people who didn't wait for the anchor tenant to show up first. They built around the gap.

If you already live here, you've probably noticed the version of Scripps Ranch that exists on the ground looks different from the one that gets promised in press releases. The Watermark may still arrive with its grocery store and its hotel. In the meantime, the corner at 10380 Spring Canyon Road already told you what this neighborhood does when it's asked to wait: it finds its own address.

If any of this ever turns into a real conversation about what a home near these blocks is worth, or what's changing block by block that could affect it, Rebecca Zhao knows this stretch of Scripps Ranch well enough to talk specifics, not generalities.