"There was just one thing missing in the market and that's great coffee," Casa Libre co-founder Natalie Taormina told the Daily Pilot the week her café opened inside Mercado González. In 2026 the market treated three gaps the same way. Coffee was one. A dinner-focused puesto was another, and the third was a sit-down brunch room in the space that opened as Maizano.
Mercado González turns three on November 17, about five weeks from now. It opened at 2300 Harbor Blvd. on November 17, 2023, as a project of the Northgate González family. The opening lineup was already deep. Northgate's puesto directory lists birria from La Tapatía Birrieria, seafood from Mariscos El Pariente and Marisquería El Puerto, Sushi El Sinaloense, Tacos Los Güichos, Carnitas Don Miguel, Churrería El Moro, La Tamalería, Pastelería La González and more. According to Eater LA's opening coverage, Maizano was the sit-down restaurant and Entre Nos was the large outdoor cocktail bar.
With that much counter food, the openings worth tracking are the ones that cover a part of the day the market didn't already serve. Each 2026 addition does that.
Dinner came first, with a bell
Cenaduría Doña Tere opened with a grand-opening ceremony on July 16, built around an official "Ringing of the Bell," the Daily Pilot reported. The paper said the ritual comes from towns throughout Mexico, where a bell calls people together.
The name tells you the meal. A cenaduría celebrates la cena, or dinner. The Daily Pilot described it as a small, family-run neighborhood format that serves comfort food late in the evening and is less familiar north of the border than cantinas and taquerias. The menu is short on purpose. It covers platos, or dinner plates, and pozole. Pozole verde comes with chicken and pozole rojo with pork, and you can add specific cuts such as pata or cabeza.
Prices run from a $15 single portion to a $70 paquetazo, the family package. Large communal tables line the wall beside the counter. Team leader Brayan Toledo told the Daily Pilot that the pozole rojo is a top seller and that its base is made in house from guajillo, California and árbol chiles. Chicken flautas and blue-corn sopes de lomo are the other popular orders.
The puesto is a companion to one that has been there since day one. Carnitas Don Miguel honors the family patriarch and uses the Michoacán-style recipe from the original Anaheim market. Doña Tere takes the name of the matriarch. Per the Daily Pilot, she opened her home to 30 to 50 people on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights. The first Northgate Market opened in Anaheim in 1980 in a converted liquor store. The family now runs more than 40 stores in California.
The brunch room changed hands
The sit-down space that housed Maizano is now Pradera, which serves a Mexican-inspired brunch menu. The same July Daily Pilot story said Pradera is open seven days a week. The coverage we found gives no exact opening date, only that the change had happened by late July.
That swap moves the market's one table-service room toward the morning. Doña Tere was pulling the other end of the day toward dinner at the same time.
Coffee arrived five weeks late
Casa Libre was supposed to open in mid-August. That was the plan the family described in July. It opened Thursday, September 24, as a roastery and bean market that roasts single-origin Mexican coffee on site. Two families own it together. Taormina and her husband, Jeremy Creighton, were among the original founders of Common Room Roasters, and in 2022 they launched Freelance Coffee Project in Newport Beach. Taormina told the Daily Pilot that both families' grandfathers ran businesses side by side in Anaheim.
The opening coffees come from Doña Duglas Molina and her family at El Cielo farm in Villa Corzo, Chiapas. The Orange County Register lists tasting notes of chocolate, red plum and honeydew. Other beans come from small farms near Motozintla, Chiapas, and Huatusco, Veracruz. The Daily Pilot added that El Cielo is part of the Café Delas program, which supports women coffee producers.
The menu covers espresso and batch brew plus two house drinks. The El Jaguar Latte uses a corn, cacao and chile syrup, and the El Colibrí uses café de olla syrup. Pastries come from the market's own bakery, including canela rolls, jamón pockets and the gingerbread hummingbird cookies called colibrí galletas.
The Register puts the café's opening time at 6 a.m. every day. Its printed closing times are odd, though: 10 a.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Casa Libre's own homepage doesn't list hours. Before an afternoon visit, check cafecasalibre.com or call ahead.
Mercado general manager Joshua González told the Daily Pilot why the roasting happens in the room:
"Roasting on site is an important part of the experience and teaching people about the process, but also the aroma of freshly roasted coffee brings people in."
How the market's day fills in now
Each of the three openings covers a slot the 2023 lineup didn't serve directly.
Part of the day | 2026 addition | What it serves | Opened |
|---|---|---|---|
Early morning | Casa Libre | Single-origin Mexican coffee, beans by the bag, Pastelería pastries | Sept. 24, 2026 |
Late morning | Pradera | Mexican-inspired brunch, seven days a week | By July 2026 |
Evening | Cenaduría Doña Tere | Pozole verde and rojo, flautas, sopes, $15 to $70 | July 16, 2026 |
The family described this as deliberate. "We've been open close to three years now and it is very much the spirit of the organization to always be asking, 'what can we do better?'" González told the Daily Pilot in July. He said the Casa Libre project went back to "identifying what are the needs of our guests," including shoppers who want to buy good beans to take home.
The programming follows the same idea. The market's official feed promoted a Día de los Muertos mole-negro cooking class with Catalina Lucas on October 8. Northgate's Mercado page also runs a weekly "flavors of the week" feature.
Up the street, the errand stop changed too
A short drive north on Harbor, at the Victoria Street corner, the former 99 Cents Only building has been split in two. Trader Joe's opened in one part on December 11, 2025, at 2170 Harbor Blvd. Kahoots, the Southern California pet-supply chain that has sold pet products since 1987, opened in Suite 150 on October 1, 2026, the Register reported. Its hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday.
Those two tenants turned a vacant discount store into a grocery and pet-food stop. With the mercado's new morning and evening counters, this stretch of Harbor between Victoria and 2300 now covers coffee, groceries, pet supplies and dinner in one trip. It got there in under a year, between Trader Joe's opening last December and Kahoots this month.
What's next at 2300 Harbor
By the three-year mark on November 17, the market's newest counter will be about eight weeks old. Casa Libre's first months will show whether its schedule settles near the Register's evening hours on weekends, which would line it up with Doña Tere's dinner crowd. Meanwhile, Pradera, the cenaduría and the roastery are all open now, and none of them existed in the 2023 lineup.
Stretches of Harbor Boulevard like this one are part of how Jade Larney values homes on Costa Mesa's Westside. A corner that went from an empty storefront to a Trader Joe's and a Kahoots in under a year matters when you're pricing a house nearby. If you're thinking about buying or selling near this part of Harbor, request a consultation and free home valuation, and we'll go through what the street-level changes mean for your property.
