Ask someone who has lived in Monrovia for six months what Friday night looks like, and they will say "the street fair." Ask someone who has lived here for six years, and they will tell you the fair is only the loudest part of the evening, not the whole thing. The two are not the same night out, and mixing them up is the fastest way to end up standing in a kettle corn line when you actually wanted a table.
The Monrovia Street Fair & Market takes over the 700 block of S. Myrtle Avenue every Friday, closing the street to cars and filling it with a certified farmers market, food vendors, artisan booths, live music, and a kids' zone with rides and games. It runs from 5 to 9 PM most of the year, stretching to 10 PM through the summer months, so on a Friday in August you have an extra hour to work with. It is genuinely one of the best free things to do in the San Gabriel Valley on a Friday, and it is also, structurally, not a restaurant.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should.
What's Actually Inside The Barricades
Walk into the fair footprint expecting a sit-down dinner and you will find funnel cakes, produce stands, a petting zoo some weeks, and a stage with a cover band. It is a market and a block party, built around browsing and grazing rather than reservations. That is exactly what makes it work as a weekly institution: nobody has to commit to a plan. You wander, you buy a peach, you listen to two songs, you leave.
But if what you actually want on a Friday is a real meal with a chair and a menu, the fair itself will not give you that. For that, you need to walk a few blocks north, outside the barricades, to the stretch of Myrtle that has quietly become Old Town's actual dinner scene.
The Restaurant Row Sits Outside The Closure
The 400 to 600 blocks of S. Myrtle Avenue run north of where the fair sets up, and they carry their own gravity on Friday nights independent of the market. Sena on Myrtle, at 409 S. Myrtle, has become the block's most talked-about kitchen, known for Ensenada-style tacos and natural Wagyu burgers, with a happy hour that runs Wednesday through Monday from 3 to 6 PM. A few doors down, Myrtle Tree Cafe occupies a brick-lined space that doubles as an event room, serving coffee and breakfast plates by day and a happy hour crowd by early evening. Keep walking and you will pass The Diplomat Eatery and Tavern, known locally for a cocktail called the Diplomat Sour, and Seoul Alley, a Korean spot that regulars describe as having been open for a while without ever quite becoming crowded.
This row has turned over before, and that turnover is worth noting because it tells you something about how durable the street itself is compared to any single tenant on it. Two other restaurants that once anchored roughly the same stretch, an Italian trattoria called Bella Sera and a European cafe called Opera, have both since closed. The storefronts changed hands. The block did not lose its pull. Sena stepped into that gap and built a following large enough to generate nearly a thousand reviews, which tells you the demand for a sit-down Friday dinner on this street was never really in question. Only the name on the door was.
The practical upshot: none of these restaurants are competing with the fair for foot traffic, because they are not inside the closure. You can park near the 500 block, eat a full dinner without dodging a stroller every ten feet, and still be a five-minute walk from the market when you are ready for dessert or a browse.
If You Want To Skip The Crowd Entirely
Not every Friday calls for a crowd, and Old Town has an answer for that too. One block west of Myrtle, on Maple Avenue, Over Town Brewing Company sits in a converted building just off the old Route 66 alignment, a short walk from the fair but far enough removed that you will not hear the stage from the patio. It is a smaller, quieter kind of Friday: a taproom pour, a rotating beer list, and none of the carnival energy that defines the 700 block after 6 PM. For residents who have done the fair enough times to know exactly what it offers, Maple Avenue is the release valve.
Here is how the three options actually break down, side by side:
| If you want | Head to | Where it sits |
|---|---|---|
| The full market: produce, crafts, a kid zone, live music | Monrovia Street Fair & Market | 700 block of S. Myrtle Ave, Fridays 5-9 PM, later in summer |
| A real sit-down dinner with a menu | Sena on Myrtle, Myrtle Tree Cafe, The Diplomat, Seoul Alley | 400-600 block of Myrtle Ave |
| A quiet pour with no crowd | Over Town Brewing | 227 W. Maple Ave, one block west |
How Locals Actually Sequence It
Once you see the geography laid out this way, the order of operations gets obvious, and it is different depending on what you are optimizing for.
- If you want a table without a wait, eat first. Reservations or walk-ins at Sena or The Diplomat between 5:30 and 6:30 PM beat the crowd that starts filling in closer to 7.
- If dessert and browsing are the real goal, walk south into the fair after 7, once the dinner rush at the sit-down spots has thinned and the market's second wind kicks in.
- If you are not in the mood for either the wait or the noise, skip Myrtle altogether and head to Maple. You lose the market entirely, but you gain a parking spot and an actual conversation at normal volume.
None of these sequences require choosing the fair over dinner or dinner over the fair. They just require knowing that Old Town Monrovia's Friday night is really three separate draws stacked within a few blocks of each other, not one event with a food court attached.
That is the part that takes longer than six months to learn. The fair gets the name recognition because it is loud, seasonal, and easy to describe to a visitor. The restaurants get the repeat business because they are open every night, not just Fridays, and because they never had to compete with a street closure to earn it. Knowing which one you actually want before you park is the difference between a good Friday and a slightly frustrating one.
Speranta Group has spent years working this exact stretch of the San Gabriel Valley, and the small details, which block closes for the fair, which restaurant replaced which, matter for the same reason they matter to anyone weighing a home nearby: a neighborhood's daily rhythm is part of what you are buying into, long before it shows up in any listing description. If you are curious what that kind of local knowledge means for your own property in Monrovia or the surrounding foothill cities, Speranta Group offers a free home valuation grounded in the same block-by-block understanding.
