The Old Nicolosi's Took Four Years to Fill. The Old Pioneer BBQ Took Five Months.

For years, anyone driving Navajo Road past the boarded-up building at the corner near Jackson Drive has asked some version of the same question: what is actually going to happen to that lot? Nicolosi's Italian Restaurant ran there from 1991 until it packed up for Santee in 2022, and the building sat empty the whole time in between, windows covered, weeds creeping through the parking lot cracks. Neighbors complained to the city about it for years.

Half a mile away on Lake Murray Boulevard, a different restaurant closed for a different reason. Pioneer BBQ, run by the Cohn Restaurant Group for seven years, shut its doors in July 2025. That building didn't sit empty for long. By December 5, 2025, it reopened as Sobremesa, a Latin American restaurant with a chef pulled straight from an acclaimed spot in Valle de Guadalupe.

Same neighborhood, same basic situation, same rough timeframe. One took four years to resolve. The other took five months.

What's Finally Going Into the Old Nicolosi's Site

The wait is over for 7005 Navajo Road. In June 2026, Mayor Todd Gloria and City Councilmember Raul Campillo joined Community HousingWorks for a ceremonial groundbreaking on Navajo Family Apartments, a four-story building that will hold 44 affordable rental homes plus one manager's unit. Eight of those units are set aside for adults with intellectual or developmental disabilities, developed in partnership with the San Diego Regional Center.

Rents will be tied to household income, ranging from 30 to 70 percent of the area median income for San Diego, which currently runs from roughly $52,450 to $122,450 a year for a family of four. The homes are required to stay affordable for 55 years. The project pulled together financing from several sources at once: a $3.4 million loan from the San Diego Housing Commission, $3.1 million from the city's Bridge to Home program, and $2.72 million from the county's Innovative Housing Trust Fund, on top of federal HOME dollars administered through the Housing Commission. Total project cost lands around $32 million.

Construction crews were already working on the foundation the day of the groundbreaking, and the target for move-in is mid-2027. That puts the total vacancy for the site, from the day Nicolosi's left in 2022 to the day the first resident gets a key, at roughly five years.

The delay wasn't for lack of interest. A CBS 8 investigation last fall found that the project's original permit had actually expired because of financing problems, and ownership of the site had to change hands before the deal could move forward again. Getting a 44-unit affordable building funded and permitted means lining up multiple public agencies, each with its own review process, before a single wall goes up.

A Few Blocks Over, a Faster Answer

Sobremesa didn't have that problem. The team behind it, led by Andrea Carbonaro along with Dario Carbonaro, Mariano Liga, and Francesco Mancino, already had a track record in the area. Their earlier ventures include Aromi and Pizza by Aromi in La Mesa and Trattoria Da Sofia in Kensington. When the Pioneer BBQ space came open, they moved.

Chef Oscar Torres, formerly of Animalón in Valle de Guadalupe and recognized as one of Food & Wine Mexico's Best New Chefs, came on-site to launch the kitchen with a seafood-forward menu spanning Mexico and Peru. Carbonaro told San Diego Magazine that people in this part of the county had been driving 15 to 20 minutes into Little Italy just to find this kind of food, and he saw a gap he could fill closer to home.

The 5,000-square-foot space now seats around 130 people, with a family-friendly early dinner service that shifts into more of a lounge atmosphere later at night. It sits within a short walk of a couple of other longtime neighborhood spots: Antica Trattoria, an Italian restaurant that's been serving Lake Murray since 2001, and Sei Sushi on Navajo Road, which shares its retail plaza with R&B Tea.

Here's how the two sites stack up side by side:

Why the Timelines Split So Sharply

The gap between four years and five months isn't a coincidence of paperwork. It's what happens when two different kinds of capital chase the same kind of vacant commercial space.

A restaurant group with its own money, an operator ready to sign a lease, and a proven concept can move as fast as a landlord will let them. Carbonaro's team had already built four restaurants together. They knew what they wanted, they had the capital, and Pioneer BBQ's landlord had a tenant lined up within months of the old lease ending.

An affordable housing project runs through a different set of gears entirely. Before Navajo Family Apartments could break ground, it needed a nonprofit developer, a city loan, a county trust fund allocation, federal HOME dollars, an environmental review, and a rezoning process that survives a permit expiring mid-stream. Every one of those pieces has to line up before a foundation gets poured. The building sat empty not because nobody wanted it, but because the kind of project the city and county wanted there takes years to finance properly, even when everyone involved agrees it should happen.

The Rest of the Corridor Isn't Waiting Around

While those two buildings worked out their separate timelines, the surrounding stretch of San Carlos kept its usual rhythm going:

• The San Carlos Branch Library on Jackson Drive remains the neighborhood's public reading room, a few minutes' walk from both sites.
• The Halloween Carnival & Costume Contest returns to San Carlos Community Park on October 23, 2026, from 5 to 7 p.m., with the costume contest kicking off at 5:30.
• Lake Murray's paved perimeter path, a 3.2-mile loop around the reservoir, stays open sunrise to sunset every day except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's. No swimming is allowed since the lake supplies drinking water, but shore fishing, kayaking, and small boat rentals are all available.
• Sei Sushi and R&B Tea continue to share their Navajo Road plaza, a short detour from the new construction site.

None of that changed while the two restaurant buildings figured out their next act. The neighborhood kept functioning around them, which is part of why the four-year gap on Navajo Road felt so noticeable to people who drove past it every week.

What's Actually There Now

Drive that stretch of Navajo Road today and you'll see rebar and framing crews where a dining room used to be. Drive half a mile over to Lake Murray Boulevard and you can already sit down for dinner. Both buildings are finally doing something again. They just got there on completely different clocks.

If you've been wondering what else is changing along Navajo Road and Lake Murray Boulevard, or you're just curious what's opening next in San Carlos, Megan Saputo keeps a close eye on this part of the neighborhood. Let's Connect.