Granada Hills is marking its 100th year in 2026 with a Gala Banquet Spectacular, a new mural unveiled in the Old Granada Hills Village, and a Fourth of July celebration that returned to the Granada Hills Recreation Center to honor both the nation's 250th birthday and the neighborhood's own. Alongside those centennial events, the stretch of Chatsworth Street between White Oak and Zelzah avenues closes to cars every Friday night, as it has for about eight years.
Every Friday, Chatsworth Street Closes
The Granada Hills Chamber of Commerce describes it plainly: every Friday night from 5 to 10 p.m., more than 30 food trucks line up along Chatsworth Street, selling everything from sushi burritos to barbecue to more taco variations than most people can count in one visit. No alcohol is sold at the event, which is part of why it reads as a genuine family scene rather than a bar crawl on wheels. Dogs come on leashes. Strollers come too.
The event is called Grubfest, and by most local accounts it has been running for about eight years, long enough that neighbors stopped treating it as a novelty and started treating it as a fixture. Organizers and several independent write-ups bill it as the longest-running food truck gathering in California, sometimes going further and calling it the largest ongoing one anywhere. Those are the kind of claims that are hard to verify against a global ledger, but the tenure itself is not in dispute. Eight consecutive years of the same street, the same night, the same format is its own kind of proof.
The trucks do not have the block to themselves. The Granada Hills Certified Farmers Market runs the same evening on the same corridor, so a Friday walk down Chatsworth Street covers both a meal and a produce run. That pairing is why the block functions less like a single event and more like a weekly market square, one that happens to specialize in food.
A Calendar of Centennial Events
Granada Hills turning 100 in 2026 has produced its own calendar, distinct from Friday nights. School kids across the neighborhood's public and private campuses received Centennial Cookies in June. The Fourth of July celebration moved back to the Recreation Center specifically to fold the town's 100th birthday into the country's 250th. A Gala Banquet Spectacular drew residents out for what organizers called a night to remember, and city officials worked with the centennial committee to unveil a new mural in the Old Granada Hills Village, a physical marker meant to outlast the celebration itself.
Those events share a structure that Grubfest does not. They are scheduled, promoted, and finite. A mural gets unveiled once. A gala happens once. The centennial itself, by definition, happens once. Grubfest, by contrast, takes place every Friday alongside the centennial events.
The Faire Uses a Nearby Stretch
Granada Hills also has an annual street faire, run separately from Grubfest and older than most of the businesses currently trading on Chatsworth Street. It has run for more than 20 years, drawing shopping, food, and arts and crafts vendors to the same general corridor, this time the section between Encino and Zelzah avenues. Recent years have landed it in mid-October: the 20th annual faire ran October 19, 2024, and the 21st annual followed on October 18, 2025. This year's listing puts the 2026 faire on Saturday, October 17, running from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., according to the event's current listing.
What's notable is not the faire's age but its geography. The annual faire uses Chatsworth Street between Encino and Zelzah avenues, while Grubfest's Friday food trucks use the stretch between White Oak and Zelzah. The events share a corridor but use different sections of the street. Chatsworth Street hosts the weekly dinner gathering and the annual community showcase.
What's Filling In Around the Trucks
The weekly foot traffic on Chatsworth Street has not stopped the neighborhood's sit-down dining scene from moving too, it has just given that scene something to build alongside.
Odyssey Restaurant, perched on the hills above Granada Hills with views across the San Fernando Valley, recently repositioned itself around a steak-forward menu and added a shaded outdoor patio with what the restaurant calls a skyline boardwalk. Its own description sums up the shift directly: "We've kept the views, and reinvented everything else." It is the kind of destination restaurant that draws people up the hill for an occasion rather than a weeknight stop, which puts it in a different lane than the trucks below but on the same map.
A few minutes away in neighboring Porter Ranch, Salina opened as a coastal European concept from the team behind the Michelin-starred No. 8, serving fresh pasta, hand-selected seafood, and dry-aged meats with a sommelier-curated wine list. It is not technically a Granada Hills address, but it sits close enough to function as part of the same dining rotation for residents willing to drive a few minutes for a different kind of evening out.
Closer to home, Lilit's International Kitchen is making the jump from a recurring stall at the Granada Hills Farmers Market to a standalone restaurant, building on the name recognition it already earned selling international dishes and baked goods at that same Friday market. And Mercado Buenos Aires, an Argentine restaurant, bakery, and market that has served the San Fernando Valley for more than three decades, keeps a Granada Hills location running alongside its original Van Nuys shop, still built around grass-fed Angus beef cuts and Argentine wine.
None of these openings compete with Grubfest for attention. They fill a different need, the sit-down meal or the special-occasion dinner, while the trucks keep covering the weeknight-casual end of things. Together they suggest a food scene that is expanding in more than one direction at once, anchored by a street that already knows how to hold a crowd.
The Street Does the Work
A hundred years is a long time to mark with any single event, and Granada Hills has tried to mark it properly, with cookies for schoolchildren, a banquet, a mural, a parade folded into the milestone. Grubfest adds a weekly gathering alongside the centennial events, closing Chatsworth Street on Fridays.
Homes With Alin keeps an eye on the small, specific things that make up daily life across Granada Hills and the rest of the northern San Fernando Valley, from a new restaurant patio to a street faire date. If something on Chatsworth Street or elsewhere in the neighborhood deserves a mention, Homes With Alin would like to hear about it.
