The Escondido landmark has a name and a date. Stone Brewing co-founders Greg Koch and Steve Wagner will reopen the former Stone World Bistro & Gardens as Quarry Escondido on November 14, giving the beloved beer garden its next chapter as an independent restaurant.

We covered the takeover earlier this month, when Koch and Wagner moved to take back the Escondido site after Sapporo, which owns the Stone brand, planned to close it in November. Now the details are filling in. Quarry Escondido will keep pouring beer, including Stone beers, even though the location no longer carries the Stone name. The beer program will celebrate the breadth of the craft brewing community, according to the founders, rather than tying itself to a single brand.

The setting stays the same, and that is most of the point. The 57,000-square-foot site, with its sprawling patio, fire pits, vine-enclosed hideout, and garden of boulders, trees, winding paths, and ponds, was once one of the area’s biggest attractions, drawing around 500,000 visitors a year at its peak. Koch told Axios the place will always be a big part of him, saying: “That place will always be a very big part of me.”

The menu is getting a refresh too. Koch said the restaurant will return to an entree-focused menu from its earlier days, with new dishes and new experiences, while keeping the spirit of what made the bistro famous. Fans should not expect anything dramatic, he said, just a return to the place at its best.

The news has landed well with San Diego beer fans, many of whom feared the landmark would disappear entirely when Sapporo announced the closure of its remaining Escondido locations earlier this year. Societe Brewing founder Doug Constantiner told San Diego Magazine the bistro set the bar across the county and the country, saying: “They built a place where beer, food and hospitality were one experience.”

Quarry Escondido opens November 14. For a site that changed what a brewery tasting room could be, the encore is fitting: same garden, same gathering place, new name, and a beer list that looks beyond one brand to the whole San Diego scene that grew up around it.

Source: New York Post, “Brewers behind iconic West Coast beer reveal new venture after brand’s SoCal closures,” October 24, 2026 (reporting San Diego Magazine and Axios).