Rosine's Mediterranean Cafe opened in Anaheim Hills in 1995 with six tables. Three decades later it is still family-run, still filling those tables on a Tuesday night without much more than word of mouth, and still known mainly to people who already live close enough to catch the smell of rotisserie chicken from the parking lot. That is roughly how the neighborhood has always eaten. Anaheim Hills built a real dining scene the slow way, one regular customer at a time, almost entirely outside anyone's marketing plan.
This September, for the first time in the neighborhood's history, that scene gets an actual name and a date on the calendar. Anaheim Hills Restaurant Week runs September 12 through 19, 2026, backed by City of Anaheim Council Member Natalie Meeks, OC Supervisor Donald P. Wagner, the Anaheim Chamber of Commerce, and Anaheim Hills Neighbors Magazine. Organizers describe it as a first-of-its-kind culinary celebration for the area, and the record backs that up. There has never been an organized restaurant week here before.
What's Actually on the Calendar
| Date | What Happens |
|---|---|
| Thursday, September 10, 2026 | Restaurant Week Kickoff Mixer |
| Saturday, September 12 through Saturday, September 19, 2026 | Anaheim Hills Restaurant Week |
The kickoff mixer on September 10 functions as a networking night for the participating restaurant owners and the local business community before the public week begins. Once the week itself starts on September 12, individual restaurants decide for themselves whether to run a prix fixe menu, a special promotion, or nothing beyond normal service. There is no single unified menu or price point across the neighborhood. Each place sets its own terms.
The Fine Print Explains Why It's Happening Now
The structure behind this event is the most telling part of it. Every restaurant in Anaheim Hills can join at no cost. Free participation gets a listing on the official Restaurant Week website, inclusion in citywide marketing across social media, email, and PR, permission to run a prix fixe menu or special promotion if the owner wants to, and access to a marketing toolkit of graphics and templates. Restaurants that want more visibility can pay for add-ons: priority placement on the website, a clickable logo on their listing, a dedicated feature during the week, and logo placement on event signage.
That is not the structure of a ticketed food festival or a curated top-ten list. It is closer to a free onboarding drive. The Chamber's own call to local businesses makes the target range clear, inviting anyone "whether you're a neighborhood favorite, café, brewery, dessert spot, or fine dining destination." The goal stated in the event materials is to maximize participation and represent the entire dining community, not to spotlight a handful of buzzy newcomers. In other words, this week was not built to introduce Anaheim Hills to new restaurants. It was built to get every existing one onto the same public list at the same time, something that has apparently never happened before in a neighborhood that has had a functioning restaurant scene for at least thirty years.
The Restaurants This Week Is Actually Cataloging
Walk the list of places already established in Anaheim Hills and the pattern becomes obvious. Rosine's Mediterranean Cafe has been serving Syrian and Lebanese dishes, including its well-known rotisserie chicken, since 1995, with son Hagop now running the wine program his family built. Reunion Kitchen + Drink, at 5775 E Santa Ana Canyon Road, has operated as the neighborhood's go-to tavern-style spot for years. Story has built a following for its fine dining and afternoon tea service. Wood Ranch Anaheim Hills and Culinary Dropout round out a group of restaurants that residents have relied on long before anyone organized a week around them, alongside newer names like Medii Kitchen and The Wild Artichoke that have joined the mix more recently.
None of these places needed a citywide marketing push to survive this long. What changes with Restaurant Week is not the quality or availability of the food. It is that a resident who has lived here for five years and never tried Story, or who drives past Reunion Kitchen twice a day without stopping, now has a specific week, a public list, and a reason to finally walk in.
Making an Evening or a Saturday of It
If a Restaurant Week stop is going to anchor a bigger outing, Oak Canyon Nature Center sits just off Nohl Ranch Road at 6700 E Walnut Canyon Road, tucked past the Anaheim Hills Golf Course. The park covers 58 acres across three adjoining canyons, with four miles of trail and a year-round stream running through it, and both entry and parking are free.
For something short before a dinner reservation, the Heritage Trail is a paved, self-guided quarter-mile loop that identifies native plants along the way, about an eight-minute walk. The Stream Trail runs a third of a mile along Walnut Canyon Creek and stays shaded almost the entire route, roughly a twelve-minute walk, which makes it an easy option even in September heat. Anyone with more time before a reservation can take on Roadrunner Ridge, the trail with the most elevation gain in the park and the best panoramic view back over the canyon and the surrounding hills.
Trails and park grounds are open sunrise to sunset seven days a week. The John J. Collier Interpretive Center on site, with its small museum and live animal exhibits, keeps shorter hours, open Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Dogs are not permitted on the trails, so this works better as a solo stop, a family outing, or a pre-dinner walk than as a dog-and-dinner combination.
What the Week Actually Signals
The interesting part of Anaheim Hills Restaurant Week is not that new restaurants are showing up. It is that the neighborhood is, for the first time, trying to make its existing loyalty visible to itself. Rosine's did not need a citywide marketing campaign to last thirty-one years. Reunion Kitchen did not need event signage to become a weekly habit for the people who already go there. What changes on September 12 is that all of it gets listed in one place, with a start date and an end date, which gives residents who have lived here for years an actual prompt to try the restaurant they have been meaning to try since they moved in.
If you already live in Anaheim Hills, September 12 through 19 is worth putting on the calendar, if only to close the gap between the restaurants you have heard about from a neighbor and the ones you have actually sat down in.
And if you are the kind of person who ends up thinking about a neighborhood like this in terms of more than one restaurant week, whether that means buying your first home in the hills or figuring out what your current one is worth in today's market, Kott & Co. has spent decades getting to know these streets one relationship at a time. Request a Local Market Consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
