The Panama Hotel Restaurant
Dinner in a hundred-year-old house
Open to everyone, not only our guests. California coastal cooking by Executive Chef Hiram Diaz, served in the historic dining rooms and out on the garden patio in Gerstle Park.
Dinner hours
- Tuesday–Thursday5:00–9:00pm
- Friday–Saturday5:00–9:30pm
- Sunday–MondayClosed
Reservations are recommended at weekends. Walk-ins are welcome whenever there is a table.
The restaurant in pictures
The dining rooms, the patio and the food. Select a photograph to see it larger.
Since 1926
A table set for nearly a hundred years
Long before it became the Panama Hotel, this was a two-story wooden Victorian in Gerstle Park. In the early 1920s Maria and Joe Gargiulo bought the house and began taking in boarders arriving at the San Rafael train station, which helped the family meet the mortgage.
In 1926 Maria started selling tamales and enchiladas. Her cooking drew a following, and she set about adding a restaurant to the front of the family home. The builder quoted $5,000; family history says Maria talked him down to $3,000.
The restaurant became Maria’s Pueblo, remembered as Marin County’s first Mexican restaurant. Joe, a trained chef from Italy, was working nights as a steward at the San Rafael Elks Club until Maria persuaded him to join her. Mexican and Italian cooking met on one menu — an early version of what we now call California cuisine. Guests came for the food and stayed for the family; Joe was known for doing magic tricks for the children.
When Maria and Joe retired in 1956 their son Frank carried the restaurant on. These rooms held weddings and anniversaries as well as dinners. Joe Gargiulo Jr. and his bride Arrah were photographed in the dining room in 1946, and came back fifty years later to mark their anniversary here.
The decoration has its own history: Maria bought Mexican pottery on a trip in 1938 and had it shipped home by train. Pieces of that collection, and photographs of the people who built this place, are still on the walls.
In the 1970s the Gargiulos sold to Richard and Mimi, who extended the building, leaned into its bohemian character and renamed it the Panama Hotel. The rooms were each given a character of their own, the art and keepsakes accumulated, and the patio filled in with greenery.
The restaurant reopened on 1 September 2026 under Hiram Diaz, who first cooked in this kitchen more than twenty years ago and returns as partner and executive chef. Nearly a century after Maria started cooking for her neighbours, the table is set again at 4 Bayview Street.