When did the pizza place at 711 Wendy Drive change its name? If you drove past in early September and noticed a new sign, the answer is a grand opening on Tuesday, Sept. 8. The building is the same one. The kitchen inside it has changed.
That pattern holds across Newbury Park this fall. Almost every new place to eat on the west end is moving into a storefront the neighborhood already knew. Most of the dates on the calendar belong to institutions that have been here for years. And the one big physical change on the horizon, a water pipeline, is routed north on Ventu Park Road, the same street where a new sandwich shop is getting ready to open.
Wendy Drive Got Two New Kitchens in One Week
Two Wendy Drive storefronts changed hands within days of each other in September.
| Address | Previous tenant | New tenant | Opened |
|---|---|---|---|
| 771 Wendy Dr., Conejo Gateway Plaza | Tomodachi Sushi | Mahina Sushi | Reported open Sept. 1 |
| 711 Wendy Dr. | Pizza Twist | Magma Modern Italian Pizzeria | Grand opening Sept. 8 |
Magma Modern Italian Pizzeria is a second location for a Moorpark pizzeria, not a brand-new concept. The Newbury Park shop goes a step past its predecessor. It adds a deli counter and grab-and-go shelves of imported Italian groceries, which makes it a quick stop on the way home and not only a sit-down dinner.
At 771 Wendy, new owners turned Tomodachi Sushi into Mahina Sushi. It's a neighborhood sushi bar with a Hawaiian flavor and more than thirty signature rolls. If Tomodachi was your usual spot, the address and the plaza are the same. The menu is what's different.
Both changes are the kind you can miss if you only see Wendy Drive from the car. Neither one added a building, and both show up only as a new sign over a familiar door.
Ventu Park Road Is Where the Next Handoff Is Lined Up
The same thing is underway on Ventu Park Road. Sourdough & Co. is preparing to open in the former Jimmy John's at 520 North Ventu Park Road, in the Walmart Plaza. The menu covers sandwiches, flatbreads, soups and salads. No opening date has been announced. The company is hiring, and its posting sends applicants to its existing Thousand Oaks location. More details are at sourdoughandco.com.
Elsewhere in Newbury Park, Cotti Coffee is planned for 1025 Broadbeck Drive, Suite D, at The Village at Newbury Park. As of a Sept. 14, 2026 check, it had no opening date either.
Ventu Park Road is also home to the neighborhood's oldest calendar anchor. The Stagecoach Inn Museum at 51 South Ventu Park Road keeps regular visiting hours on Wednesdays and Saturdays from 1 to 4 p.m. Admission is $10 for seniors, adults and teens, $5 for children ages 5 to 12, and free for children under 5. The museum has two October events, and they set the rhythm for the rest of the month.
The October Calendar, Weekend by Weekend
The events below are all familiar names. Here is how they fall across the next five weeks.
Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 10–11. The Museum Theater at the Stagecoach Inn Museum opens The Voices of Old Conejo: The Star of the Conejo, with performances at 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. each evening. Tickets are $20 for the general public and $15 for Conejo Valley Historical Society members. You can buy them at stagecoachinnmuseum.com or at the gate.
Sunday, Oct. 18. This is the busiest day on the list, with three events back to back:
- 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The 34th Annual Thousand Oaks Rotary Street Fair takes over Moorpark Road between Hillcrest and Wilbur.
- Noon to 3 p.m. The Islamic Center of Conejo Valley holds its annual Open Mosque Day at 2700 Borchard Road. All local residents are invited for guided tours, Q&A sessions and light refreshments. Details are at iccv.org.
- 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. The final performances of The Voices of Old Conejo at the Stagecoach Inn Museum.
The Stagecoach Inn shows also run Saturday, Oct. 17, at the same two times, so you can see the play on Saturday and leave Sunday open for the fair and Borchard Road.
Saturday, Oct. 31. The Stagecoach Inn Museum hosts "Happy Owl-O-Ween" from 1 to 4 p.m. The program includes crafts like pine cone owls and masks, Pumpkin Ring Toss, Pitch-A-Pumpkin, a Candy Corn guessing game and live music. The Costume Parade starts at 2:00 and the Hooting Owl Contest at 3:00. The 1-to-4 window matches the museum's regular Saturday hours, so the afternoon is over before evening trick-or-treating begins.
Saturday, Nov. 7. The Conejo Recreation & Park District hosts Festival de los Muertos from 4 to 8 p.m. at Borchard Community Center, 190 North Reino Road. Admission is free. The festival has crafts, live music, vendors and food. Updates are posted at crpd.org/muertos.
Count the venues and you get a museum on Ventu Park Road, a community center on Reino Road, a house of worship on Borchard Road, and a street fair a few miles east. None of them is new. The fall calendar sits on the same foundation as the new restaurants, which are mostly new names moving into established places.
The Pipeline Is Headed for Ventu Park Road
There is one change on the west end that does involve digging. The Pure Water Project is a potable water reuse effort by the Las Virgenes–Triunfo Joint Powers Authority. It is laying pipeline through parts of Agoura Hills, Westlake Village and Thousand Oaks. The water comes from surplus recycled water at the Tapia Water Reclamation Facility that currently flows to the ocean through Malibu Creek. It gets purified, stored in Las Virgenes Reservoir, and then treated again at the Westlake Filtration Plant.
The segment that matters most for Newbury Park is Reach 3. According to the City of Thousand Oaks, it continues west on Hillcrest Drive, turns north on Ventu Park Road and then Rancho Conejo Boulevard, and runs through Hill Canyon Fire Road, across the Conejo Canyons Bridge, to Santa Rosa Road. Reach 3 is scheduled for August 2026 through March 2028, and construction on the overall project is set to wrap up in fall 2028.
For now, the active work is on Hillcrest. The project's bulletin for the week of Sept. 28 has crews removing asphalt and installing pipe on West Hillcrest Drive near Marin Street, with final paving targeted for the end of that week. Work runs weekdays from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Expect temporary lane closures, lane shifts, turn restrictions, flagging and minor delays. The bulletin also says schedules can change with weather and field conditions. As of that update, it doesn't list a street-work schedule for Ventu Park Road or Rancho Conejo Boulevard. The project's Thousand Oaks construction page is the place to check before you head out to the Stagecoach Inn or the Walmart Plaza on a weekday.
The city's separate street resurfacing program was scheduled for April through October 2026, with closures typically from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. The city's site has an address lookup that shows timing for a specific street.
On the Trails North of Rancho Conejo
The Reach 3 route runs into open space through Hill Canyon. The Conejo Open Space Conservation Agency also has a trail-access update for the same area. On Aug. 13, 2026, COSCA posted this:
Access to the Hidden Rim Trail and the Hill Canyon Fire Road from the north side of Rancho Conejo Blvd. is anticipated to be restored soon!
That notice gives no reopening date. Treat that trailhead access as unconfirmed until COSCA posts an update on conejo-openspace.org. A separate COSCA closure on the Los Robles Trail near Ventu Park Fire Road was scheduled to end Oct. 5, 2026. COSCA described that one as repair work and didn't connect it to the pipeline.
So as of the first week of October, Ventu Park Road is the street to watch. It has a museum with four nights of theater this month, a sandwich shop getting ready to open in the former Jimmy John's, and a water pipeline route that turns north onto it, in a segment scheduled to finish by March 2028.
When a familiar storefront changes hands or a pipeline route reaches your street, it's natural to wonder what that means for your own address. Paula Kropp has followed changes like these across the Conejo Valley for more than 25 years. She's glad to talk through what's moving along Wendy Drive and Ventu Park Road, with no pressure and no agenda. Schedule My Clarity Call.
