It’s a towering glass citadel of beer. Or a national beer park. Stone World Bistro & Gardens in Escondido is by far the grandest architectural wonder ever created for San Diego’s craft beer industry. The Mormon Temple of pale ales.
And now it’s back in the hands of the two yeasty boys who built it.
Greg Koch and Steve Wagner—who launched Stone Brewing in 1996 with their first keg of Stone Pale Ale—have taken back control of the 57,000-square-foot destination in Escondido.
The deal is done; the plans on what they’ll do with it are still in white-board, non-committal phase. The duo says it’ll serve its last guests under that name on November 13, and then reopen as a new, independent restaurant with a wholly different name. The restaurant will have “a beer program celebrating the breadth and quality of the craft brewing community.”
Koch called me from an airport parking lot in Minneapolis, where he’s taken over the historic grain mill (Fruen Mill) near a river and is building a hotel with multiple restaurants and a spa.
“Oh man this is great in so many ways and also,” I replied. “Are you nuts?” He supplied an ambivalent response.
To be unjournalistically-sounding about it, it’s a fairly awesome resolution for the San Diego landmark. When built in 2006, Escondido (or the country) hadn’t seen anything like it. At the time, most craft brewing tasting rooms were warehouses with taps, hairy people, and barstools. The food operations were “there’s a truck out back.”
Koch and Wagner have always had a surplus of ambition (Koch is the gambler, Wagner the steady force tempering his tempest). So they partnered with architect Andy Kjellberg and landscape architects Schmidt Design Group to bring grand hospitality to the craft beer experience. The huge glass façade of the bistro—estimated at 22-30 feet; “super tall,” Koch specifies—are angled so that it feels like a giant fish bowl of beer cuisine is in danger of falling into a nice park. It even has a gift shop.
Courtesy of Stone Brewing
“Greg and Steve built more than a restaurant,” says Societe Brewing founder Doug Constantiner. “They built a place where beer, food, and hospitality were one experience. When I came to San Diego to learn from the best, their bistro was the gold standard. It set the bar across this town and the country.”
The “bistro” is 13,500 square feet (including back of house). The patio is expansive, with fire pits and a vine-enclosed side hideout. The acre of gardens was botany-meets-Design Week: huge boulders, trees, winding paths, ponds, a near-Frodo experience. Using most reclaimed materials, it won a national sustainability award.
By 2016, the company claimed it was the third-largest tourist attraction in North County, behind Legoland and the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. A Union-Tribune article stated around the time that it was attracting about 500,000 visitors a year, but Koch thinks that number is low. At one point, they’d even announced plans for a hotel across the street, but pulled back on the idea.
Courtesy of Stone Brewing
In 2022, Koch and Wagner sold Stone Brewing to Sapporo. In May of 2026, Sapporo sold Stone to Firestone Walker and Duvel Moortgat USA.
But Stone World Bistro wasn’t part of the Firestone deal. So Sapporo was left wondering what to do with this huge asset that didn’t really make sense anymore. In August, the company announced it had made the call to shut it down in November unless they could find the right operator.
The media and internets went wild. Beer people had gotten engaged and married here. It couldn’t just slide into the flotsam and jetsam of local culture, right? Turned into an Amazon shipping plant with a hell of an amenity for its robot employees? Who had the guts and financial resources to take it on?
Greg and Steve are the who—both the most unexpected and sensible who. “Great news to hear that these two are back in the game in a space that was their vision as well as an inspiration to us all,” says Peter Zien, CEO of AleSmith Brewing Company.
As Sapporo has done for the bulk of the year, the duo are still trying to find a solution for the brewing part of the space. But the dream is back in the hands and minds of the guys who dreamt it.
Troy Johnson is the magazine’s award-winning food writer and humorist, and a long-standing expert on Food Network. His work has been featured on NatGeo, Travel Channel, NPR, and in Food Matters, a textbook of the best American food writing.
