Citizen’s Band, Pinkie’s close
More restaurant closures are hitting San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. After six years in business, Wednesday marked the final day for Citizen’s Band and Pinkie’s Bakery, which shared a space at Folsom and Eighth streets.
“Another one bites the dust in San Francisco,” said pastry chef Cheryl Storms, who owned the sister businesses — one a restaurant, the other a pastry shop — with partner Chris Beerman.
The news is the latest in a recent spate of closures in the area, including Filipino restaurant Pampalasa, Cadence, Bon Marche Brasserie and Oro. This week, Perbacco spinoff Volta shut down after nine months in business on the corner of Mission and Fifth
streets.
Unlike the failed restaurants, all which opened within the past year or so, Citizen’s Band and Pinkie’s Bakery opened in 2010, as the SoMa neighborhood began to see a fresh boom in tech startups.
At first, Storms said, she was excited to be able to cater to these businesses, but eventually, “All the tech bros got their own kitchens and stopped coming.” As companies began to introduce their own food offerings, Storms said, there was less foot traffic at the bakery. It also led to poaching of kitchen talent in an increasingly tight labor market, she said.
“Who’s not going to want to go work 9 to 5, Monday through Friday?” she said. While Storms may be overstating the ease of a job in a corporate cafe — one listing for a sous chef at Google mentions a minimum 50-hour work week — the steadier schedules can be attractive.
In what’s becoming a familiar refrain for Bay Area restaurateurs, Storms cited a number of other factors that led to the demise of the restaurant and bakery, including increases in the minimum wage (set to rise to $14 an hour in July) and, in San Francisco, city-mandated employer health care spending. Storms and Beerman spent Wednesday notifying staff members of the closure, and saying their goodbyes. While Storms said that there are potential buyers lined up for the Folsom Street space, details are still up in the air and she declined to comment further.
Meanwhile, Beerman, a San Rafael resident, is working on opening Brewster’s, a beer garden and barbecue joint in Petaluma, this fall. Storms, who lives in Oakland, will continue to focus on her year-old outpost of Pinkie’s in Bernal Heights, which she says has been wellreceived in the more family-friendly neighborhood.
“It’s almost impossible for the little guy,” said Storms. “I don’t understand how San Francisco expects businesses besides Chipotle to succeed.”