The Snug cozies up to Fillmore Street
After more than a year of planning, the Snug in Pacific Heights opened this week with hopes of becoming the neighborhood’s go-to spot for beer, cocktails and food from a chef with fine dining credentials.
The project, which took over the former Mehfil Indian restaurant (2301 Fillmore St.), is the brainchild of chef Brian Shin (formerly of Alinea and Benu), Jacob Racusin, Zach Schwab and Shane Matthews.
Britt Hull of Tide Design Co. led the redesign of the two-level space and added a massive Douglas Fir plank, reclaimed from the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, that serves as the bar top.
The finished product may be a sleek new bar on a stretch of Fillmore that has lacked the kind of cocktail spots that have popped up in most commercial-heavy San Francisco neighborhoods, but that doesn’t mean the process wasn’t without its fair share of hiccups.
“The biggest thing we learned in this process: nothing will ever go right. Every time we had a new goal, we’d hit another hurdle,” Shin said. “We’re happy with how it turned out. Sometimes I’ll stare at the bar and just soak it in.”
For the cocktail lovers, the Snug has an eclectic mix, all of which have at least one element made in-house. The Bee’s Knees, for example, has sunflower-infused vodka, bee pollen, lemon, honeycomb, and lavender. There’s also whiskey sour made with li hing mui, a Chinese preserved plum.
Shin has a menu for the opening night of lobster chips, poke, Korean fried chicken wings, and shiitake hummus served with sesame naan. Larger dishes include a so-called “Bodega Burger” and a trotter hot dog. Growing up fast: Loving Cup, the Bay Area frozen yogurt outfit known for its customizable toppings is franchising, a business move being guided by the folks at La Boulangerie, who recently invested in the company.
There are currently four Loving Cup locations: the flagship at 2356 Polk St. in Russian Hill; 535 Octavia St. in Hayes Valley; 298 Bon Air Center in Greenbrae (Marin) and 2201 Union St. in Cow Hollow.
If all goes as planned, the mini-chain will open more than 100 locations over the next few years, according to the team.
“I started Loving Cup with no intention of expanding. I honestly thought it was going to be one little shop,” coowner Liz Fielder told Inside Scoop. “By the time we opened the second one, we started thinking this could be scalable. We could dial it into an easy model.”
For La Boulangerie’s Nicolas Bernadi and Pascal Rigo, the investment is another chance to tackle a scalability component they haven’t focused on since working with Starbucks several years ago.
In 2012, Starbucks paid $100 million for La Boulange with hopes of opening 400 new locations over the next five years. Three years later, the coffee giant closed the La Boulange bakeries, saying they weren’t sustainable for the company’s long-term growth, leading to the new “La Boulangerie” brand.
Nicolas Bernadi says they are using what they learned during the Starbucks venture to guide their project with Loving Cup. First, he said, they want to focus on the product.
“Product is king. The day you start compromising on your product, you’re dead as a company,” Bernadi said.
The La Boulangerie team is helping Loving Cup with menu items like a brownie option and a chocolate sea salt cookie that will be incorporated into the menu, as well as retail sales.
The cost for a person to own a Loving Cup franchise? $30,000 up front along with a 7 percent royalty, she says.
“We plan on being really hands-on. The first franchises are going to be local,” she said. “We already have a couple lined up.” Sign of the times: When Kate Riley, Leanna Lewis and Janine Galligani bought Mercedes Restaurant (653 Commercial St.) in 1994, they had a simple plan in mind: provide the bustling neighborhood with a fun, low-key lunch destination.
“We’re off the beaten path,” Riley said.
Before Riley and her partners took over the space, it was home to a Mexican restaurant that opened in 1967. Many of the cooks at the original restaurant stayed on through the new iteration. For decades, the Mexican fare pulled in a lunch crowd of locals familiar with the area, folks who knew to navigate the quiet alley between Kearny and Montgomery.
“We survived the dot-com boom and bust, 9/11, the Bart strikes,” Janine Galligani said. “We have cooks who have been here since the previous owners were here, so that’s 20 to 30 years at one place. There’s a lot of history.”
Yet in recent years, the restaurant market has become increasingly competitive and operating costs continued to increase. Last year, the restaurant’s building was sold to a new owner, Riley said, and subsequently the restaurant’s rent went up.
“It was a 75 percent increase and we just couldn’t afford that,” Riley said. “This alley doesn’t warrant market rent.”
Mercedes officially had its last service on Nov. 22.
“This was my baby before I had babies. It’s sad. We’ve been fighting this landlord for a year, but I couldn’t be more proud with how we went out. We had a good time with our customers,” said Galligani, who along with Riley, spent Monday packing the remnants of their restaurant.
The new owners, according to the liquor license transfer, are Priscilla Dosiou, Thomas Glenwright, Paul Schulte and Michael Timbs.
There is no plan to keep the longtime Financial District haunt alive anywhere else in the Bay Area. We work for tips! Please send news, notes and rumors from the restaurant world to jphillips@sfchronicle.com