Storied Tosca Cafe to reopen with local owners
Boulevard’s Nancy Oakes to compose Italianfocused menu in North Beach spot
North Beach’s centuryold Tosca Cafe is getting new life — this time with San Francisco restaurant veterans.
The storied Columbus Avenue venue, which opened in 1919, abruptly shut down in late July as its New Yorkbased regime of April Bloomfield and Ken Friedman concluded a tumultuous sevenyear run.
Taking over Tosca are Nancy Oakes, the chefowner of Boulevard; Anna Weinberg, the restaurateur behind popular local restaurants like Marlowe and Park Tavern; and Ken Fulk, the designer responsible for a number of posh restaurants and clubs across the country, including the Battery in San Francisco and Carbone in Las Vegas.
Former operators Bloomfield and Friedman are no longer involved with the business, although some of the same investors will remain. The operation fell into turmoil after a 2017 New York Times report wherein Friedman was accused by 10 women of sexual harassment; in that story, which largely focused on the pair’s
New York restaurants, he apologized for his actions.
Moving forward, the new owners plan to keep the Tosca name. Aesthetically, the main dining room will remain relatively unchanged, outside of some polish being added to wood surfaces, leather booths being reupholstered and maybe a widening of the dining room and entryway area.
Oakes will be the force behind the Italianfocused menu, but the group plans to hire a chef to run the kitchen on a daytoday basis. As part of the lease agreement, the group has also taken control of the adjacent Lusty Lady space, which Bloomfield and Friedman took over in 2014 but never reopened. The onetime peepshow spot remains closed and devoid of operational permits from the city; the new owners are mum on solid plans for the space.
“This is a new chapter for all of us,” Weinberg said.
There’s truth to this. Tosca will be Weinberg’s first project outside of her Big Night Restaurant Group, which currently counts seven operations in the city. Tosca is Fulk’s first ownership stake in a San Francisco restaurant, though he has ties to two New York spots.
It’s also a new leap for Oakes, who has been running Boulevard, one of the city’s top restaurants and a pioneer of upscale American cuisine, for nearly three decades. In 2010, she opened nearby Prospect with partners Pam Mazzola and Kathy King.
The goal is to have Tosca back open by winter. The timing could be earlier, but Weinberg and Oakes have other projects in the works. Weinberg is planning to reopen her recently closed Cow Marlowe restaurant as a new concept named the Greenwich. Meanwhile, Oakes is on track to sign a new lease for Boulevard in September. A degree of uncertainty surrounding Boulevard’s future was actually what drove Oakes to the Tosca project.
“After years of focusing on Boulevard, it’s fun to move to a new neighborhood. I get nostalgic for the North Beach of my childhood,” Oakes said.
And therein lies the challenge with breathing new life into Tosca. There is a San Francisco demographic that remembers Tosca in its heyday. Unpredictable and rambunctious, sometimes to a fault, and regularly filled with celebrities, the restaurant was a bastion for urban legends under former owner Jeannette Etheredge, who bought Tosca in 1980 and ran it as a bar until selling it to Bloomfield and Friedman in 2012.
During those days, people smoked inside. Sean Penn was a frequent customer. Other customers included the likes of Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Quaid and Boz Scaggs. Latenight antics became the stuff of legend.
In 2012, Friedman and Bloomfield transformed the place from a rowdy neighborhood dive to a chic culinary destination. Leather and wood surfaces were cleaned. The kitchen was given new life, and the menu took a more modern form with upscale Italian food and $14 cocktails. Critical acclaim came, but the shift isolated some longtime customers.
Oakes sees the future of Tosca somewhere in between these two points.
The chef grew up in North Beach and remembers high school days spent at City Lights Booksellers across Columbus Avenue. Sometimes for dinner, she would stop at a local restaurant and order spaghetti Caruso and an Italian fried cream for dessert.
“The feeling then was just kind of euphoric. I don’t know if getting older changes those memories, but that feeling is what I want to create with the new Tosca menu,” Oakes said. “I want it to be simple and flavorful. Italian food doesn’t need tweezers and countless ingredients to be good. You just need the right ingredients and you need to do them well.”
As such, Oakes said she envisions writing a menu each day that will include dishes like rabbit cacciatore, Dungeness crab cioppino and artichoke stuffed with shrimp and lemon mayonnaise.
A nod to the Tosca signature House Cappuccino may remain on the menu, though specifics have yet to be determined.
On the design side, Fulk plans to revamp the small upstairs private dining room, reached through a door in the kitchen. Many of those old celebrity stories that can neither be confirmed nor denied have roots in that room.
“We’re going have Ken (Fulk) go crazy in here with the design. We want to preserve and we want to give things new life,” Weinberg said. “There’s history here. But we’re going to make some new memories along the way, too.”
However, the restaurant’s other private room, the one in the back of the restaurant, will be kept more intact and still house its photos of celebrities and artwork.
On Tuesday, keys newly in hand, the three were able to collectively take a lengthy walk through the space. It was mostly to survey the state of each room, the lighting, the artwork and the seating. During the tour, they found a letter that was addressed to them.
Handwritten in ink and sealed in a white envelope, green tape adhering to a wall in the kitchen, the note was from the staff who worked the kitchen on Tosca’s final service last month. In it, the staff asked that the new owners embrace the history of the space and to remember what it means to San Francisco.
“This a very Tosca thing to find,” Weinberg said.