San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
JONATHAN KAUFFMAN
THERE’S SUCH A THING AS “SALAD LOUNGES” NOW.
Ask me to characterize the Valencia Street restaurant strip in 2018, and I offer up the following evidence: I am eating a grain bowl in a salad lounge.
Taxonomically speaking, Mixt’s new Salad Lounge, one of the two rooms in its expansive new Valencia Street location, falls between the ultra-lounge (chill beats, the smell of pheromones smushed into the entire Macy’s cologne counter) and the airport lounge (dried-out cheese cubes, overly stimulating carpet).
Decorated with blue velour chairs, low marbletopped tables and mood lighting filtered through the holes of metal colanders, Mixt’s Salad Lounge occupies the very same room that, 40 years ago, hosted performances by transgender mariachi singer Alberta Nevaerez and, in the 1990s, birthday parties for Tequila’d up bike messengers yelling over their enchilada plates.
Mission longtimers have seen the failure of the family-owned La Rondalla, which reopened in 2014 after seven years of renovations and closed for good two years later, as emblematic of the Changing Mission. Its replacement by Mixt, a local chain beloved by Financial District lunchers, seems even more portentous. But what exactly does it portend?
Edward Duran, secondgeneration owner of La Cumbre on Valencia and 16th, says that when his parents opened their taqueria in 1967, “Valencia Street was a working-class neighborhood, where people worked in the neighborhood as well as lived in the neighborhood.” Burritos cost 75 cents then, and La Cumbre’s customers were police officers, taxi drivers, construction workers and artists — the same locals who fell in love with La Rondalla. As someone who has meandered up and down Valencia Street for 25 years, poking in stores, drinking beers and eating burritos, I don’t know that I have much chest-beating to do about La Rondalla’s closure. When it reopened in 2014, after being shut down by the health department in 2007, the joy that made meals there a cheesedrenched good time disappeared along with the Christmas lights.
Besides, the commercial strip has been gentrifying for so long that activists working to preserve the Mission, particularly its Latino-owned businesses and residents, have all but given up on it. To me, the wonder of Valencia Street is that long-standing restaurants like La Cumbre, as well as El Toro, Puerto Alegre, Thanh Tam II and We Be Sushi, have endured for decades. Their longevity offers real proof that this city’s density, and Valencia Street’s street traffic, gives restaurateurs a running shot.
No, the quandary that the Mixt Salad Lounge seems to pose is of more recent vintage: What happened to the ambitious Valencia Street of 2010?
From 2010 through 2012, Eater San Francisco asked local food writers at year’s end what the hottest dining neighborhood was, and the Mission always won. (In 2012’s survey, my contribution to the survey was “Open your #$^* restaurant somewhere else.”) Not only did Valencia Street attract — and make — names, it welcomed experimentation in a way that bistros in more expensive neighborhoods like Pacific Heights and Cow Hollow did not. Think Bar Tartine under the tenures of Jason Fox or Nick Balla and Cortney Burns. Locanda. Al’s Place. Craftsman and Wolves.
Nat Cutler, co-owner of Monk’s Kettle on 16th Street and the short-lived Abbot’s Cellar on Valencia and 18th streets, said that the reason so many high-priced restaurants opened on the strip in those years was because investment money and high-earning twenty-somethings were flooding San Francisco at that time. “Businesses were making lots of money because everyone was spending it,” Cutler says.
The boom, he says, ended around 2014, as restaurants’ labor and ingredient costs rose, as did commercial rents on Valencia. So did diners’ cost of living. “The price points where people feel comfortable spending (for a meal out) got a lot higher,” Cutler says. The market for fine dining, at least on Valencia Street, had become oversaturated.
The restaurant closures included big names like Range, Bar Tartine and Urchin Bistrot (following the closure of Wo Hing in the same space). Vacancies, it seemed to me, blossomed.
According to commercial real estate broker Carol Gilbert, my perception that the Valencia Street of 2016 had gotten a little gap-laden is false. Interest in spaces there never lagged, she says. That said, a price correction may have occurred in recent years. “There are people who paid too much to get on the street and they’re not making it, and so there’s a little bit of reality adjustment,” she says.
Over the past two years, the vacancies are certainly filling back in, this time with an influx of more modest concepts, including businesses that use the word “concept” without grimacing: affordable independents such as Deccan Spice and Flor de Café and homegrown chains like Souvla, Smitten, Curry Up Now — and Mixt.
When Charles Bililies took over Grub, one of the failures from the class of 2010, and transformed it into the third location of the Greek-inspired Souvla in 2016, he was concerned that diners were only coming to Valencia on nights and weekends. “We’ve come to realize there are a tremendous amount of people who work in and around the Mission, more in the artistic or professional-services space: artists and photographers and designers and people who wouldn’t be in a conventional office building,” he says: The New Mission, in short, the people who replaced the police officers and teachers La Cumbre once served.
Mixt CEO Leslie Silverglide says that these Mission residents weren’t fully served by high-end restaurants. “We were hearing from locals that they were frustrated they had all these kinds of fine dining restaurants but there wasn’t anything that was affordable, easy and fast,” she said.
The locally owned Mixt, which opened its first spot in 2006, currently has nine San Francisco locations and another two in Los Angeles. Much about Mixt is emblematic of San Francisco values, both old and new: The chain’s ingredients are largely organic and locally sourced, it claims to pay workers well over minimum wage and provide them with full health insurance, and it makes salads and other healthy food convenient, though the $22 I paid for my grain bowl and a glass of rosé isn’t cheap by taqueria standards.
As Bililies says of his crazily popular Souvla, “This is not only what diners in San Francisco want in 2018 and beyond, it’s a model that works.” The same could be said for Mixt. During the day its main dining room — white tile, geometric designs on the walls, kombucha taps behind the counter — does a brisker business than its salad lounge.
How many small, independent retail stores and restaurants were pushed out when Valencia Street became the hottest restaurant strip in San Francisco? Yet it turns out that, in San Francisco’s incessant gentrification, hot isn’t sustainable. Once the excitement departs, the everyday rushes back in. If the arrival of Mixt and other small chains on Valencia can be seen as a parable of gentrification, the moral may be: Gentrification always eats itself.