The Excelsior: Slowest-growing restaurant strip in S.F.

Try to park in the Excelsior during the middle of the business day, and you may wonder why this stretch of Mission Street is the slowest-growing restaurant strip in San Francisco — the only one in the whole city, in fact, whose sales-tax revenue has shrunk over the past five years. Produce markets, taquerias, laundromats, nail salons and pharmacies are all busy.

As the mix of businesses attests, the Excelsior is still a neighborhood whose businesses are all oriented toward locals. It has relatively low commercial rents, rising property values and high home ownership. Despite its reputation as being an isolated neighborhood, 16 bus lines pass through the neighborhood.

Part of the problem, says Stephanie Cajina, executive director of the Excelsior Action Group, is the availability of good spaces. “Although we do have a relatively high (commercial retail) vacancy rate, most of the inventory that we do have is retail,” Cajina says.

Transforming those spaces into restaurants is expensive. “It really requires someone with deep pockets to come in and install a hood and install a kitchen and go through the process, which can take up to a year, year and a half, before you can open up.”

Many of the existing food venues are lowerpriced, family-run Chinese, Salvadoran, Filipino and Mexican restaurants. Neighborhood surveys, Cajina reports, have revealed that many residents would like to see higher-priced options, too.

“Big money doesn’t want to come down here because there’s no guarantee of return,” says Sean Ingram, co-owner of Dark Horse Inn, a craft beer bar and restaurant wrapping up its fifth year in business.

Ingram says that his business has just had its best year yet, partly because of a recent appearance on KQED’s “Check, Please!” Yet he complains of a lack of leadership from District 11 Supervisor John Avalos (who did not return The Chronicle’s phone call), as well as economic incentives to bring enough new restaurants and bars into the neighborhood to turn the Excelsior into a destination.

“I wish there were more places out here,” Ingram says.

Michael Noble Jr. / The Chronicle Geneva Avenue is one of the slowest growing restaurant corridors in San Francisco, despite bright spots that draw locals, like Dark Horse Inn, left.