Collateral damage of a tumultuous season
Restaurants near Oracle Park impacted by Giants’ struggles
The groan and smattering of polite applause following a fifth-inning Atlanta Braves home run Thursday afternoon was audible at Momo’s restaurant across the street from Oracle Park. Despite idyllic, pre-summer San Francisco weather, food and drink spots along King Street, the normally bustling strip in front of the stadium, were quiet.
“God, I hope this doesn’t go extra innings,” said a customer, one of only a few seated on Momo’s patio.
Eight innings later, the Giants lost 5-4, marking the team’s third defeat in four games. People had already left the stadium in droves between the fourth and seventh innings, few stopping to dine at Momo’s or other nearby establishments.
For restaurants and bars around Oracle Park, as much as some of the operators want to view the Giants (21-28) as the lovable local outfit struggling to rediscover its winning ways, the truth is the team has become a hindrance to business. Multiple losing seasons have sent ticket sales plummeting, meaning fewer people are coming to the neighborhood to eat and drink.
“If I’m being honest, when the Giants are losing like they are now, business for me goes down by about 30 percent,” said Deanna Sison, owner of two restaurants within a halfmile of Oracle Park — Little Skillet and Mestiza. “Naturally you want the team to do well, but when they don’t, you can feel it almost immediately as a business owner.”
Despite winning three World Series between 2010 and 2014, the Giants’ dynastic run seems like a distant memory for local fans. During a 10-game stretch to start the current season, the Giants averaged 32,165 paid fans, which was around 20% below the average for the 2018 season. The change of fortune for the franchise is more apparent when considering how between 2010 to 2017, the team sold out 530 consecutive games. As a byproduct, restaurants were thriving.
Public House and Mijita, a spacious gastropub and a Mexican restaurant, opened next to Oracle Park in 2010, the same year the Giants won a World Series. Public House remains open, while Mijita relocated in 2015. Also in 2010, an ambitious restaurant and bistro called Ironside opened on Second Street.
Things seemed to take a turn during the team’s down years — 2011, 2013 and every year after 2014. Ironside closed in 2015 when the Giants won barely more than half their games. Merigan Sub Shop opened on Second Street in 2013 and closed in 2016, just one season before the franchise took an even more dramatic downward turn and won only 40% of its games.
One of the more notable restaurant spaces near the ballpark once belonged to Paragon, a spacious restaurant and bar that originally opened in 2000. The business’s 20-year run in the neighborhood ended in 2017 during another disappointing Giants season.
Though the closures coincided with tough years for the Giants, the only recent business to publicly attribute its shutdown to the team’s lack of success was a Marina sports bar called the Brick Yard. It opened in 2010 on Union Street and closed earlier this month.
Peter Osborne, owner of three businesses — Momo’s, Pete’s Tavern and Pedro’s Cantina — near Oracle park, said the decrease in revenue during the team’s down years is to be expected. He said his own ventures have taken a hit like others in the area, but he isn’t sure of the exact numbers.
“I hate to oversimplify it, but it sort of is what it is,” he said. “You can adjust by making sure you have good management. Honestly, the only thing you control is the customer experience.”
While the Giants’ loss to the Braves was unfolding on Thursday, 66-year-old South San Francisco native Dave Jeffers decided to leave the ballpark early. He said he tries to come to at least seven or eight games each year, but after a while, this game just didn’t seem worthy of his time. He was even skipping out on what he said was an old tradition: eating before or after the game at nearby Amici's East Coast Pizzeria.
“I remember a long time ago thinking that I would die before I ever saw them with a World Series,” Jeffers said, adding that the celebratory atmosphere used to make people want to be in the neighborhood during winning seasons. “It’s different these days.”
Jeffers wasn’t alone in his behavior. On the walk up Second Street, some fleeing the stadium passed Lord George, a familiar watering hole for Giants fans over the years.
Ezra Berman is one of the bar’s operators. He said the crowds are smaller on game days this season but it “hasn’t had too much of an impact yet, luckily” on his business.
“When the Giants are good, people want to spend all nine innings at the park,” he said. “Then they leave and eat and drink around the neighborhood. It’s not really happening when the team is playing like it is now.”
Another contributing factor to the drop in business for restaurants and bars near the ballpark may be Oracle Park’s progressive dining options.
In 2014, the team opened an edible garden through a partnership with Bon Appetit Management Co., the park's food service company, which was one of the first of its kind in baseball. Dining offerings at the park remain trendy with new additions each season, like this year with burgers from Impossible Foods and an outpost of the chicken sandwich shop Organic Coup.
Since neighboring businesses can no longer rely solely on baseball crowds, some owners are shifting their focus to people who live in the area. A clear example of this could be found at the Brixton, a new bar and restaurant in the former Paragon restaurant space, on Thursday afternoon.
At one point during the early innings of the game, the dining room and bar area was filled with around 200 customers, according to staff members. Only a handful of people in the crowd at the time were wearing Giants gear.
“Look, the city is just in flux. One minute you know everyone in the neighborhood, and the next, they moved out to the outlying cities because San Francisco is too expensive,” said Hugo Gamboa, a co-founder of the Brixton. “There’s a lot of people who just moved into this area less than a year ago from New York or somewhere else. They care about baseball but they also just want a great place to go eat. So in the lean years, who is important? The residents.”
Ultimately, all businesses can do is continue riding the team’s waves of success whenever they may come, while also navigating the down years, said Lord George’s Berman. Outside of his bar there’s a mannequin wearing a Giants jersey.
“At the end of the day, people drink when they’re happy and people drink when they’re sad,” he said. “It’s still fun to go to the games. I was at one the other day. And it’s still thousands of people who come to watch them play.”