King Street blues: As Giants struggle, so do restaurants
The San Francisco Giants recently wrapped up their third consecutive losing season. Restaurants around the ballpark didn’t fare much better.
When the baseball season ended last month, it took with it several nearby restaurants. Pete’s Tavern and Pedro’s Cantina, the two megasports bars across the street, shut down. So did Amici’s East Coast Pizzeria. So did Tony Gemignani’s Slice House. Even MoMo’s, the stalwart on the corner of Second and King since 1996, is being sold to new owners.
The circumstances are nuanced and vary for each business, but a simple truth can be pulled from the recent activity: The culinary landscape near Oracle Park is shifting — and restaurateurs are wary of its future.
“It wasn’t that long ago it was said that King Street is the new center of the city,” said Peter Osborne, the restaurateur who helped shape the neighborhood by opening MoMo’s, Pete’s and Pedro’s. “It’s a completely different world now.”
Tony Gemignani, who closed his Second Street pizzeria in August, concurred.
“It just seemed like it all faded so fast,” Gemignani said. “I don’t know what to say about the neighborhood, but I think there’s going to be more places that are in the same
boat as the rest of us.”
The most common refrain from business owners is that the recent play of the Giants, who again failed to make the postseason, has resulted in smaller crowds coming to the neighborhood. Coupled with that are rising operating costs and a cadre of familiar tropes in the San Francisco restaurant scene.
“It was a fun challenge having Amici’s when the Giants were winning. During the playoffs, we would get four times as many customers as we would on a day without baseball,” said Amici’s President Peter Cooperstein. “Rent in a good location is just very high in the city. It’s hard for a business like ours, with that medium price point, to do enough volume to make it as a restaurant. We’ll be OK with the direction we’re headed in now.”
Closing made sense, Cooperstein said, because people in general aren’t eating at fullservice restaurants as much as they once did. The traffic and construction in the area has also been a problem, he added. Twothirds of Amici’s business came via delivery. As such, Amici’s has moved into a commercial kitchen space less than a mile from its former King Street home. It will now operate as a deliveryonly entity in the neighborhood where it has operated since 2004.
When Osborne opened MoMo’s in 1996 in what was once the Robert Mattock printing company plant, Oracle Park was called AT&T Park, and AT&T Park was just a proposal needing voter approval. From 2007 to 2010, he and his wife, Janet, opened Pete’s Tavern and Pedro’s Cantina on the same block.
After 23 years on King Street, Osborne points to higher operating costs and diminishing returns at his trio of King Street restaurants, but his decision to close was actually spurred along by a desire to retire. He said he knew it was time to go because too many restaurants have opened in the city in the past few years.
Plus, there’s an overwhelming amount of car traffic. “People just don’t want to be down here anymore because traveling our little 49 square miles has become so difficult,” Osborne said.
Another elder dining statesman on King Street is Public House, the yearround restaurant on the ground floor of the ballpark, led by chef Traci Des Jardins in partnership with Bon Appetit Management Company.
“It’s a bit of feast or famine for restaurants out here since it’s such a seasonal business. The key thing is to work around that, find out other ways to draw the crowds you need,” Des Jardins said.
For newcomers, though, the ballpark area has proved to be a bit of a conundrum. “I have businesses all over the place but that neighborhood just wasn’t something I could figure out,” Tony Gemignani said. “I was constantly wondering, ‘S— should I open on the weekend? Should I change the hours?’ There were all these apartments around, but the area was a ghost town on the weekends.”
So what does the future hold for the dining scene around Oracle Park? For most business owners, their approach is to wait and see.
The nearby Chase Center is a multibilliondollar venture with its own forthcoming collection of restaurants. Mission Bay will be a hub of its own kind, which could potentially lower the demand for restaurants near Oracle Park.
There, one of the neighborhood anchors is Osborne’s Mission Rock Resort, which now plays a role similar to MoMo’s a few decades back: a de facto pregame gathering spot. It speaks to how the city has changed.
“We used to be on the outer edge of the city here at the ballpark. Now you see all of this development in the area,” Des Jardins said. “Like everybody else, I don’t know what the future holds just yet. It will all be interesting to see.”
“It’s a bit of feast or famine for restaurants out here since it’s such a seasonal business.” Traci Des Jardins, chef at Public House at ballpark