The legendary and beloved Tosca Cafe in North Beach won't be making it open by year's end, as the team continues to wait for the liquor license to officially transfer from the previous ownership.

San Franciscans were fairly devastated by the news that the shiny new, nationally acclaimed reboot of Tosca as an April Bloomfield restaurant was closing back in July after barely six years in business. But those sad faces were turned upside down just a few weeks later when news came that the team of Anna Weinberg (Marlowe, Park Tavern, Leo's Oyster Bar), chef Nancy Oakes (Boulevard, Prospect), and designer Ken Fulk was stepping in to revive the place.

Weinberg now tells SFist that the team isn't doing a ton to the interior, which was lovingly restored under disgraced restaurateur Ken Friedman back in 2013. But she says that some escrow issues have held up the liquor license transfer, and among other snags, a winter opening is now just their best hope.

"Best case is 90 days from December 1," Weinberg says, which puts us out in early March. And as restaurant watchers know all too well, other last-minute issues could always hold that up until early spring. Fingers crossed for an easy rebirth.

The rebooted Tosca will have a new menu that focuses on the Italian-American heritage of the neighborhood. Oakes hinted in August that items may include a rabbit cacciatore, a Dungeness crab cioppino, and a shrimp-stuffed artichoke. A chef de cuisine for the restaurant has not yet been named.

Meanwhile, the restaurant is available for private events, and Instagram photos from Weinberg's late October birthday party at the restaurant show that the legendary back room — adorned with photographs and memorabilia about the bar's recent history under the management of Jeannette Etheredge — is fully intact and as it was, with one notable (temporary?) addition: a karaoke machine.

As private event venues go, you can't get much cooler. And this now adds to a stable of rentable spaces for Weinberg's mini-empire that includes Marianne's — the backroom space at The Cavalier at the Hotel Zetta — and the upstairs Eden Room at Park Tavern.

Previously: Tosca To Reopen By Winter Under New Owners Nancy Oakes, Anna Weinberg, and Ken Fulk

Boulevard chef Nancy Oakes and Marlowe/Park Tavern restaurateur Anna Weinberg are joining forces to reimagine Tosca Cafe as something in between the legendary dive bar it once was and the polished culinary destination it became.

It's big news for Tosca, which we just learned two weeks ago had abruptly closed under the ownership of celebrity chef April Bloomfield. Bloomfield made her name in New York at The Spotted Pig alongside partner Ken Friedman, whose sexual harassment and misconduct allegations likely played a role in hurting Tosca's business over the last year and a half. In 2013, she and Friedman "saved" Tosca after former owner Jeannette Etheredge was about to be evicted — a deal that was partly brokered by actor Sean Penn, who was a longtime regular. Bloomfield's Italian-focused menu earned the place a spot on Bon Appetit's Best New Restaurants list the following year, and for several years thereafter tables were hard to come by.

Now, as the Chronicle reports, the powerhouse team of Oakes (a James Beard Award winner), Weinberg, and designer Ken Fulk are stepping in to save Tosca once again, with Oakes taking charge of reimagining the Italian concept, Weinberg handling operations, and Fulk polishing up the design. The name Tosca shall remain.

Oakes tells the paper that she grew up in North Beach, and she wants to revive the old spirit of the place as much as possible. For the food, she is thinking "simple and flavorful," with nightly changing specials, and dishes like rabbit cacciatore, Dungeness crab cioppino and artichoke stuffed with shrimp and lemon mayonnaise. A chef de cuisine is yet to be hired who will be running the kitchen day to day.

The team is aiming for a winter re-opening, but say it could happen sooner. Also in the works will be a to-be-announced new concept for the former Lusty Lady space behind Tosca, which Bloomfield and Friedman had once planned to turn into a separate cocktail lounge but never did.

The Chronicle hints that the future is shaky for Boulevard, Oakes' nearly 30-year-old flagship restaurant, with a new lease just recently signed — and that uncertainty pushed Oakes to pursue this project. Her last new restaurant, opened with partners Pam Mazzola and Kathy King, was Prospect in 2010.

And this is a breakout project for Weinberg, who is partnering in this outside of her Big Night Restaurant Group, which includes Marlowe, Park Tavern, The Cavalier, Leo's Oyster Bar, Petit Marlowe, and the now closed Cow Marlowe, which is pivoting to become something new called Greenwich.

New details will undoubtedly be emerging in the coming months, so stay tuned.

Photo: Jeremy Brooks

First, a few classical music items: After 38 years of companionship, SF Symphony musical director and most famous acronym MTT has tied the knot with his partner Joshua Robison. Congratulations, Michael! It looks like the honeymoon will take them to hotbeds of romance like Cleveland and Kansas City: it's where the orchestra is going on tour next week, as well as New-York, Boston, Ann Arbor or Miami. Joining them on tour, violinist Gil Shaham, whom we talked with on Tuesday. Gil and the SF Opera tune up for their journey with bon voyage concerts this week at Davies Symphony Hall. Finally, SF Opera's season continued with Partenope and Tosca. Next in the batter's box: Rossini's Cinderella.

Gil Shaham burst onto the classical music scene when in 1989, just eighteen year old, he replaced Itzahk Perlman on short notice for a series of concert with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by none other than Michael Tilson Thomas. The relationship has continued over the years. He made his SFS debut in 1999 at Isaac Stern’s 70th birthday celebration in 1999 in Stern Grove, and he’s been a guest artist with the symphony almost every season since. Together, they perform this week at Davies Symphony Hall the two programs they will take on the road for a seven cities US tour: Mozart's violin concerto No. 5 in A Major, and Prokofiev's 2nd violin concerto.

The second concerto falls into a project Gil has been working on for a few years, about the violin concertos of the 30s. That decade saw a flourish of violin concertos by a list of all the major composers of the period: Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, Alban Berg, Sergei Prokofiev, William Walton, Benjamin Britten, Samuel Barber, Paul Hindemith, Karol Szymanowski, Darius Milhaud… and Shaham has been exploring those relentlessly.
We talked with him about his concerts with the symphony and the benefits of touring while sleeping in his own bed, as the SF Symphony performs in NYC where Gil lives.

You and MTT go back a long way. How is it to work with him?
Gil Shaham: It's always such a thrill to be with the orchestra. I'm always thrilled to be with Michael Tilson-Thomas. He's a brilliant mind and a brilliant musician. There's an aura and an excitement and a love of music that inspires everybody around it, on stage and off stage. When I first started working with him in 1989, that's 25 years ago, it became clear to me very quickly that he knows the violin repertoire better than I do. He's a conductor and I'm a violinist. Now, 25 years later, I suspect it might still be true. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of music and tremendous experience with music making. I always learn. For example, I remember learning the William Schuman violin concerto. Basically, Michael taught it to me. I didn't know the piece before, I remember spending a long time discussing the piece with him. It's true that there is an excitement about music that he brings everywhere he goes.

This week and on tour, you will play violin concertos by Mozart and Prokofiev. Can you contrast those?
There are both similar in that they both ended up being the final concerto for violin of the composer. I remember hearing that Prokofiev had plans to write a concerto #3 but he never did. The story with Mozart's concerto is that he was prepared to write a folio of six, which was common practice at the time to publish music in group of six. When he was ready to compose number five, he was ready to scrap the whole project and throw away these five great treasures that we still have.

The pieces are very different. Mozart is basically a funny piece in A Major. The first movement has an unusual marking of allegro aperto (open), it has an even sunnier affect than the other concertos. In general, you'd be very hard pressed to see Mozart marking anything aperto. The piece is mostly in the major mode. It has a sublime 2nd movement and rondo-dance 3rd movement. And it may be most famous for the minor mode interlude in the last movement, where Mozart uses Turkish vernacular, he turned to the folk music of the Turks that he heard at the time in Austria, and then he comes back to the Major. It's a culmination of his study of the violin concerto genre. Of the five concertos, this is the longest and grandest in scale, and maybe the most experimental. The first movement stops in the middle and the violin comes in with an adagio aria just in the middle, and then comes back as if to say, "now, to the real meaning of the music." It's perfectly written of course, the technique of it is beautiful. He writes this aria to start with a violin arpeggiation. It takes the audience by surprise. It seems unrelated, this A-C#-E arpeggio. The violin finishes this cadence, a very beautiful, very refined cadence, but it still leaves you questioning where we are. It comes back to the allegro we heard before, except this time, the allegro has a counter point in the violin solo. That counterpoint comes from the A arpeggio. And in fact you realize: this is the melody. What you heard in the beginning was the counterpoint to this melody. It's an incredible effect, and very experimental. There isn't anything like that before. People think of other forms as being strict, but in the hand of great masters, they can take great liberty with it. There are all sorts of effects. In the last movement, the cellos play con legno, with the wood of the bow. It was a special effect, an experimental sound.

By contrast, I think of the Prokofiev as a much darker piece, even more than I thought before. The other connection between the two concertos: Prokofiev also uses this vernacular of folk music. In this concerto, you hear imitations of balalaika, and of bayan (the Ukrainian accordion) and there are certainly some melodies that sound like Russian folk melodies. Actually, in the last movement, he uses castanets, probably for the purpose of the premiere of the piece, which was in Madrid in Spain. It was commissioned by Robert Sutton, a French man, and premiered in Madrid, and Prokofiev incorporated these castanets. These days, I wonder if there was, between the lines of the music, some other message. Besides these beautiful melodies and references to folk traditions, there is also a counterpart, this machinist vein in the music. In fact, it ends with this machinist vein. I wonder if Prokofiev had some darker message about the Russian soul. The opening melody is in the minor mode. It sounds like a traditional old Russian folk song, and it transforms during the piece into this very short, kinda grotesque, ghostly variations, with somewhat dissonant machinist passages in the violin and the orchestra.

You started your own label after your contract with DG was not renewed. You mentioned you would keep recording as long as each release could fund the next. How have the economics of the music business changed with services like Spotify?

You know the truth is, I'm not nearly knowledgeable enough to answer this. My understanding is that it is a difficult period of transition for the entire music industry. There is so much free content out there. Even in the pop world, or the traditional part of the music business, we're still not quite at the model where we know how musicians can make a profit. I feel very lucky with our label.When we started, we said: if there is enough demand to make another one, we'll make another one. We started with a recording of Gabriel Faure chamber music. I was very proud that we were on the billboard charts, it was a best seller and we made some more. We expanded a little bit, my wife Adele Anthony released a recording of concertos by Sibelius and Ross Edwards, an Australian composer. My sister Orli Shaham has released a new piece by Steve Mackey and this year, I will release the solos sonatas and partitas of Bach. We enjoy it and so long as there is demand for it, we're happy to make recording.

Every time we see you, we note that you move a lot and seem to almost dance with the music. Do others comment to you about it?

I wish I was more in control of my body. I suppose I should take some posture lessons and it couldn't hurt for all of us to dance the minuet and any of these dances that we all play. When I see myself, it's so embarrassing. I wish I didn't move the way I do. Often people comment and try to help. I must say, I have gotten better. When I was twelve or thirteen years old, I used to practice the violin walking up and down at home. And I remember going on stage once and I was walking and getting off stage. And I'll never forget the pianist I was playing with, Sandy Rivers [ed: Sandra Rivers], she was like: "where are you?" and I'm off the stage!

It sounds silly, and a lot of of the story is just a pretext for lovely music, but the staging here manages to put everything into a somewhat coherent vision, an exploration of love which turns into an examination of physical desire. Basically, it's taking the appropriate 18th century facade for the charade it is, and just making explicit the very sexual tension between the characters. There is also a gender confusion to add onto this tension: Rosmira cross-dresses of course, but both Arsace and Armindo are sung by counter-tenors, with rather feminine voices. As an aside: it is somewhat sad that opera lost the inventiveness which makes Handel write a score for these registers. Sure, the "evil baritone-dashing tenor-loving soprano combo" has some of the most amazing music ever written, but when again will we see two dueling counter-tenors?

David Daniels as a lost in his thoughts Ascarce

The sexy Danielle DeNiese was a perfect fit for both the vocal score and the wacky staging. Her perky voice is light and fluttery, thin in the bottom and sharp at the top, but fun, appropriate, and full of sparkles. Her cabaret sequence was downright raunchy, but her sweetness in the butterfly aria was innocently charming. David Daniels manages to emanate the manly attractiveness which draws both Rosmira and Partenope while singing high notes with both volume and lyricism. He never feels strained and stays colorful.

The staging makes some incredible demands on Anthony Roth Costanzo (Armindo) and Alek Shrader (Emilio). The former belts while doing pull-ups hanging from stairs, a feat that would result in a complaint filed with the performer's union by a lesser singer. We can't do pull-up without catching our breath, let alone sing throughout. Shrader outdoes him by singing hanging out of the window atop a bathroom's door, or pulling a yoga routine in the last act. Yoga, like singing, involves breath control, but they are supposed to be incompatible with each other, not funny as hell together. Here's a side story to the performance: Daniella Mack and Alek Shrader met as Merola attendees in 2007 and later got married.

The orchestra sounded fantastic, led by Julian Wachner in his SF Opera debut, especially the valveless period horns and the oboes given great lines by Handel.

Lianna Haroutounian lit up the stage in Tosca

Sure, Jagde was pretty good last time around. An Adler fellow with the SF Opera, he had floored us in one of our first encounters with him in Puccini, that seems to be his territory. He's still growing into the role, finding more confidence and more heft in his voice. And the familiarity of the cast with the staging ensured that all flowed smoothly, with none of the slight hesitations you may encounter on opening night.

We still recall the caution in last year's soprano Angela Ghorgiu's blocking last year. She seemed a bit restrained and not fully engaged with the staging (to her credit, she wasn't feeling well and had to leave at the first intermission to be replaced by Melody Moore). And while it was her first show on this set -on this stage, even- Lianna Haroutounian had no hesitation. She fearlessly hurled herself into the performance, just like she hurled herself off the roof of the Palazzo Farnese to end the night: fully committed to give her all.

Her Vissi d'art suspended time in the opera house, so sad, tender and lyrical. Her "Qual'occhio" duet with Jagde in the first Act gave us chills up and down the spine, one of these moments of transcendent emotion being communicated through music that makes opera so wonderful. The 6'2" Jagde and the diminutive Haroutounian formed an unlikely couple, but heavenly matched in that duet. There is one more performance on Tosca on Friday, do yourself a favor and check Haroutounian out. She'll blow you away.