A long-cursed restaurant space at a prominent corner of the Mission District is vacant once more, and the curse, it seems, has not left the place.
Hamburger Project, the Mission location anyway, has closed, and the closure happened about a month after an unfortunate delivery snafu that led to another unwanted viral social media moment for its owners, who also own Ju-Ni in NoPa.
In that March incident, a delivery person left four large plastic-wrapped cylinders of ground beef on a hot sidewalk next to a tub of mayonnaise, outside the restaurant door, and someone quickly snapped a photo and posted it to Reddit.
The restaurant quickly explained the situation, blaming their meat-delivery person, and said that all the left-out meat (and mayo) were thrown away.
And the incident may have had little to do with the closure. The space had already been flipped from the Ju-Ni team's original sushi concept, Handroll Project, last summer, after that restaurant wasn't doing the volume of business they hoped. And co-owner Tan Truong tells Eater this week that Hamburger Project also was not "getting the traction needed at that location."
Still, the second closure of a restaurant at 598 Guerrero in less than a year, and the sidewalk meat incident, just adds to the pall that has hung over this space for decades.
As SFist noted when Handroll Project closed, apart from the solid eight-year run of Izakaya Yuzuki (2011-2019), the space has seen a high number of quick restaurant closures. There was the sadly short-lived AL's Deli from chef Aaron London, which debuted in mid-2019 and shut its doors a week before pandemic lockdowns began. A restaurant called Ebb & Flow lasted a mere six months in the space in 2010. And two other short-lived concepts tried to make a go of it there in the aughts, Craig's Place in 2007/08, and Central American restaurant Platanos from 2003 to 2006.
The executive chef of the latter, Carlos Perez, was killed in a fight a few blocks away in 2003, and his death only adds to the curse narrative.
Eater reported in a 2022 story pegged to Halloween that Handroll Project employees reported strange things happening in the restaurant, including a plastic container flying across the room on its own, and someone claimed to have seen an apparition of some kind in the basement.
KQED later reported that the address at 598 Guerrero had been the home and/or place of business of a psychic medium named Mrs. C. Mayo-Steers in 1889.
The original Hamburger Project location at 808 Divisadero remains open, and it too was at the center of a social media uproar about 17 months ago. That uproar began with a slightly negative review posted to Google about the newly opened restaurant by influencer Kat Ensign, which led to her documenting a barrage of harassing messages and insults from chef Geoffrey Lee, which led to Lee stepping down as executive chef at the business and at Ju-Ni. Lee later confirmed that he was back working at the sushi counter at Ju-Ni.
Top image: Photo via Yelp
