Polenta debuts in Alamo Square, Del Popolo slings its final (non-frozen) pies, and the East Bay's takeout staple Grégoire opens in the Inner Sunset, all in This Week In Food.
The big food world news this week was the closing of Ama and Café Sebastian in the building adjacent to the Transamerica Pyramid that has been named Three Transamerica Plaza. Chef Brad Kilgore's restaurants have only been open a short while — Ama for just seven months — but after the tower and the adjacent buildings were sold in February, it sounds like the new owner wanted the businesses out and jacked up the rent.
Also now closed as of a few weeks ago, but just confirmed this week, is Hamburger Project's Mission location. The Divisadero original location remains open, and the team says that the Mission restaurant — in a notoriously cursed restaurant space — had not found enough traction with diners.
SFist earlier reported on the opening, at long last, of Polenta, at 803 Fillmore Street in Alamo Square. The Friulian restaurant features a menu of specialties from the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, along with an all-Friulian wine list. The place is still in soft-opening mode, and does not have a website, but you can reserve by phone at 415-875-9404.
Del Popolo's final night of serving pizza on Nob Hill is tonight, and the Chronicle sat down to talk this week with owner and acclaimed pizzaiolo Jon Darsky about his decision to close. Despite the restaurant still doing good business, Darsky has decided to focus on expanding the frozen pizza business he launched during the pandemic, hopefully nationwide. He also reveals that he, his wife, and two sons relocated to Los Angeles in 2019, which has meant him commuting up to SF every other week or so to oversee the restaurant, as well as his SoMa frozen pizza production facility. His likely next move is to open a much larger production facility elsewhere in California or out of state.
The almost 52-year-old Pacific Café in the Richmond District is for sale, and it may close by the end of summer unless a buyer emerges. As the Chronicle reports, the restaurant, known for its classic seafood dishes and complimentary wine pours, is on the market for $195,000, as co-owners Frank Gundry and Ross Warren are planning to retire.
Tablehopper brings word of the opening of Qua o La, a new wine bar at 1318 Grant Avenue in North Beach that is serving primarily Croatian and Italian wines "with a focus on family-run [wineries] and women producers." They're also serving some Croatian food, including sausages, salumi, and burek. And tonight (May 8) is Chevape night, celebrating the Croatian staple mincemeat sausage known as chevape or cevapi.
And we missed this opening in recent months, but East Bay upscale takeout staple Grégoire, which has locations in Berkeley and Oakland, has opened a San Francisco location in the Inner Sunset, at 9th and Irving. Chef Grégoire Jacquet tells the East Bay Express that he received over 150 franchise applications since announcing franchise opportunities two years ago, and he finally found a franchisee he wanted to work with. A shared commissary kitchen provides food for all three restaurants, and Jacquet has hopes for dozens more franchise locations in Northern California. See the current spring menu here, and don't sleep on those potato puffs.
Chronicle associate critic Cesar Hernandez has a review this week of Oakland's Snail Bar, the once white-hot wine bar and restaurant in the Temescal district where chef-owner Andres Giraldo Florez has recently left the kitchen in the hands of a young new chef after moving to France. That chef, Louisiana-born Zachary Breaux, has kept the menu interesting and impressive, Hernandez writes, with some excellent beef tongue croquettes, and an "unbelievably sticky" pig skin ragu lasagna, and the vibe at the place is still very much the same.
Photo courtesy of Del Popolo
