Many San Francisco restaurants are closing their doors – IOTW Report

Many San Francisco restaurants are closing their doors

ABC7:

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — San Francisco is known as a haven for good food, but restaurants in the city are increasingly finding it hard to stay open.

On the Embarcadero, 26-year-old Palomino, once known for its popular happy hour, has just closed its doors. Three restaurants near Oracle Park — Pete’s Tavern, Pedro’s Cantina and Amici’s East Coast Pizzeria — have also closed, according to Hoodline. And in the Mission District, the owner of Dosa is also closing its original location on Valencia Street after 15 years.

“It was a combination of a lot of different things,” Dosa CEO Anjan Mitra told ABC7 News. “It seemed like the perfect storm that hit us, hit the restaurant industry.”

Mitra said the rise of food delivery companies, such as DoorDash, Uber Eats and GrubHub, along with tech companies like Munchery and Sprig, which delivered ready-made food to customers, has contributed to the increasing number of restaurant closures.

“The way people order food, you know online, put a lot of price pressures on us,” Mitra explained, “So they took our margins away, so we are giving up 25-30 percent of our prices to the delivery companies.”

On top of that, he said, the high cost of living, along with employee benefit requirements by the City, has led to increased business costs. read more


19 Comments on Many San Francisco restaurants are closing their doors

  1. I wonder how the Chinese are handling the situation. When I graduation from HS a friend and I traveled around the country and visited SF. We bought several containers of food in Chinatown. As we were eating we were wondering what the spongy stuff was and finally figured out it was cow brain!

    9
  2. “It was a combination of a lot of different things,” Dosa CEO Anjan Mitra told ABC7 News. “It seemed like the perfect storm that hit us, hit the restaurant industry.”

    No, it was one thing. 100% predictable, but unavoidable in SF.

    15
  3. The article conveniently hides the fact that the places that are popular with tourists don’t have locals eating there. So the Uber eats GrubHub propaganda excuse goes out the window.

    It’s two things that are doing this:
    *Bums shitting all over public places
    *the Fight For $15 bullshit forces restaurant owners to pass the DOUBLED AND TRIPLED prices along to their customers

    So the tourists say screw this noise and when they return home tell all their neighbors what a shitty disgusting outrageously overpriced vacation they had

    Tourism plummets. People stop coming. Businesses close. Everybody’s out of work. Everyone’s on da Gummint Cheese. Yay Gummint!

    27
  4. TFB. They got what they deserve. There’s about a 95% chance they voted for those responsible for this mess. Sad thing is those worthless a holes are going to move somewhere else and bring their voting habits with them.

    15
  5. Cheer up, when the Dems take over the government not only will the minimum wage be $50.00 an hour but the citizens will be told where to eat, what to eat and when to eat! Piece of cake since Government will own and manage all the restaurants!

    9
  6. JUDGE ROY BEAN,
    Yea they even showed up here in my little
    town of 14,000.One told me he had 10 more years
    in Cali then he would be DEAD BROKE,but in La Marque
    he would NEVER run out of money…

    3
  7. Business is a Jungle, and the restaurant industry is in the deepest and darkest part of it.

    In the Jungle, only the strongest survive.

    In any event, San Francisco is an unsanitary city and food preparation should not be allowed in it.

    8
  8. Why not go straight to the core cause for the the poor business climate forcing the closures?
    It’s the city government the majority voted into office, the nonsense policies they dream up, that are supported by most of the people that voted for them. All democrats, afaik. The minority that can’t get better people elected to city government are just SOL.

    Mayor London Breed (D)
    Board of supervisors all Ds.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Board_of_Supervisors .

    But they are not directly the problem. Just a symptom, of the poor choices on election day of what the majority voted for.

    5
  9. @Mansfield Lovell; Have to disagree with you there. While the restaurants named may be tourist haunts I’m sure locals eat there some of the time. If they like the food but hate the tourists (the usual complaint) then Uber et al is perfect for them not so much for the owners. You’re right that the article doesn’t mention any local haunts that have gone belly up because if too many of their regulars use Uber or GrubHub that 30% cut the transport companies take would be enough to shut them down. As it is a lot of restaurants have two menus. One for that sitdown or takeout and another, higher priced (but not 30%) one for Uber. I wonder how many of them saw so much of their regular business transition to Uber or whatever that they started their own delivery service. That would have been lot easier before this gutting of contractor services in California.

    1
  10. The wife & I were in San Diego a couple weeks ago to catch a couple of Padres v Cubs games. We stayed at a place the wife found on VRBO and we Uber’d everywhere. The neighborhood was kind of nice, too. One of the trips to the ballpark was interesting to me as I observed the homeless staking out their places to bed down for the night. One of our drivers talked about how the city was trying to figure out what to “do” about the homeless there, as SD is the 4th most popular destination for those without homes.

    I didn’t want to have an extended discussion so I said nothing; I did want to hear from and get some idea of the thinking processes of those who proclaim the generosities of their city and express bafflement at the increase of the numbers of the homeless. They just can’t cogitate properly.

    5

Comments are closed.