North Beach Got Its Grocery Store Back. It Also Lost Washington Square's Anchor Restaurant, Again.
"Everybody knows each other," says Jacqueline Lanoie, who co-owns North Beach's brand new Grocery Outlet with her husband, Joel. It's the kind of line a shop owner says about any neighborhood she's trying to win over. In North Beach this year, it happens to be the detail that explains more about the neighborhood's current moment than any restaurant write-up on Columbus Avenue.
2026 has been a strange, telling year here. Inside the same eight months, the neighborhood finally solved a three-year grocery gap, watched its most expensively reinvented restaurant close for the second time, saw a family reclaim a piece of its own history on Grant Avenue, and threw its 70th street festival like nothing had changed at all. Looked at one at a time, those are four separate local news items. Looked at together, they say something specific about which kinds of businesses North Beach can actually support right now, and which ones it can't.
When the Safeway at 350 Bay Street closed in 2023, it left the block between North Beach and Fisherman's Wharf with one grocery option: a Trader Joe's. Roughly 20,000 people live within a half mile of that spot, and for three years, a full-service grocery run meant a trip somewhere else in the city.
Filling the space took longer than the closure itself. The 30,000-square-foot mall it sits in, NorthPoint Centre, went up for sale within months of Safeway leaving and eventually sold for $25.76 million to a San Jose investment firm. Grocery Outlet wasn't confirmed as the new tenant until September 2024, and it took a signed 15-year lease in early 2025 and nearly two years of construction before the doors opened on August 13, 2026, with Mayor Daniel Lurie cutting the ribbon.
The store is independently owned and operated by the Lanoies, who grew up together in Madera in California's Central Valley. That detail matters more than it sounds like it should. This isn't a corporate location run by a regional manager three cities away. It's two people who moved to San Francisco, built a business inside a neighborhood, and are now stocking discount groceries for people who live within walking distance of the register. "Everybody knows each other," Jacqueline said on opening week. In a neighborhood that just spent three years without a full grocery store, that's not a slogan. It's a description of who showed up to shop.
A half mile away, on the other side of Washington Square, a very different kind of business just ran out of road.
Park Tavern opened in 2011 under restaurateur James Nicholas, his then-wife Anna Weinberg, and chef Jennifer Puccio, in a space that had spent years as the neighborhood institution Moose's. It earned a James Beard Award nomination for best new restaurant the following year and spent most of the next decade as a go-to for brunch and business dinners. Then came a divorce, a pandemic, an eviction dispute over unpaid rent, and a closure in 2023.
The comeback, when it arrived in November 2024, was built to be a headline. Nicholas brought in Jonathan Waxman, the chef behind Barbuto in Manhattan and Michael's in Santa Monica, trained under Alice Waters at Chez Panisse. The dining room was redone in sky blue zellige tile with light birch ceiling beams, a nod to Moose's preserved in a set of antlers on the wall. It read like the kind of relaunch that wins a neighborhood back.
Instead, the San Francisco Chronicle's restaurant critic panned the food in January 2025, calling one dish "the worst steak of my life" and describing service that was uneven throughout the meal. By April 2025, the team had brought in a new chef de cuisine and opened McQueen's, a members-only lounge on the third floor aimed at corporate expense accounts and repeat guests. It wasn't enough. On June 10, 2026, Nicholas announced on Instagram that Park Tavern would close for good on June 21, less than two years after its relaunch. He called it "a privilege to steward this iconic restaurant on Washington Square." Then he closed it anyway.
Waxman, by most accounts, split his time between San Francisco and his two restaurants in New York, treating the Park Tavern kitchen more like a consulting arrangement than a daily post. Whatever else went wrong, the project had the two things a restaurant is supposed to need most: a recognizable chef and real money behind the redesign. It still didn't hold.
Two blocks away, on Francisco Street, a bakery with a fraction of that budget has spent nearly three years selling out of pastries by mid-morning.
Butter & Crumble opened in October 2023 after owner Sophie Smith, a former restaurant line cook, spent the pandemic baking layered cakes out of her Marina apartment and other restaurants' unused kitchens. The bakery now draws lines that start up to two hours before opening, caps orders at ten pastries per customer, and had built more than 76,000 Instagram followers as of earlier this year. It's popular enough that Smith runs a separate preorder list limited to people who can prove they live nearby, specifically to manage the crush on her own block.
This year she's expanding, not toward downtown or another neighborhood with foot traffic, but half a mile away on Union Street, into a storefront that had sat vacant for four years. Supervisor Danny Sauter, who represents North Beach, wrote the zoning change that let Smith convert the space into a café rather than leaving it stuck in a narrower use category. The new Cake Shop, confirmed for a summer 2026 opening, will finally give her room to build whole cakes and pour espresso from Abanico Coffee Roasters, a woman-owned roaster based in the Mission.
A similar story is playing out on Grant Avenue. In April, Sal Annuzzi and his wife's family opened Qua O La, San Francisco's first dedicated Croatian wine bar in nearly a decade, in the former home of the seafood restaurant Portofino. Annuzzi grew up in the Excelsior, but his wife's mother, Linda Lazarich, settled in North Beach in the 1960s after emigrating from Croatia and met her husband, who was born on the Istrian peninsula, in the same neighborhood. The family took over the space in October, pulled roughly 2,000 fishing lures off the ceiling, repainted the walls in sage and warm pink, and filled the room with heirlooms, including Croatian flasks made from animal hide that Lazarich loaned from her own collection. It is, literally, a family moving back into a building on the same streets where they first landed in this country.
Neither of these businesses has a celebrity name attached. Neither needed one.
The neighborhood's biggest annual draw follows the same pattern. The North Beach Festival marked its 70th year on June 20 and 21, 2026, filling 11 blocks around Columbus and Green Streets with more than 200 vendors and four stages of music, along with the Italian Street Painting promenade and the long-running Blessing of the Animals ceremony outside the National Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi. It's organized by the North Beach Business Association, and the proceeds go back into local programs: free meals, after-school activities, job training, temporary housing.
It's one of the country's oldest continuously running outdoor street fairs, dating to 1954, and it still operates on the same basic model as the businesses that are actually thriving on these blocks this year: local ownership, local funding, local benefit.
Put the year side by side and the shape is hard to miss. The businesses gaining ground in North Beach right now are the ones built around the people who already live here: a grocery store run by owners who know their customers by name, a bakery that limits its own preorder list to the neighborhood, a wine bar rebuilt by a family with three generations of history on that block. The one project built around outside star power and a members-only lounge is empty again.
None of that means investment can't work here. It means that this year, in this neighborhood, the businesses winning the daily foot traffic are the ones whose whole model depends on the same zip code showing up on a Tuesday, not on a name that plays well in a national food story.
For anyone who already calls North Beach home, that's the texture of the next twelve months: where the coffee line will actually be, which corner might finally sit down and eat again, which storefront on Grant Avenue is still waiting for a family to walk back through the door.
If you find yourself tracking a neighborhood this closely, you're probably the kind of person who eventually wonders what all of it means for your own address. That's a conversation Sage Real Estate has often, in plain terms, with no pressure attached. Discover what your home is worth.
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