SF Shake Shack Hopes to Open in Marina Real Foods Space Early Next Year

When Shake Shake makes its recently announced and highly anticipated debut in San Francisco, it hopes to shack up in the former Real Food Co. grocery space in the Cow Hollow neighborhood at 3060 Fillmore Street (at Filbert). Originally, the business said it was targeting the Marina neighborhood generally, omitting an exact address for the restaurant, which was later revealed to neighbors at an outreach meeting. Depending on decisions made by SF Planning, the location could be open for burgers and crinkle cut fires by early 2019, just after the fall arrival of Shake Shack locations in Larkspur and Palo Alto.

Real Food Co., the former tenant of the SF space, closed its location there abruptly in 2016. That’s been vacant since, and real estate developer Alec Paddock of CenterCal properties told Eater SF a grocery tenant for the space wasn’t viable, and it was too large for one business, so it was being subdivided.

Google street view

That means the restaurant is headed in to one half of the space, and a boxing gym is headed for the other. It’s the perfect one-two punch, one balancing out the other. But for the chain restaurant business — with more than 160 stores — to move in, it will need the Planning Department to make an exception to local formula retail laws, and it’s first courting neighborhood favor.

At least one former Real Foods shopper said she wasn’t excited about the prospect, complaining at a neighborhood meeting that a service, groceries, was being replaced by “a fast food restaurant that’s known for its long lines.”

That’s one fewer person to wait behind.

• Shuttered Cow Hollow Grocery To Subdivide For ‘Shake Shack,’ ‘Rumble Boxing’ [Hoodline]
• SF residents upset that Shake Shack, gym will replace grocery store [ABC7]
• Shake Shack Is Coming to the Marin Country Mart [ESF]
• Shake Shack Is Coming to SF, Palo Alto, and Marina [ESF]