Lungomare Calls It Quits After Seven Years on the Oakland Waterfront

Changes are afoot for one of Jack London Square’s most prominent restaurants

Seven years ago, Oakland was still fairly early on in its rise to becoming one of the buzziest food destinations in the entire country, and the Jack London Square neighborhood was largely seen as a culinary non-entity. When restaurateur Chris Pastena’s seafood-oriented Italian spot on the Jack London waterfront, Lungomare, opened in 2013, it helped pave the way for a new wave of better, more ambitious restaurants in the area. But last week, Berkeleyside Nosh reports, the restaurant closed its doors for good.

Of course a lot has changed since Lungomare’s heyday — most notably, Pastena (who also owns Chop Bar, Calavera, and Tribune Tavern in Oakland) sold the restaurant last year to a SoCal based restaurant group, as Berkeleyside reported at the time. It appears that the adjacent Waterfront Hotel is taking over the restaurant and plans to reopen it this summer in some other form.

And in other news...

• It’s probably too early to try to quantify the financial impact that the coronavirus (and fear-mongering associated with the coronavirus) — all those canceled reservations — has had on the local restaurant industry, but the director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association hazards a guess: “easily over $1 million” in just one week. [SFBT]
• In other coronavirus news, as a preventative measure, Starbucks is suspending use of personal cups and tumblers at all of its North American coffee shops. [CNN]
• San Jose’s Westfield Valley Fair mall opened its glitzy $1.1 billion expansion today, but many of the splashiest new food outlets — including Shake Shake, Salt and Straw, and the Bay Area’s first Eataly — will roll out more gradually over the course of the next year or so. [Merc]
• Now that DoorDash has decided to go public, the SF-based food delivery company still has to convince Wall Street investors that it’s worth its $12.7 billion evaluation. [NYT]
• Solano Avenue in Albany is getting a new taqueria called 5 Tacos & Beers. Breakfast tacos appear to be part of the plan. [Berkeleyside]
• Food explorers, take note: The Six Fifty put together a nice roundup of pop-ups on the Peninsula. [The Six Fifty]