Favorite Mission District Dive and Legacy Business the Uptown Is Closing

The Uptown, a nearly 40-year-old dive bar on the corner of 17th and Capp streets, will close after the business’s lease runs out in early January 2024, Mission Local reports. The bar has been in operation since Christmas Day 1984, the outlet reports. It was purchased by a group of former employees following the sudden death of the original owner Scott Ellsworth in 2014.

Shae Green, one of the bar’s seven worker-owners, tells Mission Local the impacts of the pandemic have resulted in the decision to shut down. Though the Uptown benefitted from a number of federal and city-level pandemic-era assistance programs, sales haven’t rebounded to pre-pandemic levels — even as rent remains high and other business costs have gone up. “There’s no more miracle money left,” Green tells the outlet.

The bar is designated as a Legacy Business through a city program intended to “maintain San Francisco’s cultural identity and to foster civic engagement and pride by assisting long-operating businesses to remain in the city.” However, recent reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle finds all of the program’s funds released between the summers of 2022 and 2023 — a total of $751,491 — has gone to landlords rather than small business owners.

This landmark restaurant is being evicted

Park Tavern, the landmark North Beach restaurant perched just off Washington Square Park, may be evicted by its landlord, per reporting from the Chronicle. Though the restaurant only reopened in May, an eviction notice posted on the restaurant’s door indicates “the property was ‘restored to the landlord’” as of November 1. Owner Anna Weinberg, who’s also behind restaurants including Leo’s Oyster Bar and Tosca Cafe, tells the paper she’s working with the landlord to negotiate a new lease.

Prolific restauranteurs expand to Burlingame

Bacchus Management Group, the team behind Michelin Guide-listed restaurants Spruce and Selby’s in Atherton, will open a massive new restaurant in Burlingame, per the San Francisco Business Times. They’ll take over a former 1940s-era post office and flip it into an “8,000-square-foot restaurant that will anchor a new six-story office project,” the outlet reports. The group also opened three new restaurants in San Francisco earlier this fall.

Save the date for this pop-up event

Holder’s House, the pop-up Oakland chef Sarah Kirnon launched after closing her beloved Afro-Caribbean restaurant Miss Ollie’s last year, heads to San Francisco’s Buddy the bar on October 8. Details are scarce but an Instagram post encourages fans to save the date: