The Artists Inn at 2231 Pine Street, near Fillmore.
By FRAN MORELAND JOHNS
Even during the
first weeks of the virus lockdown in early April, the Artists Inn at 2231 Pine
Street was at full occupancy, brimming with love and laughter. But it was a
bittersweet time.
Beloved owner Denise Shields had recently returned from her second home in Mexico with an ache that turned out to be pancreatic cancer. The cozy little blue house half a block from Fillmore, behind a white picket fence, quickly filled with her two sons, Will and Jason, daughter-in-law Lily and five granddaughters. Will’s partner Elisabeth was home in San Diego awaiting the birth of grandchild No. 6. “We’re sort of hoping for a boy,” Denise said during a brief break from a family Parcheesi game, “but we’ll be delighted with any healthy baby.”
Two months later,
on June 6, the family welcomed a sixth granddaughter into the world. Three days
after that, Denise died.
Now the Artists Inn, in one of the oldest houses in the neighborhood, is ending an era as a center of warmth and hospitality for guests from around the globe. Following the death of their mother on June 9, Denise’s sons reluctantly decided to permanently close the four-room inn. They will host a garage sale — masked and socially distanced — from August 14 to 16.
Palmer’s and other restaurants, now serving outside, may lead the recovery.
STREET TALK | THOMAS REYNOLDS
Almost a dozen Fillmore businesses have permanently closed, and more are likely to follow.
“It’s a tumultuous time for Fillmore
Street right now,” said Vas Kiniris, executive director of the Fillmore
Merchants Association. “We’re seeing a huge retail fallout.”
Kiniris listed numerous businesses
that are permanently closed: Frye Boots, Samovar Tea, Prana, Illesteva, Lip
Lab, CBD Garin, Aday, Asmbly Hall and Repeat Performance, the S.F. Symphony
resale shop.
“I’ve been on the street for 25 years
and I’ve never seen so many closings,” Kiniris said. “It’s a little bit
alarming.”
A leader and close observer of businesses citywide, Kiniris said he expects the recovery of neighborhood commercial districts to be sparked by restaurants and bars.
“These businesses really pull traffic to the corridors,” he said. “They give rebirth to those corners.” Bars remain closed for now, and indoor restaurant service has been pushed back, but eateries are now allowed to serve outside, in addition to the takeout and delivery service that has kept them alive for the past four months.
“We see this right now with Noosh,” he said. “Noosh opened, then Kiehl’s opened, Glaze is opening, so there’s activity there” at the corner of Fillmore and Pine.
The city’s shared space program, which has let stores and restaurants serve on the sidewalks and in parking spaces, has been helpful, Kiniris said. “It’s another revenue stream for the merchants,” he said. “But it’s also very important to the visual well being and the rebirth of our street. It makes the street visually more enticing, and it makes it more sticky, so people want to linger — and therefore they’ll go to other stores as well.”
At least one new business is
preparing to open. Liberty Cannabis, after two and a half years, finally has
the permits for its new shop in the former Unity Church space at 2222 Bush
Street, near Fillmore, and plans to open in the fall.
Formerly bustling upper Fillmore Street still “is pretty healthy overall,” Kiniris said. But he added: “It’s gonna be a rough ride. We’re all in startup mode now.”
There’s a new takeout window and new offerings at Noosh.
FILLMORE BEAT | CHRIS BARNETT
Fillmore’s restaurants are morphing into sidewalk dining and drinking spots as they find a way forward, with the eateries on one key block — between Pine and California — showing different recipes for creating the al fresco experience.
• At the corner of Pine and Fillmore, NOOSH has reinvented itself and opened a window counter with adjacent menus that spell out its new offerings. Patrons punch in their order on a computer terminal that feeds straight into the kitchen. Noosh will soon unveil a breakfast menu, a bakery with pastries and a deli-charcuterie with cured meats. In September, a small grocery will be added.
Noosh and Bun Mee share a stylish parklet on Fillmore.
• To create a large outdoor cafe, Noosh has teamed up with its neighbors at BUN MEE, the popular Vietnamese restaurant two doors down, and jointly created a large area filled with socially distanced tables along Fillmore and wrapping around to Pine. It extends into the street, taking several parking spaces and guarded by a stylish protective barrier.
Colorful tables now spill out onto the sidewalk at Apizza.
• A few doors up the block, APIZZA has set up sidewalk tables and the straight-from-Paris manager, Pierre Laugha, is pumping out amazing thin-crust 9-inch gluten-free pies made with organic dough and toppings for prices starting at $3.75. (Yes, the original insanely inexpensive $2.75 margherita pizza has gone up a buck.) Apizza now has interesting salads starting at $3.45, up to $7.75 for a large kale Caesar salad.
Tacobar has a takeout window and tables on Fillmore and California.
• At the corner of California and Fillmore, TACOBAR’s personable Guadalajara-born general manager Antonio Solano works the corner like a skilled maitre d’, with outdoor dining on both sidewalks and usually a line at the take-out window. Open daily from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., Tacobar has its signature $4.85 tacos, $11 quesadillas, salads, burritos and sides, plus plenty of salsas. Brightly colored, both the decor and the food are authentically Mexican, with the menu items more gourmet than just to-go. For al fresco diners, service is swift.
Curbside Cafe has added more sidewalk tables, and a parklet is coming.
• Around the corner, CURBSIDE CAFE owners Olivier and Gwyneth Perrier have perhaps the most authentic outdoor bistro setting, now with eight tables dressed in white properly spaced on California Street just east of Mollie Stone’s. Perrier promotes what he calls a “contactless menu” on his website, rather than handing out a paper menu. The tiny restaurant, a neighborhood fixture since 1978, serves a French-American breakfast, lunch and dinner, and soon will be adding a covered parklet that will allow two more tables.
• Elsewhere between California and Pine, HARRY’S BAR is getting an extensive upgrading, from new front awning to an up-to-date kitchen. THE GROVE still hopes to reopen, but has set no date. And the former ELITE CAFE is completely boarded up and quiet as a tomb.
Photographs by Jonathan Pontell
EARLIER: “Fillmore al Fresco” — Sidewalk tables have proliferated since 1993, when they were first blessed by the city.
Photograph of Massimo Lavino at Via Veneto by Daniel Bahmani
STREET TALK | THOMAS REYNOLDS
A great joy of our neighborhood is the number of neighbors you run into walking up and down Fillmore Street.
But not so much these days.
Much of the street is boarded up — an overreaction, many feel, but then come reports of another break-in.
One longs for the slightest bit of community and connectedness during the lockdown. A few still brave a walk on our high street, sometimes to pick up a take-out dinner from a familiar face at a favorite restaurant. Via Veneto owner Massimo Lavino is one of those who is keeping the neighborhood fed — and serving up a side of his boisterous good cheer as people wait for their puttanesca and tricolore salad, carefully standing six feet apart.
As I walked up Fillmore yesterday, Massimo hollered out: “Hey — do you know Betty Brassington’s phone number? I can’t find it.” I stopped to be sure he had the spelling right, but he had no phone book — who does anymore? — and couldn’t find the number online.
He wanted to tell her he had some nice ribeye steaks of the kind she and her husband Mike like.
Well, I told him, I’ll stop by on my way home and let her know. Betty and Mike live only a block from Via Veneto. I knocked on their front door, even though it seemed a little naughty in this time of social distancing. Betty came to the door with a bite of dinner already in her mouth. I told her Massimo had steaks he thought she’d want to know about, then walked two more blocks home.
That was yesterday. Today when I walked up the street in the late afternoon light, Massimo hollered out again. I stopped and walked in. There was Betty, picking up two steak dinners and a bottle of red wine.
The wiring and lettering on the vintage sign were removed on February 28.
THE LAST TRACES of the legendary Elite Cafe — a beacon of hospitality on Fillmore Street for decades — have disappeared. The lettering on the vintage neon sign has now been removed, along with the wooden booths inside.
The Elite’s new name: The Tailor’s Son, in honor of owner Adrianno Paganini ’s father, who was a tailor. The sign is being reworked to announce the new name. During earlier incarnations, the same sign proclaimed the Asia Cafe and the Lincoln Grill.
The new owner plans to restore the original Art Deco facade.
DRAGGED-OUT negotiations between Andy Chun, who held the lease on the now-dark Elite Cafe, and serial restaurateur Adriano Paganini have finally been resolved, and renovation work has begun.
The new owner of the iconic Fillmore building, Rick Howard — who also owns Harry’s Bar across the street — hopes to strip off some of Chun’s black paint and restore the building’s original Art Deco facade. The awning is already gone.
Also going: the blackened wooden booths inside — and probably the name, too, which means a reworking of the vintage neon sign out front.
Look for — but don’t bet on — a January 2020 opening.
It was on top of the world, but then Noosh, at 2001 Fillmore, went dark.
FILLMORE BEAT | CHRIS BARNETT
Noosh, the hot new California-inspired Mediterranean restaurant at Fillmore and Pine, rocketed off the launch pad in February and soared to great heights, only to explode the week before Thanksgiving when the money partner suddenly announced he was firing and suing his two highly lauded chef partners.
CEO John Litz on November 21 locked out the chefs and staff and posted a sign on Noosh’s front door saying the restaurant was “cooking up something new” and would be “closed for a couple of days.” By early December, he was still trying to re-open, now with a new “culinary advisor” — prominent pastry chef Emily Luchetti.
Chefs Sayat and Laura Ozyilmaz, the husband and wife team who have cooked in five of the world’s top 50 restaurants and were christened “rising stars” by the Chronicle in September, declared themselves “devastated to have been separated from their fans, customers and the family they have built with the employee team at Noosh.”
Albert Terry’s son-in-law Ephriam Walters on his final day at the Fillmore market.
PRODUCE FROM Terry Farms, picked just the day before, made its final appearance at the Fillmore Farmers Market on November 2 after owner Albert Terry died earlier in the week.
He was one of the original vendors when the market started in 2003 in the parking lot at Fillmore and Eddy, later to become the site of the Fillmore Heritage Center.
“He was there from the beginning,” said his daughter Lisa Terry-Walters. He had learned about the new market as a board member of the sponsoring Pacific Coast Farmers Market Association.
“After going himself for the first couple of years, he started sending employees,” she said, but they soon wanted to quit. “It wasn’t worth it because they weren’t making enough even to cover the cost of going.”
So Terry started coming to Fillmore again and established an easy rapport with customers and the other farmers.
“He always knew that Fillmore was a special deal, and it became a market that was very personal for him,” his daughter said. “This is the only market he attended regularly himself.”
Terry Farms specialized in peaches — especially white varietals and old-fashioned clings — and pluots. In the fall there were grapes, persimmons and pomegranates.
A decade ago, Terry asked his son-in-law, the tough ex-Marine Ephriam Walters, to come with him to Fillmore. “So I cancelled my fishing trip and came,” Walters said. For the past five years, Walters has been in charge, and has built a strong base of customers who return every week for his fresh fruit and no-nonsense approach.
“When I got out of the Marines, it was hard for me to transition,” Walters said on his final Saturday morning at the Fillmore market, as he bade farewell to his regulars. “This market has helped me. It has changed so much, but a lot of these people I’ve been dealing with for 10 years.”
Walters said the market paid Terry’s medical bills in recent years as he battled heart disease and had to stay close to the ranch he farmed for 51 years in Denair, in Stanislaus County.
Now the family is putting the farm on the market.
“Our family is very hopeful the farm will be purchased by another farmer who will continue to be as passionate about the products the farm produces as my dad was,” said Terry’s daughter, and Ephriam’s wife, Lisa. “With any luck, they will be able to attend the Fillmore market.”
Behind the crowds queueing up outside the hot new restaurant Noosh, on the corner of Fillmore and Pine, is a small brass plaque recalling an earlier incarnation of the space when it was home to the late and much-lamented Pacific Heights Bar & Grill.
The PacBag, as it was known, was a pioneering restaurant that reigned as the neighborhood’s living room for a decade.
“It was the neighborhood Cheers,” the bar on the television show where everybody knows your name, says Marilyn Fisher, a lawyer who lived nearby and was a regular.
“It was like Cheers,” agrees co-owner Susie Bashel. “People came in almost every day.”
Sidewalk seating, like that at Peet’s on Fillmore, is a recent — and growing — trend.
By SUSAN SWARD
Up and down Fillmore, sidewalk spots keep springing up.
Noosh, the new restaurant at Pine and Fillmore, has three four-tops outside with heat lamps at the ready. Blue Bottle Coffee finally has its outside tables back at Fillmore and Jackson. The Snug, at Clay and Fillmore, is considering putting in for a permit. And established sunny sidewalk terraces at Chouquet’s, at Washington, and Harry’s and The Grove, between Pine and California, host a crush of people, often with baby carriages and dogs along for the party.
Slowly, since 1993, when they were first blessed by the city, sidewalk tables and chairs have proliferated. Now there are more than 450 permitted sites citywide — with 19 alone on Fillmore Street. Chestnut Street has 19 as well, Columbus Avenue has 21 and Clement Street has 10. All across the city, people gather outside, chatting, hanging out, drinking and eating. Streets that once felt cold and dead bustle with activity and life, particularly on the days when sunshine blesses San Francisco.
THIS LAVISH oversized limited edition book brings together a collection of favorite photographs and stories from the pages of the New Fillmore. It tells the story of an ever-changing small town in the big city with a rich history and a strong sense of community.
Available exclusively at Browser Books on Fillmore, or order online.
THIS DOCUMENTARY — filmed entirely on Fillmore Street — tells the story of longtime Fillmore resident Kelly Johnson, who used a new California law to end his life on his own terms.
