Welcome to our new neighbors

YES, THAT’S HER. That’s the actress Julia Roberts you’ve been seeing around the neighborhood, wandering down Fillmore Street with her family, dining at Chouquet’s and Via Veneto, admiring the views in Alta Plaza Park.

Roberts has a long association with San Francisco. Back in the 1990s when she was dating fellow actor Benjamin Bratt, a son of the Mission, she was sometimes seen in that neighborhood. Then in 2020, now married to cinematographer Danny Moder and the mother of three teenage children, she and her family bought a home on Washington Street in Presidio Heights. Real estate reports said they sold that Edwardian manse for a tidy profit in October 2023.

But she and her family have not left the neighborhood. They quietly moved into a more modest Victorian near Alta Plaza Park. Let’s guess they wanted to be closer to the shops and restaurants on Fillmore Street.

UPDATE | Reports Chouquet’s server Mark Fantino: “Julia Roberts and Danny Moder came in for dinner on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday night. They sat down and I handed them menus. As I started pouring water for them I said, “We had this water brought in special for you folks … It came from a well in Hinkley,” her penultimate line from Erin Brockovich (2000). Halfway through reciting the line, I saw her trademark smile — that Kryptonite-smile — appear across her face, and then I pretty much froze and haven’t thawed since. What a delightfully down-to-Earth celebrity she is, so very nice and effortlessly beautiful.”