The commercial real estate agent handling 1 West Portal Avenue had a strange instruction from the landlord: don't rent it to just anyone. Hold it, and see if the couple who runs Khao Tiew around the corner wants it. They did. On May 13, Arkaranit Dusitnitsakul and chef Wipada Rattanapun opened Tur, a Thai breakfast and lunch spot, inside the two-story space that had been Squat & Gobble for 32 years.
That's not how commercial leasing usually works on a hot strip. Landlords take the best offer. But West Portal Avenue has spent the past two years proving it doesn't run on the usual math, and once you see the pattern, the whole corridor reads differently.
The Regulars Are the Ones Building the Restaurants
Walk the six or seven blocks of West Portal Avenue between the Muni station and Ulloa Street and you'll notice something the "hot new food destination" stories tend to skip: almost none of the people opening these places are outsiders chasing a trend. They're neighbors who already had a stake in the block.
John and Elena Duggan opened Elena's, the Mexican restaurant that drew waits as long as four hours in its early weeks. John also co-owns Original Joe's, the North Beach institution his family has run for decades, and he already had a foothold on this street with Little Original Joe's down the block. Sam Pederson, who opened Hardware Coffee Co. at 32 West Portal Avenue this spring, isn't a restaurant industry import either. He came out of tech, has two kids enrolled at nearby St. Cecilia School, and named the shop as a direct homage to Papenhausen Hardware, the 88-year-old store that occupied the space until it closed in 2024. Lorella Degan and Massimiliano Conti, who run the wine bar Binu Bonu, brought their reputation over from La Ciccia in Noe Valley, but they live in the neighborhood now.
The sushi chef Tamir Erdenebat has maybe the best version of this story. In the early 2000s he worked the counter at Fuji Japanese Restaurant on West Portal Avenue, dreaming about a place of his own. Two decades later he spotted a "for lease" sign in the window of that same address, 301 West Portal Avenue, and opened Lion West Portal there. Customers still call him "chef Tom."
Even the corridor's oldest surviving business fits the pattern by way of a rescue rather than a founding. Shaws, the candy and ice cream shop that opened in 1931, closed in 2020 and came back because Diana Zogaric, a video producer who moved to the neighborhood in 2016, brought it back to life. Last year, after overhearing diners at Elena's wishing there were somewhere nearby to get ice cream after dinner, she extended Shaws' evening hours the very next day. Sales went up 10 to 15 percent.
The contrast shows up clearly when you look just up the hill. One local business owner, describing ritzy Forest Hill next door, put it this way: "It was like a sleeping giant surrounded by $5 million homes but stuck in 1985." Forest Hill has the same money and the same proximity to downtown. What it hasn't had is a run of owners with a personal stake in the block choosing to open there. West Portal wasn't discovered by capital from outside. It was rebuilt by people who already lived close enough to see the opportunity before anyone else did.
A Third Original Joe's, Building Slowly
The newest proof of that pattern is the one still eighteen months from opening. In mid-August, the Duggan family confirmed plans for Original Joe's Cable Car, a burger and chicken tenders spot going into 385 West Portal Avenue, the former Clay Oven space next door to the original Little Original Joe's. It's a small build: about 2,000 square feet with indoor seating for only 20 to 25 people, the rest outdoors. The timeline is long on purpose. The Duggans are aiming for late 2027, which will make it the seventh restaurant in a family portfolio that now also includes a newer Original Joe's location in Walnut Creek.
That patience is itself a signal. A family that already has two restaurants generating real neighborhood loyalty on this street isn't rushing a third one to catch a wave. They're building around the same audience of families and regulars that made the first two work, on the same block, at a pace that assumes the neighborhood will still want it in 2027.
The One Address Where the Pattern Breaks
There's exactly one project on West Portal Avenue right now that doesn't fit the neighbor-builds-it-for-neighbors story, and it's worth naming because the contrast is instructive. At 85 West Portal Avenue, the site of the long-shuttered Empire Theater, a developer is planning a nine-story housing project. It's one of the only vacant buildings left on the corridor, and it has drawn opposition from local merchants concerned about the building's height and the disruption a multi-year construction timeline would bring to a strip that runs on foot traffic and street parking.
Whatever the outcome, the friction around that single address makes the rest of the pattern easier to see. Every other addition to the street in the past two years, from Tur to Hardware Coffee to the coming Original Joe's Cable Car, came from someone with an existing tie to West Portal. The one project that came from outside is the one generating pushback. That's not a coincidence worth ignoring if you're trying to understand what makes this particular commercial strip function differently from ones a few neighborhoods over.
What's on the Calendar Before the Leaves Change
None of this is theoretical for the next few weeks. The Greater West Portal Neighborhood Association has two events on the books before October:
- West Portal Wine Walk — Thursday, September 17, 2026
- SF Good Neighbor Week — Saturday, September 26 through Sunday, October 4, 2026
The Wine Walk is the kind of evening that only makes sense on a street where the new places and the old ones are genuinely neighbors rather than competitors carving up the same customers. Binu Bonu will likely be pouring alongside newer additions, while Shaws stays open late down the block the way it has since Zogaric extended its hours, and the Philosopher's Club on Ulloa Street keeps doing what it's done for decades, pouring drinks in a room that hasn't needed to reinvent itself to stay full.
That coexistence is the part easy to miss if you only read the "restaurant boom" headlines. West Portal didn't trade its old character for a new one. The comic book shop, the travel agency that's been open since 1947, the psychic parlor, these fixtures are still there, doing business a few doors down from a Thai brunch spot with a canoe hanging over the register. The new owners aren't from somewhere else trying to erase what came before. Several of them grew up walking past these same storefronts.
If you've lived here a while, you've probably already noticed the shift without naming it: more reservations needed on a Friday, more familiar faces behind new counters, a slightly longer wait at Shaws because someone finally realized the neighborhood wanted ice cream after 8 p.m. The mechanism behind it isn't mysterious once you look at who's actually signing these leases. It's largely the same people who were already eating dinner on this street, just with their names now on the door.
If you're weighing what a corridor like this means for the value of a home nearby, or you're simply curious how a neighborhood's character holds up under this kind of change, Meagan Levitan has spent nearly two decades watching how San Francisco's residential blocks respond to exactly this kind of local investment. Reach out for a conversation grounded in what's actually happening on the ground, not the version of the story everyone else is repeating.
