"This is another sign that San Francisco is on the rise, when you have major institutions and major hotels reopening," Mayor Daniel Lurie said at the Huntington Hotel's ribbon-cutting in March, standing under a neon sign that had been dark for six years. It's a tidy story. One landmark, one mayor, one relit sign as proof the city is coming back.
It's also only half the neighborhood.
Walk two blocks downhill from where Lurie stood on California Street and you land on Polk, where a Mission Street bagel shop moved into a former Peet's, a 2017 diner is suddenly the subject of food blogger obsession, and an Italian restaurant program built around a well-known local chef has been quietly filling tables at the crest of the street. None of that needed a mayor. None of it needed a single company to clear a defaulted mortgage. If you live between California and Polk, you've been watching two different comeback stories run on two different clocks, and most of what's written about this neighborhood treats them as unrelated headlines instead of the same season.
The Anchor Everyone Is Talking About
The Huntington Hotel at 1075 California Street had been closed since 2020, its rooftop sign, a Nob Hill fixture since 1949, dark right along with it for years. When it reopened this spring, the details were specific enough to notice: 143 rooms and suites, a full redesign by Ken Fulk that kept the original brick exterior intact, and the return of The Big Four, the hotel's restaurant, in its 50th anniversary year. General manager Matthew de Quillien told reporters the team tracked down the original 1970s recipe for the restaurant's chicken pot pie and remastered it for the relaunch. The hotel also added something new: Arabella's, a cocktail salon named for Arabella Huntington, built around a vintage French bar cart and decades-old spirits. Upstairs, the Nob Hill Spa reopened across three full levels with a pool, sauna, and treatment rooms.
The neon sign came back on first, in a small early-March ceremony lit by Flynn Properties founder Greg Flynn, designer Ken Fulk, and general manager Matthew de Quillien. The hotel's official reopening followed later that month, with Mayor Lurie on hand for a ribbon-cutting, and the Big Four restaurant opened its doors to the public on March 17, covered by outlets from ABC7 to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Why It Took Six Years and One Foreclosure
Here's the part that explains the timing. The Huntington didn't sit empty because nobody wanted to reopen it. It sat empty because its previous owner, Woodridge Capital, defaulted on a $56.2 million mortgage in 2022. Flynn and hospitality group Highgate bought the property in 2023, and renovation work began in earnest in 2024. In September 2025, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Only after that sequence, financing, ownership change, permitting, restoration, did the sign come back on.
That's a single point of failure and a single point of recovery. One buyer, one renovation budget, one grand reopening. It's the kind of comeback that makes a good ribbon-cutting photo because it's legible: closed, then open, with a mayor in the middle to mark the transition.
Polk Street doesn't work that way.
Down the Hill, Nobody Was Waiting on Financing
While the Huntington's renovation crews were still finishing the top floor this spring, Polk Street was filling in through a half dozen smaller, unconnected decisions.
Bageletto, the Mission bagel shop that built a production kitchen on 14th Street, announced plans in April to open at 2193 Polk, the former Peet's Coffee location between Broadway and Vallejo, with a late-spring debut. Unlike the Mission original, the Polk Street shop runs as a full sit-down cafe rather than a grab-and-go counter, with bagels trucked over from the 14th Street kitchen in small batches, twice a day or more if the counter runs low. One of the owners told the San Francisco Standard the goal was simple freshness: guests are eating bagels within one to four hours of coming out of the oven. The Polk menu leans into Italian sandwich staples too, a muffuletta, roast beef, a prosciutto cotto breakfast sandwich, with meats cured in-house. The team has said they aren't looking to expand further after this location, which makes Polk Street the second and possibly final stop for a shop that started across town in the Mission District.
A few blocks up, The New Spot on Polk, a family-owned diner at 2401 Polk that's been serving the neighborhood since May 2017, is having a moment nobody planned. Food blogs and local coverage this year have pointed to the same things regulars already knew: the corned beef hash, the crispy house potatoes, a staff that's been slinging plates on Polk long enough to remember your order.
And at the crest of Polk, Sorella has been running a full Italian dinner and cocktail program with chef Fernanda Baggio in the kitchen and Suzette Gresham overseeing, a pairing that's kept the restaurant's tables full without a single press conference. It sits alongside two neighborhood mainstays that never needed a relaunch: Amarena, which has served classic Italian dishes on Polk for more than two decades, and Frascati, the tri-level bistro whose dining room looks out on the cable cars running up and down Hyde Street.
None of these businesses coordinated with each other. None of them needed a foreclosure to resolve or a historic registry designation to clear. A bagel shop tested a second location. A diner got rediscovered. A chef built a following one dinner service at a time. That's a different kind of recovery, slower to notice because it doesn't come with a ribbon.
What This Actually Changes About a Walk From California to Polk
If your usual routine has been staying up top for a quiet dinner or heading straight down to Polk for the noise, this spring gave you a reason to link the two. Reservations at The Big Four now put you a short walk from a completely different scene: a bagel counter serving all-day breakfast, an Italian bar program a few blocks over, and a diner where "resurgence" mostly means longer waits on Saturday morning.
A few ways that's showing up on the ground:
- Evening foot traffic on California Street has picked up around the hotel's relit sign, according to reporting from Hoodline, with nearby merchants telling the outlet they're hoping the Big Four and the spa pull more regular weekend visitors, not just hotel guests.
- Polk Street's morning rush now has a second breakfast anchor. Bageletto's twice-daily bagel runs give the corridor an option that was scarce here before this year, when Russian Hill had few dedicated bagel counters to speak of.
- The stretch between Vallejo and California, roughly four short blocks, now covers an entire evening: cocktails at Arabella's, dinner at Sorella or Frascati, dessert if you're still capable of it.
None of that required a hotel and a bagel shop to plan around each other. It just means a resident's evening circuit got wider without getting more complicated.
The Two Speeds of a Comeback
The mayor's version of this story is true as far as it goes. A landmark hotel closing for six years and reopening with its original chicken pot pie recipe is a real milestone, and it's fair to read a relit sign as a sign of something bigger. But if you live here, you already know the neighborhood didn't only recover because one investment group cleared a defaulted mortgage. It recovered because a dozen smaller bets landed around the same season, a bagel shop's second location, a diner's rediscovery, a chef's following building one table at a time.
That's worth knowing if you're the one deciding where to eat on a Tuesday, and it's worth knowing if you're just trying to understand why this particular stretch of the city feels different than it did two years ago. One story runs on a single financing timeline. The other runs on however many independent operators decide the block is worth betting on. This year, both clocks happened to strike around the same time. That's not something you can plan for. It's just what it looks like when a neighborhood comes back from more than one direction at once.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home on Russian Hill or Nob Hill, from a Polk Street condo within walking distance of both scenes to a place higher up the hill near Huntington Park, the Denis Lancerin Group has spent years reading exactly this kind of neighborhood detail. Reach out when you're ready to talk about what it means for you.
