For nearly twenty years, the little castle clinging to the side of Telegraph Hill has been one of San Francisco's most beautiful empty buildings. This September, Julius' Castle is coming back.
The landmark restaurant at 1541 Montgomery Street, tucked below Coit Tower with the Bay Bridge laid out beneath it, is set to reopen after a restoration that dragged on for more than a decade and seemed to collect every obstacle a building project can. Owner Paul Scott, who bought the place in 2012, plans to open first to the neighbors and the workers who rebuilt it, then to the rest of us.
If you have lived here a while, you know the silhouette even if you never scored a table. Built in 1922, or 1923, depending on which paperwork you trust, the castle was the fever dream of Julius Roz, an Italian American restaurateur who lived on the top floor and ran an upscale dining room on the middle one. For decades it was the city's date-night fantasy and a magnet for the famous: Cary Grant, Marlon Brando, Ginger Rogers, Sir Edmund Hillary, and, at one point, the entire cast of The Empire Strikes Back. It turns up in Dashiell Hammett's fiction and starred in the 1951 noir The House on Telegraph Hill. It has been a city landmark since 1980.
Then the building got old, the food got tired, and in the late 2000s the lights went out.
Scott, a Telegraph Hill neighbor with some construction experience behind him, told ABC7 the whole thing started on a drive past the shuttered property with his son. "My son looked over and said that'd be cool," he recalled. "Before I knew it, I had a huge project on my hands."
Huge is one word for it. Scott discovered the original structure had been built across the property line, which stalled permitting for years. Previous owners had done work without permits that all had to be undone. There were lawsuits. The hillside beside the building was sliding. During renovation, a fire took out one of the turrets, which had to be rebuilt from scratch. "We had lawsuits, fires, landslides, and a tremendous amount of deferred maintenance," Scott told ABC7. "It was in very rough shape."
Then there were the neighbors, because this is Telegraph Hill. Residents fought the reopening over the usual grievances of noise, traffic, and the neighborhood's punishing parking. The San Francisco Planning Commission sided with Scott in 2017, and a lawsuit from a group of opposed neighbors was thrown out by a judge in early 2019, with the court finding no real environmental impact. Not everyone stayed mad. "I'm so glad he had the perseverance," Telegraph Hill resident Bill Reilly told ABC7. "I just want it to be a pleasant destination for tourists and locals."
Inside, the castle has been reimagined by designer Jon de la Cruz, whose résumé includes Wayfare Tavern and Che Fico. The new look reportedly takes its cues from the Nightingale House, the moody Victorian mansion in the Lower Haight, and the exterior has traded its old pale yellow for something darker in greens and golds. The restoration brought back the bar, the fireplace, and the wood paneling Roz is said to have salvaged from the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Even the landslide turned into a feature; while shoring up the hillside, crews added a terraced edible garden along the public stairway next door.
As for what you will actually eat, Scott is keeping quiet. He has hired a chef and says the restaurant will serve dinner only to start. The menu in the building's later years leaned continental, the house style of every great view restaurant that ever coasted a little on the view. Whether the new kitchen has bigger ambitions is the question worth asking.
For now, the promise is enough. Julius' Castle joins a short list of dormant San Francisco institutions, the Cliff House among them, that this city has simply refused to let go of. This fall, one of them finally answers.
Julius' Castle, 1541 Montgomery Street. Reopening in September.
Photos of Julius' Castle by Patrick B. and Rachid H. via Flickr.
The Bold Italic is a not-for-profit media organization, and we publish first-person perspectives about San Francisco and the Bay Area. We also cover local arts, nightlife, and tourism in the area. We operate under a fiscal sponsorship of a 501(c)(3).
You can become a paid subscriber. Or donate. Or learn more about us.
