Tartine is opening in the Financial District. The bakery has leased the former CVS at 351 California Street at Sansome, a 4,000-square-foot corner space at the base of the J. Harold Dollar Building. Plans call for breakfast, lunch and dinner service, with an opening sometime next year.
It would be Tartine’s fourth location in San Francisco, after the Guerrero Street flagship that opened in 2002, the Manufactory in the Mission and the Inner Sunset cafe that arrived in 2019.
CEO Dar Vasseghi described the move as putting the company “right in the heart of the city’s next chapter,” as the San Francisco Chronicle first reported. Mayor Daniel Lurie, whose office has spent the past year publicizing downtown wins, said the spot on the cable car line was a good fit for residents and visitors.
The address has cycled through a few identities. The building went up in 1920, carried the J. Harold Dollar name for the shipping family, and later did a long stretch as the Pacific Bank Building before the drugstore era.
Elsewhere in the Tartine footprint, the Strawberry Village location in Mill Valley, announced in 2025 as the company’s first North Bay outpost, has slid past multiple target dates and still has not opened. The company runs seven locations in Los Angeles and six in Seoul.
Separately, co-founder Chad Robertson has relocated to New York, where he is finishing a 7,500-square-foot bakery called Altbau on North 8th Street in Williamsburg, per Grub Street. The Brooklyn operation, which will include an upstairs milling room and teaching space, is his own project rather than a Tartine one.
For more than a decade, people lined up around a Mission block to buy a loaf of bread from Tartine and considered it a bargain. The bakery opened in 2002 at 600 Guerrero Street, the work of Elisabeth Prueitt and Robertson. She ran the pastries, he ran the bread. The two had met at culinary school and baked together in Point Reyes before landing in the Mission, taking over a corner that had been a neighborhood bakery twice before. They named it after the French word for an open-faced sandwich.
I posted the above photo on Facebook today and received some Tartine love. Kathleen Delgado called it one of the best croissants outside of Paris. Frida Sierra said the loaves are the best she has had in this country. But then of course some expected hate.
"I never paid $15 for baked flour and water," Beth Patty wrote. Someone else said only in America "can you take simple, common food and put it beyond the reach of simple, common people."
Carbs are the enemy of many a gay man. I remember the 2010s when I had a metabolism and enjoyed a panini at Tartine's Mission location; a sandwich so big it had to be cut into three sections, and they drenched it in butter. Later, when they opened an Inner Sunset location, I'd go after the gym for a croissant and coffee.
Saul Sugarman
I can't speak ill of their offerings, and you do get the quality you pay for. But for the price I feel like someone on staff should have been around to bus the tables.
Saul Sugarman is editor-in-chief and owner of The Bold Italic.
The Bold Italic is a not-for-profit media organization, and we publish first-person perspectives about San Francisco and the Bay Area. We operate under a fiscal sponsorship of a 501(c)(3).
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The San Francisco Trolley Problem
I may not have mentioned I've been making little games to keep viewers on The Bold Italic website. The San Francisco Trolley Problem asks readers to send a trolley rampaging over a beloved SF institution. Tartine and Boudin were actually paired in the game's original launch about two weeks ago. There have since been nearly 10,000 votes.
Tartine is currently winning that by a small margin. A croissant, if you will; 53 percent of the vote favors Tartine.
More in bougie pastry and coffee
ICYMI, I weighed in on that expensive-ass croissant at Arsicault. (Pretty worth it if you're OK with standing in line at 8 AM.)
Saul Sugarman
There's also that new cafe Jandii in the avenues. I'm still on the fence about it, but I think as a 20-year-old college student I'd probably love it, so long as there was a seat and I had $20 to burn that day.
Saul Sugarman
I'm also writing about
Clint Reilly, a political consultant and newspaper owner, died at age 79 recently.
Saul Sugarman
Far be it for anyone to believe me, but I do my best to not be a sour grapes person, and to keep grudges in check. I still mostly know Reilly as the person who bought SF Media Co., shuttered SF Weekly, and fired a great majority of the staff and freelancers at the time. I was a columnist then, as was Broke-Ass Stuart.
Reilly owned Nob Hill Gazette and regularly appeared at philanthropic events I also attend. We never met, but it feels like his enduring legacy will be an appeal to San Francisco's wealth class. So you can read my take, which is mostly lukewarm and fine, but for a different bias, I found Tim Redmond's at 48Hills pretty interesting. The NYTimes put out a pretty standard obit; although like me, they noted Reilly was "known for feuding".
And in news no one asked about
In "passive" ad income, we're now making more on Meta than the website. If those receipts were the only dollars we were receiving–not counting grants, paid subscribers, donations, and direct sponsorships–it would be enough to pay me more than minimum wage for about two hours a day. Which is a far cry from the zero dollars The Bold Italic was bringing in at the beginning of 2026. So thank you for sticking around and supporting. And if you're still on Facebook, follow that evolution there. It's mostly tourism posts that are getting a surprising amount of traction.
Oh, and:
If you've been following the SF Sunshine Ordinance Task Force drama, I've since been in touch with a supervisor and with the current and former SOTF members. Suffice to say I think our feelings on the situation were as equally on point as they were also tinfoil hat conspiracy. I'm really not passionately political by nature, but it there are major divisive team sports at play between the progressives and moderates in San Francisco. And while there may not be a concerted effort by the Supes to remake the SOTF, I would still characterize it as at least a quiet one to do that.
Saul Sugarman
As it happens, it's an unpaid volunteer position that also granted me dental benefits from the city. And by taking those benefits, I became ineligible to receive grants from the SF Arts Commission.
Self-employment on many days feels like unemployment. To make all of this work more solvent, I really may forego returning to SOTF in order to clear the path for The Bold Italic to have a relationship with the city and its granting bodies. I haven't decided. But if you're a journalist or "member of electronic media" who wants to participate in local government, I would love to talk to you about joining the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force.
