In a city with an ever-growing reputation for its wealth of restaurants and bars, why are they so often closed?
Co-owner of Marcella’s Lasagneria Terry Ferrari remembers one customer saying he was “glad” he had a concussion. “What?” she asked him, shocked. She says he replied, “It means I’m home today and can come for lunch.” That’s because Marcella’s is open between 11:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, making it difficult for many to get there when the doors are open.
That lasagna stan might have been concussed, but his logic was far from fuzzy. I truly agree with him. I have also spent work-from-home mornings counting down the clock until I can head over to Marcella’s and lock eyes with Bolognese sauce one more time. We all know that five hours a day, weekdays only, is hardly enough time for us to get our ’sagna on. The policy wouldn’t pass visitation rights in a family court.
So is the way many San Francisco businesses operate. Ice cream shops close at 6:00 p.m. (Mr. and Mrs. Miscellaneous) or do not open until 6:00 p.m. on weekdays (Garden Creamery); coffee shops (Luv A Java) and pizzerias (Cheese Board) are closed on Sundays; and smoothie shops close at 6:00 p.m. (Bebebar). Bars are required to close by 2:00 a.m., and a motion to change this rule in the Bay Area was recently vetoed by Governor Brown. And restaurants in many neighborhoods cater to the lunch crowd. This is a pattern we know all too well in this city. As one Redditor noted on a thread about this topic, “We like to think we are this world-class metropolitan city, but the truth is we are a sleepy seaside town. Tokyo, Seoul, Mumbai, NYC, Shanghai and London we are not.”
We love you, San Francisco, but your businesses need to stay open longer. In SF some places, like Bob’s Donuts, open 24 hours every single day of the week, get it. Or at the very least, can we keep stores open until people get out of work (6:30 p.m. if they’re in the tech sector, 9:00 p.m. if they’re anywhere else)? And can we all agree that we like to eat out on Sundays, a day when our corporate overlords are certainly not plying us with free lunch and coffee? Now that San Francisco is the tech capital of the world and draws talent from around the globe, putting it on the map alongside NYC, Chicago and Los Angeles, it’s time for its service-sector businesses to catch up and take themselves seriously as well.
Some businesses really take their short hours seriously. Legendary vinyl shop Jack’s Record Cellar in the Lower Haight is open just five hours a week (on Saturday from 2:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.). It wasn’t always this way. An old advertisement for the shop shows that it used to be open daily from 4:00 to 9:00 p.m. and even longer on weekends. But now, when you call on a Monday, you go straight to a voicemail that lists out (in a chilled-out, slow-as-molasses voice) the outdoor activities happening in the Bay Area that weekend and indicates whether or not the shop will indeed be open that Saturday. It’s charming, but not exactly convenient.
We like to think we are this world-class metropolitan city, but the truth is we are a sleepy seaside town. Tokyo, Seoul, Mumbai, NYC, Shanghai and London we are not.
Businesses have their justifications for their hours. Workers rights, for one, especially in a place like SF, where some businesses are cooperatives. Cathy Goldsmith, representative at Cheese Board, says that the business’s hours have grown over time organically. Their reason for taking Sunday off (even though I accidentally went across the bay to find out they were closed, because what restaurant is closed on a Sunday?) is to give workers “a day of rest.” She continues, “Maybe some other businesses have a hierarchy, or upper management might want to squeeze more out of the workers. But we don’t really do that.”
At Marcella’s the reasons are mixed and often economically driven, weighing the need for more staff and the return on investment in a neighborhood that’s historically been quiet at night, with little foot traffic. They once tried keeping the restaurant open until 6:00 p.m., but “the dollar value between 3:30 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. doesn’t warrant turning the lights on,” Ferrari said.
Imagine if New York City, the city that never sleeps with a drug store on every corner open all the time, found out about our hours. Just take Milk Bar, the dessert shop du jour of Manhattan. It can wave its 10:00 a.m.–1:00 a.m. hours in San Francisco’s face. Of course, San Francisco might be sleeping at the time and not even notice the shade.
Running a business in San Francisco is hard. There are unique problems found not found elsewhere, primarily astronomical rent prices and a small workforce to draw on. Being surrounded on three sides by water means there aren’t a lot of close suburbs where employees can commute in from. What makes running an establishment difficult, is also what makes it so desirable.
Whether it’s those unique challenges, the lack of foot traffic or simply a more Californian laid back attitude, if San Francisco wants to compete with the greatest cities on earth, it may need to figure out how to keep the lights on a little longer.
Hey! The Bold Italic recently launched a podcast, This Is Your Life in Silicon Valley. Check out the full season or listen to the episode below featuring Jessica Alter, founder of Tech for Campaigns. More coming soon, so stay tuned!
