When did you last leave Russian Hill for something you assumed the neighborhood would never carry on its own? A proper bagel, still warm, meant a trip to the Mission. A serious martini list, the kind poured by someone with Michelin on their resume, meant a trip to SoMa. Grocery shopping that didn't feel like an afterthought at a corner store meant heading downhill to the Mission or over to Divisadero. For years those were just facts of living here.
Polk Street has spent the past two years closing those gaps, but not all at once and not in the order you'd expect. A grocery anchor landed first, in 2024, with a 26-year lease that suggested its owner was betting on the block for decades, not seasons. A bagel shop followed this summer, ending a shortage food writers had started calling the neighborhood's "bagel desert." A cocktail bar with a Michelin-starred pedigree is still to come, targeted for this fall, and it's arriving last for a reason that has nothing to do with scheduling delays. The sequence itself tells you something about how a commercial strip actually rebuilds, and it's more interesting than a simple list of new addresses.
The Anchor Arrives First
Bi-Rite Market opened at 2140 Polk Street in August 2024, taking over a space that had belonged to Real Food Co. since 1976. It's Bi-Rite's third San Francisco location, and the company made it their new headquarters, a detail that matters more than the ribbon-cutting itself. Owner Sam Mogannam took over the original 18th Street market from his father and uncle in 1998 and built it into one of the city's defining food shops. His decision to put both a flagship store and his company's home office on Polk Street was a statement that this stretch was worth a long-term commitment, not a quick storefront lease.
Mogannam framed the move around the block it was joining rather than the market itself. "The local, independent businesses just care more," he said, pointing to the bookstore, coffee shops, and bars already surrounding the new store. Inside, shoppers get 4,000 square feet of produce, meats, and pantry goods, plus a kitchen, sandwich counter, and full fish and meat cases. Before 2024, a proper Bi-Rite run meant the Mission or Divisadero. Now it's a walk down the hill.
The Everyday Gap Closes Next
Bagels came next, and later than you might guess for a neighborhood this size. Bageletto, the bagel shop that built its reputation from a production kitchen on 14th Street in the Mission, signed on for a sit-down cafe at 2193 Polk Street, the address a Peet's Coffee had vacated. Cofounder Kiki Theodorides described the timeline plainly when the deal was announced in April: "Cross our fingers, we should open in the next 60 to 90 days." By this summer, the cafe was slated to be fully running, stocked twice daily with bagels trucked over from the Mission kitchen rather than baked on-site.
The Polk Street location was built as a full cafe from the start, with a dining counter, sandwiches, and house-cured meats, not a satellite grab-and-go window. For a stretch of the city that reporters had genuinely called a bagel desert, that's a meaningful upgrade from a to-go counter. It also means the bagel run and the grocery run now happen within the same two-block walk.
Why the Bar Comes Last
The most anticipated arrival hasn't opened yet, and that timing isn't an accident. Jupiter Room, a martini-focused bar going into the former Lord Stanley space at 2065 Polk Street, comes from chef Peter Hemsley, who earned a Michelin star at his SoMa restaurant Aphotic before closing it in 2024, and mixologist Trevin Hutchins, whom Michelin had already named its 2024 Exceptional Cocktails Award winner. Together they formed a new company, Jackson Square Hospitality, and Jupiter Room is its first project. The bar takes its name from a boast made by the 19th-century bartender Jerry Thomas, who called himself the "Jupiter Olympus of the bar." It's already been named to Imbibe's "Imbibe 75," a global list recognizing people and places shaping drink culture, months before it has served a single cocktail. Pastry chef Deirdre Balao Rieutort-Louis, the San Francisco Chronicle's 2026 Best Pastry Chef, is building the dessert menu around midcentury references, including a reworked pineapple upside-down cake. As of this spring, the target had shifted to a fall opening.
Here's the part worth sitting with. Hemsley closed Aphotic in part because its SoMa block, near the Moscone Center, didn't generate enough daytime foot traffic to support a destination restaurant. A bar like Jupiter Room, built around late-night industry crowds and a considered cocktail program, depends on a corridor that already has people moving through it during the day. That's exactly what a grocery anchor and a daily bagel stop create. The bar isn't opening last because of construction delays. It's opening last because it needed the first two pieces to do their work before a bet like this one made sense.
What Didn't Need to Change
None of this replaced what was already serving the neighborhood well. The New Spot on Polk, a family-owned diner at 2401 Polk Street that's been running since 2017, still opens for breakfast and brunch on its usual weekday and weekend schedule. It's a useful check on the instinct to describe a changing block as if everything in it is new. The businesses that already had loyal regulars are still there, just with more company nearby, and more reasons for people to stop rather than pass through.
The Order Is the Story
Add it up and you get a rebuild that unfolded in a specific sequence rather than a burst. A grocer signed a decades-long lease and moved its headquarters here, first. A bagel shop that had spent years building its Mission following decided the daily commute across town no longer made sense for its customers, second. A Michelin-decorated chef, having learned the hard way that foot traffic isn't optional for a destination concept, picked this street for his next serious bet, last, and only once the first two moves had proven the corridor could support him.
For anyone who already calls Russian Hill home, none of that requires a decision on your part. It just means the daily loop, groceries, a bagel, eventually a good cocktail, is starting to close within a couple of blocks instead of across the city.
If you're curious how a stretch like this tends to show up in interest around the surrounding blocks over time, that kind of pattern reading is exactly what Rossi Real Estate has spent nearly three decades doing across San Francisco's hill neighborhoods. Schedule a private consultation to talk through what you're noticing on your own street.
