Reports of the demise of the Phoenix Hotel, the iconic rock-and-roll motor lodge in the Tenderloin, have been greatly exaggerated. Despite announcing its imminent closure at the end of 2025, and throwing a blowout farewell New Year’s party, the hotel appears to have risen from the ashes just like its mythical namesake.
In fact, it didn’t even have to burn first — the Phoenix never closed at all. News broke last summer that the hotel’s lease was ending at the end of the year and, on Dec. 31, Chambers, the bar within the hotel, lamented its closure on Instagram.
But on Jan. 1, the Phoenix’s Instagram account put out a very different statement: “Rolling into 2026 like we always do. Good music, strong drinks, NO freaking regrets, and the kind of energy you can’t fake.”
Mission Local has learned that Michel Suas, the French baker who purchased the property in 2024 for $9 million, unexpectedly stepped in to continue operating the decades-old hotel in recent weeks, according to the Phoenix’s former managing partner Isabel Manchester. Manchester said the change happened “very quickly” and “came out of nowhere” at the 11th hour.
It appears that Suas, who owns the property, found a new hotel operator: City business filings from earlier this month show that an LLC named “Phoenix Hotel TL” took ownership of the address at 601 Eddy St. That LLC is associated with an address for Binoy Patel, a local hotelier and investor who once managed the nearby Civic Center Inn, once notorious for being one of the cheapest — and most chaotic — hotels in the Tenderloin.
Manchester declined to offer details about why the team that created the Phoenix decades ago is leaving, or why it never closed, but suggested that lease negotiations between the team and Suas did not pan out.
The Phoenix Hotel at 601 Eddy St. Photo by Eleni Balakrishnan.
Suas, a James Beard award winner, owns popular bakeries b. Patisserie, Thorough Bread & Pastry, and founded the San Francisco Baking Institute. He purchased the hotel through his baking institute in August 2024.
Reached by phone, Suas said he was busy in a meeting, and was subsequently unreachable.
Patel also did not respond to Mission Local’s requests for comment. He did, however, reply to a heartfelt sequence of limericks posted to LinkedIn this month by Phoenix hotel founder Chip Conley. Patel indicated that he intends to keep the Phoenix open.
The hotel, which opened in 1987, was a destination for the stars, drawing guests like Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Keanu Reeves. It was also a fixture in the Tenderloin’s political life — a place where nonprofits would host galas and politicos would participate in an annual charity dunk in the courtyard pool. Before it was purchased and redesigned as the Phoenix, the Caravan Motor Lodge, built in 1956, operated there.
News of the Phoenix’s closure last year came as a blow. Randy Shaw, the executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic affordable housing nonprofit, blamed the city for its demise: “City-promoted drug tourism has claimed another victim,” he wrote on his website, Beyond Chron.
Whether chaotic street conditions were a factor in the closure is unclear. Many businesses in the neighborhood have struggled to stay afloat since the pandemic, and the Phoenix was one of the primary plaintiffs in a 2024 lawsuit claiming that city officials were using the Tenderloin as a “containment zone” for drug activity that they wanted to keep out of other parts of the city.
By Jan. 30, court filings show that the LLCs associated with the Phoenix and the bar inside, Chambers, had dismissed their claims and withdrawn from the lawsuit, which is still ongoing. That same day, the Phoenix’s Instagram account put out a statement suggesting an uncertain future. “For the time being, our doors are still open and reservations are available to book. What the next chapter looks like is still being worked out, but for now, we’re here.”
Manchester, who has been with the Phoenix since 2011, said that her team’s 40-year lease on the hotel ended on Jan. 31, but that she was “thrilled” that the Phoenix would remain open.
“It’s a complicated story,” Manchester said. “But we are excited to have been part of the amazing legacy that we were a part of for the last 40 years.”
Patel, for his part, seems to want to continue that legacy. “Your heart still beats here … Good things are forthcoming,” Patel wrote in his reply to Conley’s farewell poem on LinkedIn. “The Phoenix is alive and well!! Can’t wait for you to come and see what I will do next. Blessed to have opportunity to continue your legacy. The Phoenix lives…”
But as Conley wrote in his farewell post:
“Now the keys change hands, seasons turn,
But the soul? That’s a harder thing to earn.”