This column is a part of the Off Menu newsletter, our Wednesday dispatch of restaurant news, gossip, tips, and hot takes. To sign up, visit The Standard’s newsletter page.
A few months ago, a snapshot was posted to the SanFrancisco subreddit (opens in new tab). Almost 1,000 people upvoted it, boosting a post that will likely live forever.
The photo showed the mammoth driftwood sculpture that greets patrons at Greens, the seminal vegetarian restaurant on the waterfront in Fort Mason. But a closer look reveals a long, mottled, gray tail draping from one of its hollows — clearly attached to a rat living its best life.
After reporting the sighting to a blasé, seen-it-all server who allegedly responded, “Oh, this has been known to happen,” user @swag69 assured fellow Redditors that the photo would be submitted to “the correct food authorities.”
Trust me. Those food authorities are aware.
Here’s the squeamish truth: Rodents are part of restaurant life. The surprise isn’t that diners occasionally spot one — it’s that sightings don’t happen more often. Rats live in seawalls (which makes Fort Mason prime real estate), under parklets, and in shared garbage corridors. When construction starts, they migrate. When it rains, they seek shelter. Bakeries? Pure heaven. As one operator told me, “We’re a bread-crumb-making machine, and we’re warm — what is more attractive than that?”
What’s more, local rats may be multiplying. A study published last year in Science Advance found that rat populations are increasing in most major cities, with some of the strongest upward trends in Washington, D.C., and, yes, San Francisco. The biggest culprits are growing human populations, urbanization, and a warming climate — and our city has seen average summer temperatures rise by 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970, according to Climate Central (opens in new tab).
Jennifer Callewaert, principal environmental health inspector at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, doesn’t dispute that rodents are inevitable. “They’re part of the ecosystem,” she told me. But that doesn’t mean the city can turn the other cheek. “It’s our responsibility to protect public health and prevent foodborne illness,” she said, “and we have regulatory obligations to post that information.” Inspections, she added, are meant to be “education-forward,” with the goal of helping operators correct problems on the spot. But if there is an imminent health hazard, the department has to act by doing everything from a warning to a closure.
If I had spotted the rat at Greens, I too would have spit out my maitake mushroom Reuben and flagged the manager. But before people go directly to the health department or publicly flame a restaurant on Yelp, Reddit, or TikTok, they should take a beat. Most well-operated restaurants deserve the benefit of the doubt; they’re doing their best to keep the vermin at bay. The rodent war they are waging is almost unwinnable.
Marcus Belardes, a health auditor for Eye Spy (opens in new tab), a local “mystery shopper” consultancy that essentially plays health inspector for the food industry, sees the fight up close. His firm conducts mock inspections to identify violations and help eateries avoid the dreaded red placard — immediate closure until conditions are corrected. (Yellow indicates a conditional pass; green means pass.)
Belardes has reached a kind of zen acceptance of rodents. “San Francisco has generational rats from the Gold Rush — seriously. They’ve been here forever, and they’re not going away.” His rodent tolerance has its limit, of course, and for diners, it’s a good one to borrow. “If a restaurant has had multiple rodent instances and two closures in two years? Well, yeah, I probably don’t want to go back either.”
Still when it comes to rats, it’s one battle after another. “You’ll seal a hole, a rat will make another one,” said Belardes. “To protect your restaurant, you almost have to wrap your whole building in stainless steel.”
A couple of my favorite eating establishments, which shall go unnamed, recently got the red card, meaning they were briefly closed by the Public Health Department. It was “a complete shock and embarrassing,” said one owner. Her place hadn’t been shut down by the city in 31 years, but a first-day-on-the-job inspector found sanitizer missing in the three-compartment sink (a violation), along with mouse droppings.
“We occupy a very old 1902 building. The mice were there before we got there. We pay over $300 a month to pest control, and it doesn’t do anything,” she said. “The only thing between you and a shutdown is a couple of bad employee decisions.”
She also has a gripe about the health department’s inconsistency, something I’ve heard from other operators. “Yes, the things they shut us down for were our fault,” said one. “But I think the process is capricious and not uniformly and consistently applied across the city.”
Last fall, another popular SF restaurateur had one of his locations shut briefly for a similar mouse-dropping infraction. The city posts the results of these inspections (opens in new tab) online, which can create a domino effect. “It gets picked up by the press or social media, and then it becomes a really big deal, even if you’ve done everything to fix the problem,” he said.
Case in point: On the Greens thread, one Redditor clutched their pearls: “I’ve been to outside bars and seen my fair share of street rats on the patios … but this is in the middle of their restaurant?? The audacity.”
In a city built on Gold Rush landfill and tight spaces, maybe the bigger surprise isn’t that the rat showed up. It’s that we treat the sighting like a scandal. So before you tank a restaurant’s reputation with a post that will outlive the rodent itself, ask yourself: Is this true negligence — or just life in San Francisco?