Broad Street Oyster Co. burst out of the Los Angeles food scene and touched down in San Francisco in March 2024, armed with its Insta-famous, caviar-topped lobster rolls. The popular brand went from seafood pop-up to multiple locations in Southern California, and the expansion to San Francisco felt like hitting a goal on the company’s “imaginary roadmap,” says owner Christopher Tompkins. “When the opportunity was presented to us, we didn’t want to pass it up,” Tompkins says of the move, two years later. “We thought that it would be a great chance for us to get established in San Francisco.”
But things didn’t take off as planned. A stinging review from the Infatuation just two weeks after the opening labeled the restaurant as “perfect for wasting your time & money.” Broad Street’s response to the video was criticized — in a now removed post on Instagram, the restaurant “thanked” the site for its “lovely takedown of our brand new restaurant”, SFGATE reports. Tompkins says that since the review and ensuing response, the San Francisco location hasn’t hit the company’s internal benchmarks. He adds that it’s not something he blames the locals for, but instead, he says the restaurant just wasn’t connecting with the Bay Area diners they wanted to reach.
“I think that review in particular really allowed us to self-reflect,” Tompkins says. As of Monday, March 23, the restaurant has revamped the menu, dialing in dishes and adding new options that the team feels will help them reintroduce Broad Street to the neighborhood.
After the early negative reviews, Tompkins wanted to rework the menu, but life got in the way. Around the time of the opening in March 2024, Tompkins and his wife had a baby. Fast-forward to January 2025, and Los Angeles was working through the Eaton and Palisades fires, the latter of which threatened the Malibu location of the business. “I’ve thought a lot about [the Infatuation review] over the last two years, and volume hides a lot of faults — it’s hard to really think about what is going wrong when it feels like everything’s going so right,” Tompkins says. “I think that it took Malibu essentially being shut down, and it took me nearly losing [the business] physically with the fires, to really think about what we wanted to be, specifically in San Francisco and as a brand as a whole.”
Tompkins’ self-reflection has led to an updated menu that the team has built from the ground up, rather than “transplanting what we thought could work,” he admits. Broad Street brought on chef Thomas Edgington — who grew up and worked in the Bay Area, at places like Lazy Bear, Atelier Crenn, and Liholiho Yacht Club — to work in tandem with culinary director Luca Quinn. Together, they reworked the restaurant’s menu and ethos, spending seven months developing new dishes.
Liam Brown
Liam Brown
Liam Brown
Liam Brown
The first among the changes: sourcing locally. Rather than shucking oysters from Massachusetts and Maine, Broad Street will now turn to Tamales Bay and the Pacific Northwest, for instance. Bread for the lobster rolls will come from a local bakery instead of being transported from Southern California, while the fish and chips will feature local cod. The restaurant tapped local company Cream Co. Meats for beef, seeking to improve its cheeseburger. Dungeness crab and halibut will come from Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. The shift in sourcing arrives alongside some all-new dishes specific to the San Francisco location, such as a seasonal Sicilian crudo, a loaded halibut chowder, a breaded halibut Milanese with a sauce gribiche, and even branzino.
Tompkins has flown up to San Francisco just about every 10 days for the last few months to monitor the changes, and now he’s excited to bring a new and improved Broad Street to Ghirardelli Square. “That’s what brings me joy now,” Tompkins says. “This is a reinvigorating experiment, in a way, where it’s like, ‘Let’s just really try and have fun with it, and try and allow that fun to be passed on to as many people as we can, that are willing to try it.’”
Broad Street Oyster Co. (900 North Point Street, Suite K201, San Francisco) debuts its new menu on Monday, March 23.
Liam Brown