Chef Bradley Kilgore, seen at Transamerica Redwood Park in San Francisco in 2024, said his restaurants in the Transamerica Pyramid are closed.
Benjamin Fanjoy/Special to the Chronicle
A quiet but telling shift has taken place at San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid: Roughly a month after its sale, Michael Shvo’s name is no longer on the facade of the landmark 48-story tower, once a conspicuous marker of the New York developer’s ambitious repositioning of the iconic property, which spans an entire block between Montgomery, Sansome, Washington and Clay streets in the Financial District.
And on Tuesday morning, at the back exit of a small building in the shadow of the Pyramid along Washington Street, another somber transition could be observed from the sidewalk: Workers wheeled out culinary equipment under the watch of a security guard, hastily emptying two restaurant spaces that had only opened within the last two years.
The doors to Cafe Sebastian, located in a separate building on the same property, at 545 Sansome St., were locked, a “closed” sign hanging in the window as employees huddled inside of the design-forward café from Miami chef Brad Kilgore.
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An employee confirmed that both Cafe Sebastian and Ama — the cafe’s upscale, dinner-focused counterpart in the same building — had shuttered permanently.
The tortellini en brodo prepared by chef Bradley Kilgore at Café Sebastian is shown in 2024. Café Sebastian has closed its location in the Transamerica Pyramid.
Benjamin Fanjoy/Special to the Chronicle
Kilgore, whose team had been brought in by Shvo when he was the Pyramid’s operator, said that when “ownership changed, the required rent to continue operating became unaffordable,” referring to the property’s March sale to new owners, Cyprus-based investment firm Yoda Plc.
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“I’m incredibly grateful to the San Francisco community that has supported us since the very beginning of this project, and with these openings. It has always been a dream to be a Chef in this city,” Kilgore said. “This, combined with the fact that they plan to demolish the building where the restaurants are, made it impossible to continue.”
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Yoda Plc did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on the restaurant closures.
Together, these developments point to the end of Shvo’s real estate excursion in downtown San Francisco, where he sought to recast one of the city’s most recognizable skyscrapers into a mixed-use destination defined as much by hospitality and street-level activation as by its office tenants. Shvo, the face of a well-heeled partnership that purchased the 54-year-old Pyramid for $650 million in the thick of the pandemic in 2020 and spent another $200 million renovating it, had cast the project as the sweeping reinvention of a Financial District showpiece, at a time when the city’s office market was grappling with deep uncertainty, elevated vacancies and a broader sense that downtown’s post-pandemic recovery was not assured.
Undeterred and bullish on the city’s comeback, Shvo became something like the city’s unlikely cheerleader, reopening the long shuttered Redwood Park and turning the Pyramid’s lobby into a publicly accessible ground floor lounge. The brash developer brought in Kilgore’s hospitality concepts to anchor the property’s ground floor and signal that the Pyramid was no longer just an office building, but a destination. Cafe Sebastian opened its doors in 2024 as a curated extension of the Pyramid’s new identity, with polished interiors, high-end coffee and offerings aimed at downtown office workers and tourists alike. Ama, Kilgore’s swanky, 18-seat Japanese-Italian fusion restaurant featuring a secret lounge, launched the following year, drawing evening crowds.
Ama’s bluefin tuna tartare and carpaccio is shown in 2025, in San Francisco. Ama, an Italian-Japanese restaurant from Miami chef Brad Kilgore, is closing its location at the Transamerica Pyramid.
Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle
Shvo’s control of the Pyramid did not last: In the months following the tower’s reopening after its renovation wrapped up, a dispute between the ownership group — which included German pension fund Bayerische Versorgunksammer and Deutsche Finance America — and a ritzy members-only social club that was slated to occupy the first three floors of the building resulted in a fraud lawsuit. The legal battle exposed deeper cracks within the ownership consortium itself, revealing diverging expectations over leasing strategy, governance and the project’s financial viability — leading to Shvo’s German partners moving to reassert control over the property.
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The unravelling ultimately resulted in the decision to sell the Transamerica Pyramid at 600 Montgomery St. and two adjacent buildings on the same property — 545 Sansome, which rises nine stories, and 505 Sansome streets, a 20-story office building — to Yoda Plc for roughly $692 million (Yoda Plc paid another $34 million to end Shvo’s involvement with the property).
Signage for Ama, an Italian-Japanese restaurant from Miami chef Brad Kilgore, was seen in the Transamerica Pyramid. The restaurant is now closed.
Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle
So far, Yoda Plc has not commented on its exact plans for the properties, which together make up the Transamerica Pyramid Center. Under Shvo’s modernization plans, the 545 Sansome building was entitled for redevelopment into a boutique office building, though work on that component of the larger project never started.
“We believe we have a lot to add to this magnificent asset and make it one of the most desired places in the San Francisco market, especially revitalizing the Transamerica Redwood Park and its existing buildings as well as exploit some 800,000 square feet of development rights in the property,” Yoda Plc said in a statement about the property’s sale in April.
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A spokesperson for Kilgore said that his business, the Kilgore Hospitality Group, is “currently doing everything possible” to support its laid off team members, and is also “exploring next steps” in San Francisco.