Published Aug. 12, 2026at6:00am<\/p>\n
Off Menu is available exclusively for SF Standard members. Click <\/a>here<\/a> for a limited-time friends-and-fam offer starting at $1 for the first month (and the cost of a couple Arsicault croissants every month thereafter).<\/p>\n There\u2019s the C-word, and then there\u2019s the C-word.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re a restaurant owner with a few locations, the latter is probably more offensive than the first. Especially if your business is based in San Francisco. Get your mind out of the gutter: It\u2019s not the four-letter C-word. It\u2019s \u201cchain.\u201d<\/p>\n Charles Bililies knows what I\u2019m talking about. The founder of Souvla has six restaurants and wants to double that over the next seven years. So too does the king of croissants, Armando Lacayo of Arsicault, which is expanding from three to five bakeries, with openings soon in Palo Alto and Mission Bay. Then there are Thomas McNaughton and Ryan Pollnow, the duo behind Flour + Water, which has two pizzerias in San Francisco and starting slinging Hawaiian pies in Oakland in January.<\/p>\n The owners of these San Francisco-born brands would rather die a thousand deaths than have their reputation degraded by the C-slur.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Published Aug. 12, 2026at6:00am Off Menu is available exclusively for SF Standard members. Click here for a limited-time…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":430792,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[2867,412,101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-430791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-off-menu","tag-restaurants","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430791\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/430792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}