{"id":98776,"date":"2025-12-17T21:29:20","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T21:29:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/98776\/"},"modified":"2025-12-17T21:29:20","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T21:29:20","slug":"our-big-fat-italian-restaurant-boom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/98776\/","title":{"rendered":"Our big, fat, Italian restaurant boom"},"content":{"rendered":"

It seems like only yesterday that we crowned 2024 the year of the tiny, practical restaurant<\/a>. What we hadn\u2019t predicted was that, just one year later, big restaurants would come roaring back. But not just any big restaurants \u2014 specifically, big Italian restaurants.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the post-pandemic years, San Francisco restaurants shrank so they could run skeleton crews. They leaned into counter service and prix-fixe menus \u2014 anything to keep labor predictable and food costs in check. But in the past year, something shifted. A handful of seasoned operators are gaining the confidence to take a swing at sprawling footprints. And the equation they\u2019re betting on is as ubiquitous and safe as red sauce: pizza + pasta = success.<\/p>\n

The trend arguably kicked off last year with Italian American Little Original Joe\u2019s in the Marina \u2014 whose success serving meatballs and martinis has been the talk of the town and, frankly, the envy of half the industry.\u00a0But over the last 12 months, the Italian slice of the restaurant scene has gotten even bigger. <\/p>\n

La Connessa opened in Potrero Hill, with wood-fired oven pizzas and handmade pastas. Piccino had a 200-seat second coming in the Presidio. Bosco \u2014 a 5,000-square-footer \u2014\u00a0opened in SoMa, and Original Joe\u2019s (the precursor to Little Original Joe\u2019s) expanded to a 10,000-square-foot, 200-seat behemoth in Walnut Creek. And the marinara sauce tsunami looks like it\u2019ll continue well past December: Come 2026, the Ferry Building will welcome to the mix Lucania, from the people behind A16.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"ASeafood bucatini at Piccino Presidio.\"AAlexis Moreno stretches dough at Che Fico Pizzeria. \"FiveA spread of plates at Bosco.<\/p>\n

Notably, none of these establishments is a firstborn. They are second, third, and even fourth restaurants opened by seasoned vets making calculated moves.<\/p>\n

Matt Brewer and chef David Nayfeld \u2014\u00a0who have two popular Che Fico locations, in SF and Menlo Park \u2014\u00a0have the most ambitious project on the list: Via Aurelia, the 200-seat, 8,000-square-foot Tuscan-inspired restaurant that opened in September in the glossy Mission Rock development.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

For Nayfeld, another Italian restaurant was an extension of his lifelong obsession. The pastas at Via Aurelia are treated as works of art; even the rice-sized orzo is house-made. \u201cAnyone who knows me knows that I\u2019ve dedicated my life to pizza and pasta. I\u2019ve spent months traveling in Italy, working for a butcher shop in Puglia, a pizza shop in Naples,\u201d he said. Even when he was in New York working at Eleven Madison Park, he wasn\u2019t rushing to eat at Per Se. \u201cI found myself going to Roberta\u2019s and Franny\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n

But passion explains only part of it. There\u2019s a spreadsheet logic to the Italian boom, too.<\/p>\n

Tim Stannard, founding partner of Bacchus Management Group, built the 100-seat La Connessa around the idea of optimism. He decided that with minimum wage hikes slowing, and technology like handheld point-of-sale systems<\/a> creating more turns, midlevel restaurants \u2014 the beloved category he\u2019d feared was on its way to extinction \u2014 were viable once again. Making the menu Italian would clinch the deal.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s kind of like solving a Rubik\u2019s cube,\u201d he said of the profitability puzzle. \u201cItalian is the kind of food that allows you to have a little antipasti at the bar, maybe bring the kids for pizza, have some salads, some pasta, some wine.\u201d Plus, there\u2019s the built-in appeal of carbs and cheese, with acidity from tomatoes or lemons: comfort.<\/p>\n

\"\"Cutting pasta at 7 Adams.\"\"John Duggan Sr. greets diners during lunch at Little Original Joe\u2019s on Chestnut St.<\/p>\n

This appealed to Eric Vreede, too. The owner of the Absinthe Group had a problem to solve when he opened Bosco in Showplace Square. The sweeping, 180-seat space had been inhabited by his group\u2019s Spanish restaurant Bellota in 2016, a time when the city was in a different economic place, and the Airbnb building, where it\u2019s located, was bustling. But the menu of cured meats, saffron, and paella was too expensive for a city facing a drastically reduced workforce and daytime population.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe decided to see if we can rebrand the restaurant space in a way that makes sense for today,\u201d he said. \u201cKeep the prices reasonable, get people in the door.\u201d\u00a0 The correct answer, of course, was Italian.<\/p>\n

And so the city\u2019s newest trend is actually one of its oldest: a lot of tomatoes, a shameless amount of gluten, and a business plan that doesn\u2019t require a Ph.D. in economics to understand.\u00a0 \u201cThough it takes labor, Italian can be less expensive to produce,\u201d said Vreede. \u201cEspecially pasta \u2014 because it\u2019s just flour and water.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It seems like only yesterday that we crowned 2024 the year of the tiny, practical restaurant. What we…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":98777,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[18241,412,101,103,102,104,106,105,52377],"class_list":["post-98776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-italian-food","tag-restaurants","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news","tag-the-year-in-eating"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98776","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=98776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}