Same Rooms, New Hands: Who's Taking Over the Mission's Bars This Fall

On Saturday, October 24, Studio Aurora at 302 Valencia Street held a closing party. Bottles were 30 percent off the menu price and mixed cases were 40 percent off. Berkeley's Tessier Winery poured small-batch wines while owner Dario Barbone made pinsas, the chewy Roman-style pizzas, until 9 p.m. Barbone told The San Francisco Standard that everything had to go.

The room itself isn't going anywhere. Barbone handed it to two friends, Emma Rahr and Trang Trinh, who plan to open a wine bar and restaurant there early next year. "I prefer to pass the torch to a couple of friends," he told the Standard. "The block will stay alive."

Across the Mission this fall, the rooms with the clearest future are the ones where the person leaving chose the person arriving. The rooms where nobody was lined up tell the other half of the story. One Valencia Street storefront went through four tenants in about five years. A Mission Street institution sat dark for six years. A 25-year-old Guerrero Street bar is shut right now while its owner looks for someone to take it over.

A wine bar handed to friends

Studio Aurora lasted two years. It was known for sandwiches and a curated bottle list, and it once shared its space with the community radio station Fault Radio. Barbone is closing it to focus on Alimentari Aurora, his shop and restaurant in Potrero Hill.

Rahr and Trinh are planning another wine bar and restaurant, which keeps the room close to what Studio Aurora was. Eater SF's closings roundup describes Barbone as passing the property on to the pair, with an opening early next year.

So this stretch of Valencia gets a short gap, not a long stretch of brown paper in the windows. The space goes from one wine bar to another, run by people the outgoing owner knows.

The owner who replaced his own bar

A few blocks east, at 1779 Folsom Street, the handoff is even shorter, because the owner is handing the room to himself. Nihon Whiskey Lounge is becoming Yabani, an Arab and Japanese cocktail bar that opens Friday, November 6. That's tomorrow, if you're reading this on publication day. Eater SF reports that it comes from the same owner behind Nihon, Khaled Dajani, who also runs the amaro bar Bar 821 and Tsunami Sushi. Yabani is the Arabic word for Japanese.

Beverage director Mohammed Zagha explained the thinking to Eater SF:

"We were playing with the idea because [owner Khaled Dajani] is Palestinian, I'm half-Jordanian. We both lived in West Asia, and we're thinking about all the different flavors ... At the same time, we're just thinking about how we still want to keep Nihon's soul in it a little bit."

You can see Nihon's influence on the menu. Japanese whisky, sake and shochu share the menu with arak, sumac and date. The highballs work the way Zagha's do at Bar 821. You choose a spirit, then a flavor profile. The options include damask rose hydrosol with toasted kombu, watermelon with yuzu kosho and vanilla, and sumac with umeboshi. Every flavor base is alcohol-free and on tap, so any of them can be made without spirits. The Bakanana is the bar's nod to its neighborhood, a michelada made with sake, arak, Japanese lager and a house take on chamoy.

Eater SF reports that Yabani will start with Friday and Saturday service from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. Longer hours are planned for January, and a food menu is expected later, likely in February.

What happens when nobody picks the next tenant

680 Valencia Street shows what a handoff prevents. Gazetteer SF and Hoodline tracked a run of short tenancies there:

1. Hawker Fare closed after the pandemic.
2. The Kickback, a breakfast restaurant and bar, closed in 2023.
3. Petra Mediterranean closed in 2024. Its outpost here came with a Mitchell's ice cream pop-up and belly dancing.
4. Smokey Joe, a barbecue spot, shut down after six months in 2025.

Every new concept started from nothing, with no regulars and no reputation carried over. The address picked up a nickname instead, and Hoodline called it "cursed" in its headline.

The fifth tenant looks likely to stay. Mandi House opened in June. Owner Faris Alqabass brought the Yemeni concept up from its original Los Angeles location. Gazetteer SF says it has drawn steady business, and it credits the group-friendly room, the food and the late hours.

The room is built for groups. Traditional majlis booths seat eight to 10 people, other tables can be pushed together for four to 20, and there's a full second floor. The restaurant doesn't take reservations. The kitchen serves mandi chicken and lamb, lamb madhbi, and seltah, the bubbling stew that is Yemen's national dish. It also makes tandoor bread about 15 inches across. The big shareable platters run $80 to $180. Mandi House's own website lists daily hours of 11 a.m. to 12:30 a.m. Hoodline notes that this late window stands out on a strip that isn't known for after-dinner food.

Breaking the streak took a concept with an established track record, which Mandi House brought from Los Angeles, and it fills a gap nobody else on the block was covering.

Six years dark at 2389 Mission Street

Bruno's shows how long a room can stay empty when its future depends on permits and paperwork. The former Italian restaurant and labor hangout, which later became a nightclub, has been at 2389 Mission Street for more than 60 years. It closed in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown. Mission Local reported that the previous owner expected to reopen in 2023 and blamed city permit delays when that didn't happen. In February 2024, the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution recommending that the state issue the club a new liquor license, and a spring 2024 reopening looked possible. That date slipped too.

What finally reopened Bruno's was a new owner. Noelle Calixto also owns Campus in the Marina, the Owl Tree in Lower Nob Hill and Chief Sullivan's in North Beach. Bruno's soft-opened on September 12 with DJs REZA and Ibarra and then ran trial events on weekends through September. General manager Travis Blain told Mission Local that the club is going for a neighborhood feel, with local DJs and door staff who act like "hosts, not bouncers."

"I feel like we're lucky to have you as a guest in my house," Blain said. "I think the neighborhood wants this place going again."

The Liberties is looking for its successor

At 22nd and Guerrero, the question is still open. The Liberties opened at 998 Guerrero Street in 2002 and has hosted bingo, trivia, live music and jam sessions for almost 25 years. It closed for Labor Day weekend and hasn't reopened since. Ian Duggan, a neighbor and regular who took over the business in 2019, told Mission Local that he is considering bringing in a new operator to keep it going.

"The place has been here for 25 years. It means a lot to me and to a lot of people," Duggan said. "I'd love it to be me, but I care more about the place than I care about me."

As of Eater SF's October 14 update, the bar was still closed indefinitely and no successor or reopening date had been announced.

Duggan is trying to do what Barbone did on Valencia, which is to choose who keeps the room going rather than leave it empty. Bruno's had no successor lined up and stayed dark for six years.

Other rooms that came back

The handoffs aren't the only good news. Reem's California at 2901 Mission Street, at 25th, closed July 30 for structural repairs and reopened in late October, Mission Local reported. Mission Local also reviewed Mission's Kitchen, the longtime Mission Street restaurant, at its bright new second location at 1020 Valencia.

On the calendar

For more on how the corridor fills its empty spaces, see our earlier look at why Mission Street storefronts open at two very different speeds, along with our Mission District neighborhood page.

Barbone chose his successors before he locked the door, and Duggan is trying to do the same at 22nd and Guerrero. If you own in the Mission and want to plan your own handoff that early, Level Up Group can help you plan the timing, the preparation and the buyer search. Schedule a consultation and we'll map out your next chapter together.