When the two-story corner space at 1 West Portal Avenue went quiet after 32 years as Squat & Gobble, the listing never really made it to the open market. The real estate agent handling it had one call to make: to Arkaranit Dusitnitsakul, co-owner of Khao Tiew, the Thai restaurant doing a steady brunch and dinner business just around the corner on Claremont Boulevard. "This is luck," Dusitnitsakul told the SF Standard when he got the call. On May 13, 2026, he and chef Wipada Rattanapun opened Tur in that corner space, a breakfast and lunch spot built around the dishes they grew up eating in Thailand, including a French toast made with passion fruit and mango sticky rice.
That is not how most commercial real estate changes hands. It is, apparently, how it works on this three-block stretch of the west side. And once you notice the pattern, it explains something else happening less than a hundred yards away, at a building that has sat empty since February 2021.
The new names, and who actually owns them
If you have walked West Portal Avenue lately, you have seen the turnover accelerate. Here is what has actually opened over the past year and a half, and who is behind it:
| Name | What it is | Backstory |
|---|---|---|
| Tur (1 West Portal Ave) | Thai breakfast and lunch | Second restaurant from the Khao Tiew owners, opened May 13, 2026, in the old Squat & Gobble space |
| Binu Bonu (230 West Portal Ave) | Italian wine bar and bottle shop | From Lorella Degan and Massimiliano Conti, who sold Noe Valley's La Ciccia in 2022 |
| Elena's Mexican Restaurant (255 West Portal Ave) | Mexican, big-plate dinners | From the Duggan family, who also run Little Original Joe's |
| George's Donuts & Merriment (163 West Portal Ave) | Elevated cafe and pastry counter | Opened January 2025, pastry chef Janina O'Leary |
| Hardware Coffee Co. | Bilevel florist and cafe | Opened early May 2026, brews beans from Grand Coffee |
| Proposition Chicken (16 West Portal Ave) | Fast-casual sandwiches and salads | First location to serve breakfast, across from the Muni station |
Look at that list again and a second pattern shows up underneath the first one. Elena's is not some outside operator betting on a trendy strip. It is named after Elena Duggan, whose family already runs Little Original Joe's three blocks away at 393 West Portal Avenue. "As people who grew up in West Portal ourselves, we have to represent," she told the SF Standard. "We do our dry cleaning here. We have to look our neighbors in the eye." Binu Bonu exists for the same reason. Degan and Conti did not scout West Portal from the outside. They already lived there, and chose it because they did.
Why the good space never hits the open market
The reason a landlord skips the listing and just calls the restaurant owner they already know is written into the zoning itself. West Portal Avenue's commercial district runs exactly three blocks, from Ulloa Street to 15th Avenue, with one more block along Ulloa to Claremont. Under the planning code that governs it, buildings are capped at 26 feet and two stories, and any single retail use over 2,500 square feet needs a conditional use permit, with 4,000 square feet as an absolute ceiling. Lot mergers that would create bigger footprints are actively discouraged. The code's own language says the goal is to protect "the existing family-oriented, village character" of the strip.
That is a small, fixed amount of retail frontage that almost never grows. A few of the most visible parcels are not even restaurants at all: Wells Fargo still holds the corner at 145 West Portal Avenue, Bank of America is at 288, and Tri-Counties Bank opened its newest San Francisco branch at 279 in September 2025. The zoning code itself notes that large-scale financial institutions eat up a disproportionate share of ground-floor frontage here. So when a genuinely good space opens up, whether it is a bank moving out or a 32-year restaurant closing, there is not much of it to go around, and landlords tend to hand it to whoever they already trust to make rent and keep the sidewalk in front of their building looking decent.
That is the mechanism behind the phone call to Khao Tiew. It also explains why the same handful of families keep showing up on the tenant roll instead of a wider mix of first-time operators.
The one thing that never got the call
There is exactly one property on this stretch that has not followed that quiet, relationship-driven path, and it is the biggest one on the block. The Empire Theater at 85 West Portal Avenue, a 1920s moviehouse that operated for decades as CineArts at the Empire, closed in February 2021. Owner Jesse Appleton later said the operator had mothballed the space and stripped out the equipment, and that interest in reopening it as a theater died once a new multiplex opened nearby at Stonestown.
Instead of a quiet handoff, the Empire has spent more than five years in public limbo, and this July that finally turned into a formal application. According to SF YIMBY's coverage of the filing, DM Development is now working on behalf of property owner Empire West Portal LLC to replace the theater with a nine-story building of roughly 113,670 square feet, split between 16 one-bedroom, 36 two-bedroom, and 12 three-bedroom apartments, with ground-floor retail, parking for 27 cars, and space for dozens of bicycles. The project is using a state streamlining law that grants faster approval, which is exactly why it needed to go through a formal, documented process instead of a phone call to a familiar name.
There is a small irony buried in the zoning code that makes this pairing even sharper. The same planning code section that describes West Portal's small-scale, family-oriented character also notes an exception: "except for one three-movie theater complex, West Portal offers no entertainment uses." That complex was the Empire. The one use the code carved out as different from everything else on the strip is the one now becoming apartments, while every restaurant vacancy around it keeps getting filled the old way, informally and fast.
What is holding steady while all this happens
None of this is displacing what already worked. Little Original Joe's is still turning out pizzas and parmigiana at 393 West Portal Avenue, and it is the reason the Duggan name carries weight three blocks over at Elena's. Shaw's has been scooping candy and ice cream from the same spot for close to a century. The bar once known as Philosopher's Club, now West Portal Station, still pours drinks in front of a jukebox and a wall of televisions. Bursa is still serving Turkish and Eastern Mediterranean food in its blue-tiled dining room, and Trattoria da Vittorio is still turning out wood-fired pizza and housemade pasta a few doors down.
These are not backdrop. They are the reason the newer wave of owners chose this street in the first place. When a restaurant family that already knows the neighborhood is deciding where to open a second concept, an intact, functioning main street with decades-old anchors is exactly the kind of foot traffic and trust they are buying into.
What it means if you already live here
If you have noticed West Portal Avenue getting busier lately, you were not imagining it, and it is not random. A small number of already-established local operators are using a tight, zoning-capped strip of storefronts to open second and third acts within walking distance of their first ones, while the one property too large and too public to hand off quietly has spent more than five years working through the kind of formal process every other storefront on the block gets to skip.
That is worth knowing whether you are grabbing brunch at Tur this weekend or just wondering what is finally going to happen to the old theater marquee you pass every day. For a fuller picture of what makes this stretch of the city tick, from the shops on the avenue to the homes tucked into the hills around it, Level Up Group's West Portal neighborhood page is a good place to keep tabs on what changes next. And if the Empire Theater project or anything else on the horizon has you thinking about your own plans in the neighborhood, Level Up Group is always glad to talk it through. Schedule a consultation whenever the timing feels right.
