Three businesses are making their biggest move on Polk Street this fall, and none of them are new to the Bay Area. A Mission bagel shop that could have expanded anywhere is opening its second location here. A plant shop that spent years hosting free shows on the sidewalk is converting into a full venue with a bar program. And a sushi concept from Australia picked the corner of Polk and Union for its first San Francisco address. Read the timing and the paperwork together, and a different story shows up than the usual "new restaurants keep landing on a trendy block" write-up. What's actually happening on Polk Street this fall is a set of businesses signing up for years, not seasons.
The Fall Openings and Their Earlier Anchor, By Address and Term
Here's what each business has done or is planning, and what signals its commitment:
| Business | Address | Timing | What signals the commitment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bi-Rite Market | 2140 Polk St. | Opened 2024 | Signed a 26-year lease and made the store its company headquarters |
| Bageletto | Polk St., between Broadway and Vallejo | Confirmed for summer 2026 | Second location after opening in the Mission in 2025 |
| The Mellow | Polk Street | Reported July 2026 | Moving from free sidewalk shows to a licensed venue with a full bar program |
| Handroll Hawker | Polk and Union | Opens Sept. 29, 2026 | Billed as San Francisco's first Australian-style handroll concept |
Laid out that way, the pattern isn't a set of unrelated Polk Street business moves. It's a two-year build that started with a grocery anchor and is finishing with a sushi counter and a music room.
Bageletto's Polk Street Expansion
Bageletto opened its first shop and a much larger production facility on 14th Street in the Mission in 2025. By April 2026, the San Francisco Standard reported that the company had confirmed a second location, taking over a former Peet's Coffee spot on Polk between Broadway and Vallejo after that Peet's closed as part of a wider round of closures. Cofounder Kiki Theodorides, a San Francisco native, is opening the location alongside her partner D'Aloia, who was born in Brooklyn. Their sandwiches, including a muffuletta and a prosciutto cotto breakfast sandwich, use meats cured in house, the kind of build-out that assumes repeat customers rather than a single busy season.
What makes the choice worth noting is what the company said about growth beyond it. Asked about further expansion, Theodorides told the San Francisco Standard the company isn't looking to add more locations right now: "We'll see where it takes us after Polk Street." That's not the language of a business chasing the next hot corridor. The Standard's reporting described the neighborhood as underserved for bagels despite the city's crowded bagel scene.
The Lease That Explains the Grocery Aisle
Bi-Rite's move into Russian Hill predates this fall's wave by two years, but it's the anchor the rest of the pattern sits on top of. The market opened at 2140 Polk St. in 2024, taking over a site that Real Food Co. had occupied since 1976, and according to the San Francisco Chronicle, Bi-Rite signed a 26-year lease and made the location its new headquarters. The store runs roughly twice the size of Bi-Rite's Mission District shop and about 50 percent larger than its NoPa location, with around 70 employees on staff.
Owner Sam Mogannam has his own version of the long-game argument. He took over the family's original 18th Street shop from his father and uncle in 1998, a business the Mogannam family had run since 1964. The San Francisco Chronicle quoted Mogannam saying, "The local, independent businesses just care more." A 26-year commercial lease is one way to prove you mean it.
A Sidewalk Show Becomes a Liquor License
The smallest item on this list may be the clearest signal. For years, the plant shop known as The Mellow ran free shows on the sidewalk outside its storefront on Polk Street, the kind of low-cost, low-commitment programming that costs a shop owner an afternoon and a speaker. The Standard's July 2026 reporting noted that The Mellow is now converting into a full live-music venue with a bar program, a shift that requires a liquor license, sound permitting, and build-out money that a folding table and an amp never did. Businesses don't apply for that kind of license to test a neighborhood for a few months. They apply for it because they've already tested the neighborhood, informally, for years, and they liked the answer.
The Corridor Has Been Here Before
Polk Street's habit of rewarding whoever stays isn't new. Long before it became a shopping strip for Russian Hill and Nob Hill's wealthier families, the stretch now called Polk Gulch was a center of early LGBTQ+ organizing in San Francisco. California Hall, built around 1910 as a German American community building, became the meeting site for the Tavern Guild, the first gay business association in the United States. A New Year's Day gathering there in 1965 is widely credited as a catalyst for the more public, political phase of San Francisco's gay rights movement, and Polk Street went on to host the city's first Gay Pride Parade in 1972, years before that role shifted to the Castro. Most of the bars and businesses that built that history didn't survive the corridor's later turnover. As of 2025, The Cinch is the last historic gay bar still operating on Polk, a single survivor out of what was once a strip full of them.
That history doesn't map neatly onto a bagel shop and a handroll counter, but it does back up the general shape of the argument. Polk Street has never been a place where the businesses that mattered most were the ones that turned over fastest. It's been a place where the ones that stuck around ended up mattering the most, whether that staying power ran a few years or, in Bi-Rite's case, a couple of decades on paper before the doors even opened.
What's Actually Landing, In Order
Strip out the interpretation and the sequence looks like this:
- 2024: Bi-Rite Market opens at 2140 Polk St. on a 26-year lease, replacing Real Food Co. after nearly five decades on the same block.
- April 2026: Bageletto confirms a second location on Polk, between Broadway and Vallejo, in a former Peet's Coffee space.
- July 2026: The Mellow's transition from sidewalk shows to a full venue with a bar program is reported.
- Sept. 29, 2026: Handroll Hawker opens at Polk and Union, its first San Francisco address.
Read in order, this isn't a fall restaurant roundup. It's the tail end of a multi-year sequence that started with a grocery store willing to sign a quarter-century lease and is closing out with a music venue that had to apply for a liquor license to make its Friday nights official.
Polk Street between Broadway and Union is a short walk, easily covered on foot from the Hyde-Powell cable car line or the 19 Muni bus that runs the length of the street from Ghirardelli Square to the Tenderloin. It's worth making that walk before the end of the year, while the bagel counter is new, the handrolls are fresh off their opening week, and the sidewalk outside The Mellow is about to get a cover charge for the first time.
Stephen Bartlett keeps an eye on which Polk Street leases turn into decade-long fixtures and which ones don't. If you're curious what else is signing long-term paper on this stretch of Russian Hill, that's a conversation worth having over coffee, not a form.
