Trampled by Unicorns

CHAPTER 3Emerald Cities

In July 2016, Cadence, a fine dining establishment located in the Mid-Market district of San Francisco, served its final meal. Its six months of operations were described by Sarah Fritsche, former food writer at the San Francisco Chronicle, as “a stunningly short life for a restaurant expected to be a blockbuster.”¹ Unfortunately Cadence was far from the only restaurant to close its doors in the same neighborhood over a matter of months.

Four years earlier, Twitter had moved into the area. The social media firm was the first of several celebrated tech companies (including Zendesk, Yammer, Square, Spotify, and Uber) to open up in the city's then emerging Mid-Market district between mid-2012 and 2014,² alongside luxury apartment complexes, whose residents reportedly included large numbers of high-earning tech workers. Over the next few years, a wave of upscale restaurants followed, tempted by the area's evolving demographics as well as incentives from the city. Several failed; some, like Cadence, didn't last much beyond the appetizer.

While restaurants often misfire for a complex web of reasons—and in the Mid-Market district these included endemic homelessness—there was broad agreement among the neighborhood's restaurateurs that tech companies' free cafeterias made achieving profitability a struggle for many of them. The former chief executive of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, Gwyneth Borden, reckons that, pre-COVID-19, there were as many as 50 ...