Walk the 2100 block of Polk Street this month and you'll pass two storefronts with paper still taped over the glass. One used to sling boiled-and-baked bagels under a striped awning. The other poured Peet's coffee for years before the chain pulled out. Neither has been empty long enough to feel like a dead zone, and neither is staying empty. Two of San Francisco's more closely watched bakery operators picked this exact stretch, within months of each other, to make their next move.
That's not really a coincidence. It's a sign of how few open storefronts this corridor has left, and how much competition there now is for them.
The Bagelry, a fixture at 2139 Polk St since the 1970s, closed and left the space dark. What's replacing it isn't a bagel shop at all. It's Lorella, a bakery from Frances and Octavia chef-owner Melissa Perello and pastry chef Melissa Loar, and it's arriving with a track record most brick-and-mortar bakeries never get to build first.
For two years, Loar ran a Saturday pop-up called Saturbake out of a side door at Octavia. Lines wrapped the block on busy weekends, and the pastries, from twice-baked stone fruit croissants to pear-cardamom monkey bread, routinely sold out within minutes of opening. That pop-up is now becoming Lorella's opening menu: country levain loaves, focaccia, pizza, and a rotating mix of sweet and savory croissants, alongside Frances's signature lumberjack cake sold by the slice or whole. The team is also considering an ice cream cart pulling from Octavia and Frances dessert recipes and a doughnut program that includes a blueberry-and-ricotta version finished with an ultraviolet glaze.
The build-out isn't a simple paint-and-reopen job. The team brought in architect Seth Boor for a full gut renovation, and Loar has said the space will include a second story where kids can play, a detail she's mentioned partly because she and Perello are both mothers juggling childcare costs against restaurant-industry paychecks. Lorella is targeting a fall 2026 opening, which puts its debut somewhere in the next several weeks if the timeline holds.
A few doors up, in the former Peet's Coffee between Broadway and Vallejo, Bageletto is moving in. The shop opened its original location on 14th Street in the Mission in February 2025, run by Kiki Theodorides and Rich D'Aloia, and built a following on bagels baked in small batches throughout the day rather than one morning run that goes stale by early afternoon. Theodorides has said the appeal is straightforward: you're eating a bagel within one to four hours of it coming out of the oven, not from a case that's been sitting since 6 a.m.
The Polk Street location won't be a production kitchen. Bagels will be delivered from the Mission facility twice a day or more, and the space will run as a full sit-down cafe with a dining counter, Italian sandwiches like a muffuletta and a prosciutto cotto breakfast sandwich, and in-house-cured meats. When the deal was announced this spring, Theodorides put the timeline at 60 to 90 days.
"Cross our fingers, we should open in the next 60 to 90 days."
That quote is from April. At the time, the company still hadn't posted hours for the new address, though the build-out was reportedly underway. Theodorides has also said the company isn't planning to expand further after Polk Street, which makes this less a chain rolling out and more a single, deliberate bet on one block.
Perello's team and the Bageletto team aren't connected, and neither appears to have been chasing the other. What they were both chasing was the same short list of available Polk Street storefronts, and that list got shorter after Bi-Rite opened a Russian Hill market on this stretch in 2024. Lorella's own siting was described as landing directly across the street from that Bi-Rite location, on what's now called a particularly lively part of Polk, a description that only makes sense if the market itself changed how much foot traffic the block could support.
There's also an earlier thread worth pulling on. Reporting from early 2025 had Bageletto's expansion plans pointed at space tied to the old Bagelry footprint itself, before the deal that eventually closed put the Bageletto team into the former Peet's a few doors away instead, while Perello and Loar's team secured the actual Bagelry address. Whether that was a negotiation that shifted or two separate leases that happened to close in the same window, the practical result is the same: two bakery operators were drawing from the same tight pool of vacancies on this one block, and where each one ended up says something about how competitive that pool became.
Russian Hill hasn't had a dedicated bagel counter in years, and that gap is part of what made Bageletto's move newsworthy in the first place. If the Polk Street location opens on anything close to its original timeline, residents get a full-service option for a fresh bagel sandwich without crossing the city to the Mission.
Lorella is a different kind of addition. It's not filling a gap so much as raising the ceiling on what a neighborhood bakery can be, backed by a kitchen that already carries a Michelin star at Octavia and two years of proof that the pastry program can sell out a weekly pop-up without advertising much beyond word of mouth.
Together, they turn one short stretch of Polk into a stretch where you can get a fast bagel sandwich on your way to work and, a few storefronts down, sit with a kid-friendly second floor over a slice of lumberjack cake on a weekend morning. Neither existed on this block a year ago. Both are arriving because the old tenants left and the new ones were willing to fight for what opened up.
If you own property along this stretch of Polk Street and want a clearer read on what a resurgent retail corridor like this is doing to building values nearby, the Bonn Webb Team offers a complimentary, confidential valuation grounded in what's actually happening on the street, not just what the comps say.
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