The red neon sign for Appel & Dietrich Fine Food Market has been dark for more than two years now, but it's still bolted to the corner of California and 22nd, the same spot it's occupied since the building went up in 1917. The market that took over that space most recently, 6001 California Market, closed in 2024, and the storefront has sat empty since, a fact every regular on that block already knows because they've walked past it on the way to Pearl 6101 or Pizzetta 211 more times than they can count.
For most of 2026, the only thing filling that gap was a name. Bi-Rite signed a lease on the building in March, and the news drew wide and warm coverage across San Francisco. Co-CEO Patrick Mills told the Chronicle the company had been hearing from Outer Richmond residents for years, some of whom had gone as far as emailing the company real estate listings for the neighborhood. He called the new location a chance to be "stewards of a small, neighborhood grocery business that serves the immediate neighborhood." That sentiment, along with the lease itself, was the main thing on the record for the next five months.
That changed on August 21, when an entity called BR California LLC filed three separate applications with the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control for 6001 California St. This is the detail that got buried under the bigger headline, and it's the one that tells you the most.
Between March and August, the story stayed exactly where a signed-but-not-finalized lease usually stays: real, but unconfirmed in the ways that matter to someone who wants to know when they can actually walk in and buy groceries. Mills was careful with his language the whole time, telling SFGATE the company had "engaged in a lease" while contingencies "need to be resolved." Planning records from that period showed permits for roughly $380,000 in approved upgrades, mostly new restrooms and improved accessibility, the unglamorous work that has to happen before a building this old can open its doors to the public again. Hoodline and Progressive Grocer both reported the company was targeting a 2027 opening, with Hoodline adding the caveat that a best-case date should be treated as exactly that.
None of this was nothing. But it also wasn't the kind of thing a longtime Outer Richmond resident could point to and say the store is actually happening. A lease can fall through. A permit can sit unused for a year. What changes the calculus is a filing with the state that specifies exactly what kind of business is going to occupy the space, because state license applications aren't just paperwork, they're a description of the room.
The August 21 filing covered three license categories, and each one maps to a specific part of what the store will actually be:
Read individually, each license is a routine filing. Read together, they describe a full-scale grocery store with a working wine program, an eat-in prepared foods counter, and in-aisle sampling, not a scaled-down express version built to fit a smaller neighborhood footprint. That distinction matters to anyone who's watched a beloved brand open a stripped-down version of itself in a new location and wondered what got cut. Based on this filing, nothing did.
The company still hasn't set a firm opening date, and an ABC application is a filing, not an approval. The licenses have to clear a standard protest period before they're granted. But the paperwork is now specific enough that it reads less like an announcement and more like a construction plan.
Whatever the eventual opening date, the corner around 6001 California isn't waiting on Bi-Rite to become worth a walk. Pearl 6101 and Pizzetta 211 already share the block, and Fiorella and Angelina's Deli Cafe sit close enough that the stretch of California Street around 22nd Avenue has functioned as a small food cluster for years, well before any grocery chain signed a lease. Bi-Rite's own executives have pointed to this same texture as part of the pitch, with Mills noting the area's proximity to the long-running Sunday Clement Street Farmers Market and to Breadbelly as evidence the neighborhood was already primed for a grocer like theirs.
That's worth sitting with, because it means the eventual Bi-Rite opening isn't creating a food destination out of nothing. It's adding a grocery anchor to a block that already has its regulars and its lines. The corner has been quietly working the whole time the storefront sat dark.
If Bi-Rite's fourth San Francisco store opens as filed, it will be the company's first location on the west side of the city, following the Mission original from 1940, the Divisadero store that opened in 2013, and the Polk Street location that debuted in 2024 as the company's largest yet. Founder Sam Mogannam has described a ten-year plan built around two to three additional Bay Area markets by 2030, and this filing is the clearest evidence yet that the Richmond store is the next concrete step in that plan rather than a placeholder announcement. Progressive Grocer reported the new location is expected to bring roughly 75 jobs to the neighborhood, and Bi-Rite has said it intends to keep the vintage Appel & Dietrich sign in some form, a small detail but one that matters to a corner that's had that same sign overhead for over a century.
None of that changes what a resident can do on California Street this week. The store isn't open, the timeline is still 2027 at the earliest, and the corner still looks the way it's looked for two years. What's changed is how confident anyone can be that it's actually coming, and now there's a state filing on record to point to instead of a press release.
If you own property on this stretch of the Outer Richmond and you're wondering how an anchor grocer's arrival tends to shift how buyers read a block once it actually opens, that's the kind of question Mirella Webb and the Bonn Webb Team spend their days answering. Reach out for a conversation about what's happening on your corner of the neighborhood.
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