Two Chestnut Street Corners Are Going Back to Breakfast

La Boulangerie de San Francisco opens at 7 a.m. every day at 2300 Chestnut Street. The room it opens into was built for something else. ERIA Marina, the operator of the space, markets the corner as an event venue with transformable lighting and staging and a capacity of 400 standing guests. The bakery serves until 2:30 p.m., and on weekends it adds brunch and spritz.

The corner started as a caffè, spent more than two decades as an Italian dinner room and now has pastry in the morning again. A short walk up the street, the former L'Mida space at 2359 Chestnut is following the same path back to its bakery past. On Chestnut, the morning is coming back as a shift folded into a bigger business, and these two addresses show how that works.

The 2300 Chestnut Corner Started as a Caffè

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the space was Emporio Rulli Gran Caffè before it became Ristobar. Gary Rulli later remodeled it into a full-service restaurant and wine bar known for handmade pastas and cocktails, and it ran under that name for 22 years. The final service was Memorial Day, May 25, 2026.

The corner never sat dark. As the Chronicle reported, Ristobar's closing announcement said the address would continue "in a new direction through a partnership with Eria Events." The paper also reported that the venue was being advertised as a 5,300-square-foot indoor-outdoor space for weddings, private celebrations, corporate gatherings and community events, with a launch party on June 13. ERIA, which lists Nikita Khandheria as its founder, also runs a waterfront venue in Sausalito.

La Boulangerie came next. Its grand-opening brunch ran Saturday, September 12, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with DJs and free pastries for anyone who bought an espresso drink. A portion of the day's proceeds went to LearnUp Centers and Village Enterprise. The bakery's own site now lists the Chestnut outpost as "NOW OPEN" and gives a dedicated email for that location.

The Bakery Runs on the Venue's Clock

The setup at 2300 Chestnut is unusual for a cafe. La Boulangerie's hours end at 2:30 p.m., and the space it occupies is booked out through ERIA. The ERIA Marina page lists the uses it is pitching for the room: corporate events, conferences, birthday parties, post-City Hall receptions and baby showers. Morning coffee is one tenant's shift inside a building whose main business is private bookings.

That arrangement also tells you how firm the bakery's place is. When the San Francisco Business Times previewed the bakery's arrival, its headline called it a pop-up at Eria. The bakery's own listing makes no mention of an end date. For now, the corner where the Marina once had a caffè is serving espresso and pastry again, under a partnership structure that the corner's caffè years never had.

Scout Picked Its Space for the Oven

The second corner shows the same pattern with a different structure. Kait Bauman and Angelo De Lorenzi, who run the Pierce Street cocktail bar Frankie's and its sister restaurant Norcina, are opening Scout around the block at 2359 Chestnut. The space was most recently L'Mida. The San Francisco Standard reported on October 8 that the pair is planning an early-November debut and that construction is nearly done.

Years ago, the same storefront was Chestnut Street Bakery. Bauman told The Standard she was a regular there and had long had her eye on the space, mostly because of its oven. "There's not a lot of wood-fired restaurants in the Marina," she said, apart from her own Frankie's. Her preferred wood is almond. Scout's pastry chef will bake everything in-house, including a sourdough served with smoked tomato-mussel butter and saffron chile. So the storefront's bakery past was more than a backstory. It came with the equipment that made the lease attractive.

The morning program is spelled out. Bauman described Scout to The Standard as a place to sit over coffee and a pastry at the table, adding, "We want physical newspapers in there." Scout's website says the restaurant "starts early with coffee, fresh pastries and the daily paper."

Morning Is One Shift of Several

At both addresses, breakfast comes as part of a larger operation. Here is how each one lays out its day, based on what the operators have published.

• La Boulangerie at ERIA Marina, 2300 Chestnut: open 7 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. daily, with brunch and spritz on weekends, inside a venue that ERIA rents out for events.
• Scout, 2359 Chestnut: coffee, pastries and the paper to start the day, lunch on weekdays, brunch on weekends, then dinner, running late into the night on weekends, seven days a week.

Scout's dinner menu shows how much of the business sits after dark. The Standard listed late-fall and early-winter dishes including a rabbit roulade, ember-roasted pumpkin with zucchini-cashew babaganoush, charred leek agnolotti in a Parmesan-leek brodo and mafaldine with braised short rib. Bauman said the wine list will be about 70% Californian. Scout's site sums up the range as "a morning coffee, a long lunch, a martini at the bar or dinner around the hearth."

So Chestnut's newest coffee counters don't stand alone. One sits inside an event business and the other is the opening shift of a wood-fired dinner restaurant. At 2300 Chestnut, morning service is already back because a bigger operation carries the space, and Scout is set up to work the same way at 2359 once it opens.

The Evening Side Is Still Filling In

None of this means the street is shedding its nightlife. On March 17, Lobalita opened at 2231 Chestnut in the former Tipsy Pig, a gastropub that closed the previous spring after 17 years. The Standard's opening coverage reported a cocktail list priced at $14 per drink, five beers on tap and a menu of tostadas, taquitos and a lamb picadillo gordita. Lobalita comes from Stryker Scales, Nate Valentine and Jamal Blake-Williams, the group behind Bar Darling.

Dinner competition near the old Ristobar corner is also dense. In the Chronicle's closure coverage, A16, Napizza and Delarosa Marina were named as nearby Italian options on Chestnut. That context helps explain both corners. In a stretch where evening slots are well covered, both former dinner rooms are going after the morning hours too. One has already brought in a bakery, and the other is building breakfast into an all-day restaurant.

Dates to Watch on Chestnut This Fall

1. Scout's opening. As of late October, the target is still early November. Scout's website says "OPENING FALL 2026" and says reservations open in mid-October. The team had first planned to open earlier in 2026.
2. La Boulangerie's status at ERIA. The bakery lists daily hours. Because the Business Times first described it as a pop-up, whether it stays long term is still an open question.
3. New storefronts at 2055 Chestnut. SF YIMBY reported in February 2026 that the plans for the site changed from a previously approved 49-apartment mixed-use project to an expansion of the existing building into four narrow retail spaces. The Lombard-facing parking lot stays. No construction timeline has been set.

The two corners in this post show how a ground-floor space can change uses over time, from caffè to dinner room to event venue with a bakery, and that history shapes what a mixed-use building on a corridor like Chestnut is worth. If you own a building with ground-floor commercial space in the Marina and want to know how its current and potential tenancy affects pricing, Mirella Webb and the Bonn Webb Team offer a complimentary, confidential property valuation.