Something worth paying attention to is happening to the Richmond's dining geography this year. For a long time the shorthand ran one direction: Clement Street was the neighborhood's daily kitchen, Geary Boulevard was the commuter artery you drove through, and Point Lobos was a memory with a shuttered building on top of it. That map is redrawing itself in real time.
The short version, if you live here and want to know where the new tables are: Geary is quietly turning into a destination corridor, Clement is filling in with the kind of small, specific openings that reward walking, and the Cliff House is finally moving from rumor to construction schedule. Here is what that looks like block by block this summer.
Geary Boulevard, suddenly a destination
For years the pitch for Geary as a food street was one restaurant at a time. That has changed. The most talked-about opening of early 2026 is Hwa Mi Won, a Korean restaurant on Geary opened by a former Daeho chef. The anchor dish is kkori, a variation on galbi-jjim built from braised short ribs, oxtail, rice cakes, carrots, onions, and potatoes in gochujang sauce, finished tableside with two butane torches so the jack cheese on top browns into the meat. It runs $87 for the platter, which is a real number for a neighborhood restaurant and a useful marker for how the corridor is being priced now.
The comparison worth holding onto: Daeho on Nob Hill has been the reference point for Korean short-rib theater in San Francisco for years, and it regularly drew hours-long waits. A former Daeho cook opening on Geary rather than downtown is the story. That is not a hand-me-down; it is a chef choosing this stretch of the Richmond on purpose.
Clement Street's soft-opening season
Clement is doing something different. Instead of one anchor, it is absorbing a run of smaller openings across the last several months, most of them from operators with a track record somewhere else in the Bay Area. The pattern is worth naming, because it changes how the street reads on a Saturday walk.
A few worth putting on the list:
- Rose Pizzeria, the Inner Richmond outpost of the Berkeley original, is serving the same thin-crust program with more room than the East Bay location. Expect pies with burrata and garlic confit, fennel sausage and goat horn peppers, and mushroom builds. Yelp reviewers noted the new kitchen is still calibrating against the Berkeley bar, which is a fair caveat to hold if you go in the first month.
- Kissaten HiFi, a Japanese cafe in the Richmond, is pouring freshly milled matcha with a small daily allotment of hard-to-find black matcha. Espresso, lattes, and einspänners round out the menu. The "quantities are limited each day" note in the Infatuation writeup is not marketing; it is how the room actually operates.
- Hologram has soft-opened as a coffee-and-matcha cafe with a short food menu of breakfast sandwiches, burritos, and tater tots. It reads as a neighborhood morning stop rather than a destination, which is exactly what Clement has been missing on that end of the block.
- Ghien Banh Mi & Coffee adds another Vietnamese sandwich option to the corridor. Grilled pork, chicken, and the standard combination anchor the menu, with iced coffee, matcha, and fruit tea on the drinks side.
- Smoking D's is bringing a second location into the Richmond District, per the ongoing openings tracker at Eddie's List. Same tracker flags a Neon Workspace second location coming to a former Walgreens on Clement, which is a shift in the street's non-restaurant tenant mix worth watching if you use co-working.
Read together, the openings tell a coherent story. Clement is not chasing a single flagship. It is layering in specific, operator-driven concepts that make the street more walkable at more hours of the day. A run from a morning matcha at Kissaten HiFi to a bánh mì at lunch to a pizza on the way home is a real routine now, not a stitched-together errand.
Land's End: the clock on the Cliff House
The question every Richmond resident asks eventually is when the building at 1090 Point Lobos comes back. The 2026 answer is more concrete than it has been in five years, and also more honest about how hard the project is.
Here is where things stand, drawn from reporting by the San Francisco Standard, SFist, and the building's public record:
- The lease is held by Sutro Lands End Partners, led by Alexander Leff, a native of the Richmond District. The National Park Service selected the group in 2023 on a 20-year term.
- Restoration costs have climbed from a reported $10 million to a projected $20 to $25 million, driven by facade damage, elevator damage, damaged windows and doors, and years of failed waterproofing on a salt-sprayed bluff. The Hountalas family, which ran the last iteration of the restaurant, estimated spending roughly $250,000 a year on upkeep even when the building was fully operational, which tells you what the deferred maintenance number really looks like.
- Construction was expected to begin in December 2025. The full reopening is projected for late 2026. Mary Hountalas, who has decades of first-hand knowledge of the building, has publicly called that timeline optimistic.
- The plan is four concepts under one roof: a high-end seafood restaurant, a family-friendly burger spot, a coffee-and-pastry cafe, and a fourth concept not yet announced. Hi Neighbor Hospitality Group, the team behind Trestle and The Vault, is consulting on food and beverage. The street-level cafe is targeted to open first, potentially by summer 2026, with deck seating and ocean views.
- The Cliff House name, sign, original recipes, social accounts, and memorabilia were donated by the Hountalas family to the nonprofit Western Neighborhoods Project, which is now the steward of the name. Any operator using it works through WNP. In 2021 the same nonprofit raised more than $150,000 in under three weeks to buy back more than 100 Cliff House artifacts at auction.
What this means for a Richmond resident this summer is narrower than the headlines suggest. Do not plan a birthday dinner around a Cliff House reopening. Do check in on the street-level cafe, because if any piece of the project debuts on the announced timeline it will be that one, and it will change the flow of a Land's End walk in a real way. The Camera Obscura on the terrace remains open, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., three dollars for adults, which is still the best value on that headland.
The through line
The reason to notice all of this at once, rather than reading each opening as a one-off, is that the Richmond's food identity is finishing a quiet consolidation. Geary is becoming a corridor people cross the city to eat on. Clement is becoming denser and more specific rather than louder. Land's End is transitioning from a closed landmark back into an active tenant, on a slower clock than anyone would like but on a real one.
The neighborhood has always been under-covered relative to how much life happens inside it. The 2026 map argues for a different habit: walk your own blocks this summer as if you were the out-of-town guest. The list of places you have not been to yet is longer than it has been in several years.
A summer walk, if you want one
Start with a morning matcha at Kissaten HiFi while the daily allotment lasts. Cut over to Clement for a bánh mì at Ghien around noon. If the weather is cooperating, drive or bus out to Point Lobos in the afternoon, take the Lands End Trail loop, and note the construction fencing at 1090 Point Lobos on the way past. Circle back to Geary for an early dinner at Hwa Mi Won if you can get a reservation, or grab a Rose pie on Clement if you cannot. That is a Saturday that would have been impossible to string together in the Richmond as recently as 2024.
If you own a home here and are thinking about what any of this means for the longer arc of the neighborhood, or if you are weighing a sale and want to talk about how the corridor's shift affects positioning, the team at Deason Group is happy to have that conversation over coffee. Contact Us.
