Mission Local24%
In South Park, offices overshadow the only operating restaurant 4%
By Sarah Hopkins0%
7/14/2026, 12:00:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 1 faulty reasoning type, including Optimism Bias, with Optimism Bias as the most egregious example at 1.7% saturation with 16 hits. Analysis detected 16 faulty-reasoning hits from 930 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 16.8% and a BS Rank of 4% (15,026 of 15,517 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 96.80% of the article peer group.
Caffe Centro, South Park’s oldest operating coffee shop and cafe, doesn’t look like a place designed by a branding agency.
Its warm, wood-lined interior is a little worn-in.
Its menu is simple and relatively affordable.
Co-owner Erwin Ganschow describes it as the opposite of the sleek, corporate cafes associated with the city’s technology industry, like the bustling Blue Bottle about a block away on Second Street.
But the young tech workers coming through his door appear to appreciate the difference.
“They seem kind of interested in this place because it’s not like your normal Apple Store-type cafe,” Ganschow said.
“It’s kind of old-school.”
South Park, the oldest public park in San Francisco, is a grassy oval that stretches between Second and Third Streets, encircled by low-rise buildings and the deep shade of London plane trees.
Ganschow, who has worked at the cafe since the early 1990s, has watched South Park move from boom to bust and back again.
He remembers small tech startups arriving in the late 1990s, and the frenzy of the dot-com boom that followed.
Caffe Centro survived, said Ganschow, because its landlord, Mission Housing, an affordable housing developer, was willing to take an unusual risk, allowing them to reopen as a worker-owned collective in 2024.
But, across the years, other neighborhood businesses have disappeared through successive downturns.
When the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, contemporary reporting described the park as “ground zero” for tech layoffs, with the Butler and the Chef, a local French bistro, losing customers.
By early 2002, nearly every building around the park carried a “For Lease” sign, according to the Boston Review.
(While the bistro survived the downturn, it closed at the end of 2017.)
The pandemic brought another round of retail losses.
South Park Cafe closed in March 2020, and Mexico Au Parc, which operated on the ground floor of the Madrid Hotel, a local SRO, closed in 2021.
City business-registration data shows that several design and arts businesses have ended their registrations since 2020 as well.
But things are looking up.
“We’re doing roughly three-quarters of our pre-pandemic business,” Ganschow said.
In 2024, “South Park was dead.”
During the pandemic, Caffe Centro’s most reliable customers were residents of Mission Housing’s three nearby SROs.
Nearly 100 people live in the SROs, some directly above the cafe, and Ganschow and his colleagues have tried to keep prices low enough for them to continue eating there.
Now, business is climbing, driven largely by wealthier workers returning to a growing number of technology and investment offices nearby.
Capital returns, retail lags
The South Park neighborhood is coming back to life, but not evenly, locals say.
While venture-capital businesses have opened, returning workers and customers to the sidewalks around the park, restaurants and cafes have recovered more slowly.
Flourish Ventures opened its San Francisco office at 140 South Park in 2022.
Touring Capital followed in 2025, announcing a South Park office and a $330 million fund focused on AI software.
Notable Capital and investment manager Coatue now both list offices at 21 South Park, while Founders Circle Capital, MGV and other investors operate within walking distance.
Cameron Tu, a broker at Touchstone Commercial Partners, described South Park as primarily an office market.
Office rents per square foot have risen significantly, he said, pushed in part by early-stage startups with venture funding.
Retail, meanwhile, is weaker and more volatile, Tu said.
The empty restaurant spaces around the park illuminate the imbalance.
The Mexico Au Parc space remains vacant, leaving Caffe Centro as the park’s solitary restaurant.
(Tu said a tenant recently signed a lease on the space, but then defaulted.)
Flour & Branch’s planned opening at 155A South Park, where the Butler and the Chef was formerly located, offers one sign of renewed retail interest.
Owner Lauren Arnsdorff, who hopes to open the bakery in July, said passersby regularly tell her that the park needs another restaurant.
Ganschow welcomes the prospect.
More restaurants, he said, could give workers a reason to leave their offices, and perhaps another reason to come into the neighborhood at all.
While Ganschow is careful not to declare another economic boom, he is continuing to measure modest changes in his business: fuller tables, busier midweek lunches and the ability to keep prices low while paying the bills.
“There’s a light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.
Occasionally, signs of the neighborhood’s new tech economy seem to emerge from behind office doors.
Ganschow and other neighbors have seen robots roving around the park, sometimes several times a week.
A nearby robotics company, OpenMind, which creates AI software to guide robots in the real world, confirmed that they send out humanoid, wheeled and four-legged robots for testing in the park.
(One of their robots, a humanoid named Pam, recently took the Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty in New York.)
Phillip Kim, a business development manager at OpenMind, said they are training the robots to eventually work in retail and healthcare settings, and to perform work that humans often find difficult.
Advancements in AI are driving advancements in robotics, he said.
Their robots build “social intelligence” by interacting with humans in South Park.
“Diane, the old lady that lives next door, comes and meets our robots pretty often,” he said.
Another humanoid robotics company, Minerva Humoids, operates across the street.
Ganschow described the roaming robots as “semi-annoying,” but also as evidence that people are working nearby, and might eventually stop in for lunch.
“It’s good for business,” he said.
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