Few restaurants ever get to celebrate their 25thanniversary, especially when it started out in a derelict corner.
“There was a soup kitchen across the street and the restoration of the old Ferry Building was years away,” says the owner Michael Dellar, with g-m Larry Bouchard, who opened One Market Restaurant in San Francisco in 1993 on Market Street.
The grotesque Embarcadero Freeway had been torn down after the 1989 earthquake, and grindingly slow construction of the city’s BART system ruined Market Street’s retail business. Street crime soared. Even as late as 2009 Streetsblog SF described the area as “congested, hazardous, and in poor repair.”
“When we opened the restaurant people asked us if we’d be here in twenty-five years,” says Dellar, “and I told them, `Of course we will; we signed a 30-year lease!” He paused, then added, “At a dollar per square foot.”
In the restaurant business an affordable thirty-year lease on a less-than-prime property allowed the partners to gamble on a neighborhood largely devoid of any restaurants, much less a grand American brasserie with an open kitchen and rotisserie, vast wine cellar and its own meat locker for aging.”
Now, twenty-five years later One Market has served three million covers, which Dellar notes is “three times the population of San Francisco.” And the booming in the area—now nicknamed Soma for South of Market—was kick started by the restaurant and the restoration of the Ferry Building into a marketplace by bringing a vitality and tourists to the block.
If not ideally situated, One Market was among the first of a new generation of San Francisco restaurants that followed trailblazers like Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse (in Berkeley), Jeremiah Tower’s Stars, and Wolfgang Puck’s Postrio. BY the mid-80’s San Francisco had changed from a tourist dining town with a slew of brocade-wallpapered continental restaurants like Ernie’s and The Blue Fox to a crucible of so-called “New California Cuisine” that stressed the freshest local ingredients and the best wines coming out of nearby Napa and Sonoma Valleys.
Dellar hired
young chef Bradley Ogden, with whom he’d opened the acclaimed Lark Creek in Marin County. In 1993, they returned to San Francisco to take on the biggest restaurant project seen in the city in many years. In 1997 Chef George Morrone, whose restaurant Aqua pioneered a new style of seafood cuisine in the city, took over One Market’s kitchens, followed in 2001 by Adrian Hoffman, and in 2004 by the current resident, Mark Dommen, who won One Market its first Michelin star.
To celebrate the restaurant’s silver anniversary the restaurant threw a charity gala last Saturday night for invited guests and included a performance by San Francisco’s iconic jazz singer Paula West—an original employee at the restaurant. For the event Ogden, Morrone and Hoffman joined Dommen for a five-course meal of dishes they made famous over the years: Ogden’s Point Reyes blue cheese soufflé with a blood orange gastrique; Morrone’s Pommery-poached lobster with vanilla, jalapeño butter and saffron potato; Hoffman’s served tortelli pasta of veal breast with bottarga and pine nuts; Dommen’s Prime New York steak with beef cheeks, marrow, smoked mashed potatoes and truffles; Pastry chef Patti Dellamonica-Bauler finished with a chocolate gâteau with chocolate-caramel sorbet.
California wines were poured by Sommelier & Wine Director Tonya Pitts. Dellar’s wife Leslye still does the restaurant’s flower arrangements. As a founding director of OpenTable, Dellar stays active in the non-profit sector as a Director of Lighthouse for the Blind and as a member of the Kitchen Cabinet for the Food Project at the Smithsonian Institution. He also owns Stardust Winery in Napa Valley.
In speaking to his guests Dellar stressed that from the beginning the straightforward style of One Market’s food would always be maintained– Ogden’s Caesar salad is still on the menu–whoever the chef was, and that he had little interest in trendy foods, instead focusing on west coast seafood like Alaskan halibut, Dungeness crab and Pacific swordfish and not complicating the dishes, many cooked over an open wood fire.
Some of his staff have been with the restaurant since the beginning and built long-term relationships with guests. Wine service is meant to be friendly, not overbearing. “We expect see our first-time customers come back again and again,” says Dellar, “and for our regulars to depend on us not to rock the boat too much. We also think our prices are very fair for the quality of food, wine and atmosphere we provide.” (Dinner entrees run from $22.50 to $47.)
One Market’s survival against the odds is not without precedent in boom-and-bust town like San Francisco, despite two earthquakes, two world wars, depression, recessions and changing tastes. Sam’s Grill dates back to 1932, John’s Grill to 1908, the Fly Trap to 1883, and (though now in a newer location) Tadich Grill to 1849, all once rough-house versions of what they are today, serving honest food culled from the region.
One Market refined that idea and has stuck with it. Persistence seems to have paid off. For while most of the first generation of New California restaurants have closed—Stars, Postrio, Masa’s, Santa Fe Bar and Grill, and others—after their fashion wore thin, One Market thrives on keeping to basics it established a quarter century ago in a location whose current gentrification started when One Market turned its lights onto the street.