When did you last actually eat inside the Ferry Building, rather than just cut through it on the way to catch a ferry or grab a coffee at the Saturday market?
If your last real meal there was a lunch at Slanted Door or a business dinner at One Market, you are remembering a building that no longer exists in that form. Those restaurants, along with the longtime lunch spot MarketBar, all went dark years ago. MarketBar's owners actually announced their closure in February 2020, about two weeks before the citywide pandemic shutdown made the decision look prophetic instead of unlucky. For most of the five years since, the building's most visible commercial spaces sat empty behind glass while the Saturday farmers market kept running out front like nothing had changed.
That gap is now closing, and it is closing in a specific, deliberate direction. The Ferry Building is not simply refilling with more of the same daytime food hall vendors it had before 2020. It is being rebuilt, tenant by tenant, into something the original 2003 marketplace never really was: a place people go at 7 or 8 in the evening, not just at noon.
The Space That Explains the Whole Pattern
The clearest evidence sits at the building's south end, in the roughly 3,000-square-foot space that housed MarketBar for 17 years. A16 owner Shelley Lindgren has signed on to fill it with a new Southern Italian restaurant called Lucania, targeted for a second-half-2026 opening. The concept is designed to run from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., with a 140-seat outdoor patio built for year-round dining, not the lunch-rush turnover MarketBar was known for.
Lindgren already runs A16 La Pala, a Roman-style pizza counter that has operated inside the Ferry Building since early 2024, so this is her second bet on the building rather than her first. As of early June, according to a review from The Infatuation, Lucania had not yet opened, so the wait continues. But the ambition behind it tells you what management is actually optimizing for now: longer hours, table service, and a patio built to hold people past dinner rather than move them through at lunch. Ferry Building general manager Jane Connors has described the building's turnaround as a genuine bright spot for downtown San Francisco, and the leasing decisions back that framing up.
Where the Turnover Actually Happened
The pattern is easiest to see space by space. Here is what left, and who is filling the gap:
| Former space | What closed | What's moving in |
|---|---|---|
| MarketBar (17 years, closed April 2020) | MarketBar | Lucania, from A16's Shelley Lindgren, targeting second half of 2026 |
| Slanted Door | Slanted Door | Arquet and Parachute Bakery, both from the Michelin-starred Sorrel team |
| Boulette's Larder (a founding 2003 tenant, closed July 31, 2025) | Boulette's Larder | Hayati, a Mediterranean concept from restaurateur Kais Bouzidi, targeting summer 2026 |
| San Francisco Fish Company (closed 2020) | SF Fish Co. | Nopa Fish, from chef Laurence Jossel, opened in 2025 |
Notice that three of the four outgoing tenants were not casualties of a single bad year. MarketBar and the Fish Company both closed in the initial 2020 wave. Boulette's Larder lasted through the pandemic and closed just last summer, ending a two-decade run as one of the building's original anchors. The building spent years with these spaces dark before finding tenants willing to commit to the new, evening-focused model.
What's Already Open, If You Haven't Walked Through Since Spring
If your mental map of the building is a year or two stale, several of these tenants are already serving. Nopa Fish has been running its counter-service fish sandwiches, fish and chips, and seafood sourced through Water2Table since 2025. Nash Bakes, known for savory cheesecakes, opened around the same stretch. The Sorrel team's Parachute Bakery had a debut strong enough to sell out all 800 of its opening-day pastries in about 90 minutes, and its sibling restaurant Arquet has followed it into the former Slanted Door footprint. Bernal Cutlery, the Mission district knife and cookware shop, also signed on as a tenant during this same leasing push, a sign that not every new addition is a restaurant.
None of this changes the Saturday farmers market run by the nonprofit Foodwise out front, which is still the same three-times-a-week draw it has been for years. What's different is what happens once you walk through the doors on a Tuesday night instead of a Saturday morning.
What's Still Coming
Two of the higher-profile projects are still ahead of us as of this month. Lucania, as noted, is targeting a second-half-2026 opening in the old MarketBar space. Hayati, from Kais Bouzidi, is aiming for summer 2026 in the former Boulette's Larder space, and it is worth understanding who Bouzidi is before writing this off as just another new name. He already operates Sens at Embarcadero Center, Barcha in the Financial District, and Bon Délire near Pier 3. Hayati would give him a fourth restaurant within a few blocks of the Ferry Building, effectively completing a cluster of Mediterranean-leaning concepts along this stretch of the waterfront rather than a single isolated opening.
The Exits Worth Knowing About
A building filling up is also, by definition, a building where some tenants did not make the cut or chose to leave. Grande Crêperie and Reem's both closed, and both operators described their departures as sudden despite running popular, established businesses inside the building. Red Bay Coffee, the Oakland-founded roaster, gave up part of its footprint within the building in 2025 to make room for the shift toward full-service dining. And Maison Verbena, the bakery and home goods shop that started as a stall in the building's Village Market, has been relocating its flagship out of the Ferry Building entirely, into a space at 437 Hayes Street in Hayes Valley, in the building that most recently housed Zero and Amour Vert. Maison Verbena's founders have left the door open to returning to the Ferry Building down the line, and for now their products are still available through the Village Market stall even as the Hayes Valley flagship comes together.
Taken together, these exits are not a sign of instability. They are the cost of a management team actively curating for a different kind of tenant than the building had in 2019: fewer counters meant for a five-minute grab-and-go transaction, more rooms meant to hold a table of four for two hours after dark.
Why This Actually Matters If You Live Here
The headline stat backs up what the leasing pattern suggests. Foot traffic at the Ferry Building rose 23 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2025, its strongest opening quarter on record. That is not tourists discovering the building for the first time. Tourist volume to San Francisco has been recovering steadily since the pandemic but not at anything like a 23 percent single-quarter jump. That kind of number points to something more local: people who already live in the city treating the Ferry Building as a dinner destination again, not just a lunch stop or a place to catch the ferry to Sausalito.
If you have been avoiding the building because your last few visits felt half-empty, or because the restaurant you used to count on has quietly disappeared, this is the year that changes. The version of the Ferry Building worth planning an evening around is not fully finished yet. Lucania and Hayati are both still ahead of us. But enough of the new lineup is already open that a Tuesday night down at the Embarcadero looks genuinely different than it did even eighteen months ago.
Paying attention to how a neighborhood's daily rhythms shift, not just its home prices, is part of what it means to actually know a market rather than just report on it. If you are weighing a move within San Francisco or wondering what your own corner of the city is worth in a year like this one, Aviva Kamler brings that same close-to-the-ground read to every conversation about your home.
