Employee Pine Watt walks through Barebottle in San Francisco in 2017. The popular brewery is expanding to the Salesforce Transit Center.
Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle 2017Barebottle Brewing Co.,one of the fastest-growing craft breweries in San Francisco, is opening two taprooms at the Salesforce Transit Center.
Barebottle will bring its craft beer, wine and snacks to the center’s rooftop park and a space on the ground floor facing First Street. Both locations will open in spring 2022.
It’s the latest addition to a string of food and drink businesses coming to the Transit Center — alineup that the city hopes will draw customers back to the $2.2 billion projectand spur more sales in sluggish downtown.
The popular beer company brews a range of beer styles and is known for its hazy Muir Woods IPA, though the draft lineup changes often. The owners have also expanded beyond beer: They now serve their own natural wines, coffee they roast themselves and house-made root beer and sodas.
Lester Koga, Michael Seitz and Ben Sterling, three friends and avid home-brewers, started Barebottle together in Bernal Heights in 2007. The taproom took off and has remained a packed, family-friendly neighborhood favorite since. Barebottle expanded to the South Bay with a Santa Clara taproom in 2020.
Other local restaurants that have rented spaces at the transit center and are targeting early 2022 openings include Per Diem, Venga Empanadas, Tycoon Kitchen, Acquolina and Dim Baos. It was previously reported that San Francisco’s Feves Chocolate would open there, but it no longer is, according to the transit center. Anunnamed rooftop restaurant from the owners of Berkeley’s acclaimed Isayarehas been going through lease negotiations and construction has not yet started. The owners are also taking over two additional ground floor spaces, one of which will house a fish market, according to anew lease agreement.
One of two Philz Coffee locations at the Transit Center is open (themobile-only Philzwill reopen this fall), as well asHappy Lemon, a boba chain known for serving tea topped with cheese foam.
The massive, much-anticipated Salesforce Transit Center, the city’s second-largest new retail project in years, has been marred by delays. Soon after opening in 2018, the center shut down for more than nine months after two cracked steel beams were discovered and had to be repaired. Itreopened in August 2019.
Then the pandemic hit, and the office workers intended to patronize the center and use the 5.4-acre rooftop park went away. Businesses at the transit hubremained dark for much of 2020. The broadereconomic recovery of downtown San Francisco remains slowas remote work continues.
Elena Kadvany is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email:elena.kadvany@sfchronicle.comTwitter:@ekadvany
