Anyone from the Bay Area who loves Italian pastries has heard of Chef Gary Rulli, proprietor of RistoBar, located on Chestnut Street in San Francisco’s Marina District, and the flagship pasticceria, Emporio Rulli, in Larkspur. Rulli is a fourth-generation San Franciscan whose grandparents emigrated from Abruzzi, Italy, but it was a trip back to the motherland that gave him an appreciation for authentic Italian baking and, in particular, Panettone. When Rulli arrived in Italy in 1982, he discovered that Panettone was a dying art. Rulli made it his mission to learn from the masters, and reinvent what Americans knew as a dry, prepackaged cupola-shaped Christmas cake made with baker’s yeast and filled with candied fruits and raisins. His mentor, renowned Bergamo pastry chef Achille Brena, showed him the secret of using natural yeast to make authentic Panettone, “un pasticcere a 360 gradi.”
Rulli brought the natural yeast starter back to America as a gift from Brena, and that 100-year-old starter allowed him to produce the regional varieties of Panettone that made him the cake’s ambassador, from Milanese to Genovese, and the New Year’s Panettone known as the Veneziana.
Dubbed “the ambassador of authentic Italian pastry in America” by La Pasticceria Internazionale, Rulli is considered one of the greatest master pastry chefs in America, but it is his Panettone that put him on the map. Italian-American chef and TV personality Giada de Laurentiis once called Rulli’s Milanese Panettone “the best thing she had ever eaten.” He was the only Italian-American to be included in the Accademia Maestri Pasticceria Italiana, in Brescia. Rulli’s client roster includes President Jimmy Carter, Sophia Loren, Martha Stewart, George Lucas, and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead.
Besides his skills as a chef, Rulli’s deep roots in San Francisco have led to community involvement, from welcoming San Francisco police officers like his own grandfather during the “defund the police” unrest when other restaurants were shutting them out, to hosting a morning meet-and-greet for a Marina District runners group with then mayoral candidate Daniel Lurie. Over the years, Rulli has put over $12 million into the City of San Francisco with his various businesses, but it hasn’t always been smooth sailing, especially the 12 years he spent in Union Square, where he has seen a one-million-dollar aggregate loss since 2012 due to drawn out construction on the Central Subway, rampant crime, drug use, homelessness, and the 2020 pandemic. As he watched the City bend over backward to welcome celebrity chef Tyler Florence while referring to him as “the previous tenant who defaulted,” Rulli decided it was time to set the record straight.
FREE RENT FOR YEE BUT NOT FOR THEE
Union Square features two permanent kiosks on opposite corners across the street from the iconic department store Macy’s (which is set to close in the next two years). In 2023, then-mayor London Breed announced celebrity chef Tyler Florence’s company would open two of his Miller & Lux Provisions cafés, one next to Stockton Street offering lunch and all-day brunch options, and the other adjacent to Powell Street offering pastries.
Florence, a familiar face from his nearly 30 years on the Food Network, operates the critically acclaimed Wayfare Tavern in the Financial District and another Miller & Lux inside Chase Center. To speed things up ahead of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit and the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference at the Westin St. Francis Hotel, the mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development gave Florence $440,000 to overhaul the kiosks, help pay for equipment, and cover some of his initial operating and program expenses. Despite Florence’s initial enthusiasm, he soon found significant challenges in running the restaurants, including the fact that neither had a kitchen for preparing fresh food. When Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill in September 2023 awarding a $2 million grant to refurbish Union Square, San Francisco officials said the money would be used to install kitchens in the kiosks, as well as upgrade their serving areas and public spaces. In fact, Phil Ginsburg, General Manager of the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, credited Florence’s lobbying for helping secure the grant.
During the NBA All-Star festivities, TV news stations played video of new mayor Daniel Lurie cozying up to a clearly uncomfortable Florence. While it may have seemed sudden to the public, Florence had been warning the City for most of 2024 about various challenges and had already let Rec and Park know that he would be leaving the Union Square kiosks after losing nearly $300,000 in one year.
According to public records, in February 2024, just over three months into operation, Miller & Lux asked the City for a pause at the rotisserie due to an issue with the dumbwaiter (more on that later) and to release the company from its obligation to operate the rotisserie until the renovations funded by the state grant were completed, to which the City agreed. Instead, the kiosk closed and never reopened. On September 30, 2024, Donna Perreault, Chief of Staff at Tyler Florence Entertainment Inc., wrote to city officials, “Police presence is down, skateboarders are back, and we are getting complaints about the cleanliness of the Park.” She also said that Dreamforce, Salesforce’s large annual conference at Moscone Center, “was a huge disappointment … one of our slowest weeks on record.”
In December 2024, the day after Florence’s team said it would close at the end of that month, Rec and Park’s Director of Property Management Dana Ketcham emailed colleagues about “playing hardball” by holding Florence to his three-year lease and potentially seeking damages if he still closed, but lamented that could result in “bad publicity” for both Florence and the City. Alternatively, Ketcham said, the City could be “nice” and try to convince Florence to stay, at least for another two months. Meanwhile, Florence’s effort to secure additional funds were unsuccessful: in a Jan. 27, 2025, email, Ginsburg confirmed to Florence that Breed’s administration “had not been able to allocate the money” from the grant and stated that Miller & Lux would be allowed to break its lease obligations “as soon as a replacement tenant was found.”
The awkward video clips of a jubilant Mayor Lurie and a stiff Florence occurred just before the celebrity chef left the building. City officials brought in Belinda Leong, proprietor of one of Lurie’s favorite morning stops, b. Patisserie in Pacific Heights, to open a pop-up with just two days to prepare to serve pastries over the three-day NBA All-Star weekend that ran from Feb. 14 through 18, 2025. For stepping up at the last minute, the City rewarded b. Patisserie with a deal sweeter than its famous kouign-amann — a one-year deal where the tenant pays expenses but has the opportunity to seek credits to offset them after the first six months of free rent. During the second six months, the tenant pays a percentage of rent only after achieving $80,000 in sales per month.
Rulli is understandably angry at the way he was treated by the very same players as he dealt with the Central Subway construction boondoggle and a worldwide pandemic in addition to the crime, blight, and homelessness that Florence complained about. Over the course of several interviews, Rulli shared some of the correspondence he received from the City as he begged for their help and said that he had no choice but to walk away. “My lease was over 16 years, $22,000 a month base plus percentage rent,” he explained. “We closed down at the start of the pandemic. We were on a month-to-month the last year waiting for the subway to open after 12 years of construction. We had been losing substantial amounts of money the last three years due to the continuous degradation of the Square and the constant construction which had already kept business away since it started 12 years ago. We were offered no rent relief during the entire time of the construction period even though the general contractor, through negligence, had laid down the wrong tracks and had to remove and reinstall them, which only further delayed the reopening of the Central Subway.”
Rulli spent $3.5 million to build out the two cafés, including display cases and a glass patio, with no help from the City, and paid $4 million in rent over the course of his lease. “With half the workforce leaving downtown during Covid and the continued downward spiral of the whole environment around Union Square, we decided not to reopen and left the built-out cafés and infrastructure to the City,” Rulli says. “We owed around $100,000 in rent accumulated in the final year. Fighting the City in a legal battle would have been too expensive, and due to being impacted already by the Covid economy, we decided to just let it go. After reading the PR campaign put out by the City and how the new cafés had been reopened after being ‘abandoned by the previous tenant,’ we decided it was time to set the record straight.”
COMPLACENT AND COMPLICIT CITY OFFICIALS
While Ginsberg and Mayor Breed kept in constant contact with Florence, offered him cash and grants to renovate the kiosks, and eventually let him break his lease, Rulli never received a return message from either. “I sent text messages [to Breed] and contacted Ginsberg numerous times, including meetings with my team. He never responded.” Rulli also reached out to then-District 2 Supervisor Catherine Stefani, with whom he had a relationship from his many years in business on Chestnut Street, to no avail. Supervisor Aaron Peskin, whose District 3 included the Union Square kiosks, was also unresponsive. “After we closed, and I saw the article about the cafés reopening, I contacted his office. He told me after hearing about our situation how embarrassed he was that the City treated us in that way,” Rulli says. Peskin contacted him one other time to seek a contribution for his mayoral run.
As for Dana Ketcham, the Rec and Park property management director who worried about “bad publicity” if the City played hardball with Florence, emails show no such benevolence toward longtime tenant Rulli and his two kiosk cafés, Emporio Rulli and Bancarella.
“The City is writing to officially notify you of the termination of your lease,” Ketcham said to Rulli in a December 29, 2021, email. “We recognize that you may be entitled to one month’s notice before the termination can go into effect. However, in light of your failure to operate the cafe or to pay rent, we would like the termination to take effect as soon as possible … If you are not willing to discuss an expeditious termination with us, this letter will also serve as formal notice of default. You have not kept up the cafes and they are creating an attractive nuisance.”
On Dec. 31, Rulli responded to Ketcham, “Our ‘failure to operate the café has largely been dictated by both the mayor of San Francisco and governor of California. To expect any business to continue to pay employees and other operating expenses only to be told to shut down time and again is unreasonable at best. Since the beginning of the subway construction the only time either of the locations on Union Square had any chance of not losing thousands is during the summer months when tourists are in town … Here are photos from June 2020. As you can clearly see there is no one to sell our wares to. Then of course there is the homeless problem and lack of support from San Francisco Supervisors, the Mayor, SFPD, and the Director of Parks and Recreation, Phil Ginsburg.”
Rulli attached a message sent to Ginsburg in 2018: “Hi Phil, I wanted to let you know Saturday our female manager at Union Square was spit on by a female transient in our Stockton street cafe. She was treated at the scene and the homeless woman was arrested. Every day there is some incident from theft or human excrement smeared on windows or in front of our doors. This has been an unsafe work environment for our staff and our customers. We need to have a meeting with the Mayor and the supervisors as well as the police about the square. It is a civic embarrassment as well as now a safety concern. Why do transients have more rights than the taxpaying residents of San Francisco? I know there is only so much Park And Rec can do and that’s why I feel it’s long past due to have a meeting with everyone concerned about this problem. It’s not only the seven-year construction that has negatively impacted the square but probably more so the homeless situation. There is a percentage of the population that is a danger to anyone trying to enjoy the surrounding area. The city has had enough bad publicity lately on the national news. We don’t need an incident at Union Square to become a public news story but I’m afraid something is going to happen if we don’t have a police presence on the square throughout the day.”
Rulli points out to Ketcham that Ginsburg didn’t respond to that message or numerous other communication attempts. “Over the last seven or eight years we have reached out … and attempted to work with Park and Recreation and the City of San Francisco looking for some relief for the losses we sustained as a result of the ongoing subway construction and the never-ending homeless problem, the result has been nothing. Our cafes have had to deal with flooding caused by the construction, damage to our equipment, the lack of use of the elevator (adding to the hazardous work environment) because of said flooding, raw sewage odors coming from underground. We believe we have been irreparably harmed by these ongoing issues and fully expect some remuneration … In March of 2019 we took out a $425,000 loan to keep our heads above water, however the homeless problem became national news, and the construction never ended. Our losses for the period of 10/1/18—3/20/20 are a whopping $705,000. We are including a recap of our P & L for your review. Our employees were spit on, bashed in the head, stolen from, threatened and harassed on a daily basis, were required to clean up hazardous waste left by the homeless and the drug addicts, working conditions in Union Square were difficult at best and most unpleasant for our customers and visitors to San Francisco.”
In a series of interviews, former Rulli employees corroborated the horrific conditions, as well as the City’s refusal to help. “It was a literal shit show,” says former Director of Operations Adolfo Veronese. “They didn’t do anything for Gary. We had to call multiple times a week for homeless, due to drugs and behavior issues. People were shooting up in the morning out front. A guy dropped his pants, laid down, and passed out inside the café; we called the cops. It took 40 minutes for them to arrive. Cops on Union Square didn’t want to deal with it … I sat in on city meetings and they wouldn’t help him out, just brush him off.”
The situation deteriorated further when the City closed Geary Street for subway construction. “Gary would spend all this money on signs to get some business and the City would take the signs down.
Another former worker, who asked to remain anonymous as he still does work with the City, says his car was broken into three times near the office. “The homeless problem was really bad — there were needles and people shooting up. During construction of the subway, raw sewage was coming down the walls of the office. One day I walked into my home and my wife almost puked because she said I smelled like shit — I was just used to it. I grew up on a construction zone and the engineer was agreeing that I was right that they weren’t doing things correctly. The elevator and the dumbwaiter were locked for a year because there was sewage coming off the shaft and affecting the downstairs.” Yes, the same dumbwaiter that caused Florence to close his Miller & Lux rotisserie and request a release from his obligation to operate, which Rec and Park granted.
“At one point I stopped calling the City because nothing was getting done,” the former employee continued. “I told them they were doing a very poor job of protecting their tenants. They just come out with their big suits and nothing gets resolved. We were not a priority. But I had an employee who wouldn’t come into the storage without a mask.”
Thomas Bunker was Vice President of Operations for Rulli’s company, but he says Union Square needed all of his time “like the Dutch parable about putting your finger in the dam.” The City and the subway construction crew proved a powerful combination of incompetence. “It was cause and effect. The subway work displaced vermin, then when the ice rink was up for the holidays, the City used rice to absorb the water and that just set up a buffet for the vermin,” Bunker says. The dumbwaiter — a consistent theme in all of the interviews — also had water in it along with the elevator. “The left hand never knew what the right hand was doing, it seemed,” Bunker says of the City. Because the cafés had “young people, 18 to 20 years old” working there who were nervous about the conditions in Union Square, Bunker would arrive early to open up. “You would have to step over people who had OD’ed. There were three types of homeless: catastrophic event — they weren’t around long — mental incapacitation, and the ones with drug, alcohol and mental issues. They would grab the food off customers’ tables. They’d steal the sugar packets. They’d pass bad money. De-escalation is something I learned. We had a security guard who was ex-Army — he asked a guy to get off the property and the guy came back later with a steel pipe and clobbered him over the head. He was out for six months.”
And how did the City respond? “We would go to all of these meetings, and they would talk about roses or the tulip festival but not about facilities or the problems. I marvel at some of the things that should have been done but didn’t get done. Gary is a reputable businessman — he really cares about what he does. It was hard on him.”
Rulli agrees that homelessness, crime, the pandemic, and the Central Subway created a potent cocktail of negativity not only for him and his employees, but also for customers. “Homeless predators spit in the faces of two different managers; one manager had his car broken into and his grandfather’s briefcase with really personal stuff was stolen; we had human feces smeared across our doors for our staff to clean up; syringes and condoms being left in the bushes outside of the store; the stairwell and hallway to the garage where our office was located were constantly occupied at all hours with sleeping vagrants on drugs which my female staff had to walk by with cash deposits — we used to send deposits down in the dumbwaiter, but since it wasn’t operational they had to go through the garage, and the garage refused to have security cameras due to privacy issues for its staff. We had to call the police constantly — they were compassionate but said their hands were tied by the Board of Supervisors and District Attorney [Chesa Boudin]. We had many meetings with the City with my attorney Joe Veronese. Rec and Park was completely nonresponsive and in denial about the unsafe work environment city politics had created for San Francisco citizens, my employees, and our customers.”
Follow Susan and the Marina Times on X: @SusanDReynolds and @TheMarinaTimes.
