Oasis Grill, a family-run Mediterranean restaurant that fed San Francisco’s Financial District since 1999, shut its 1st Street location last week after corporate landlord Kilroy Realty refused to renew the lease and handed the space to another tenant.
Co-owners Muna Azzghayer and Mohammad Zughaiyir told the San Francisco Standard they had no warning. The lease expired at the end of October, and Kilroy Realty simply declined to renew it.
“We were blindsided,” Azzghayer said.
The warning signs were there, in hindsight. Earlier this year, building management began walking prospective tenants through the storefront while service was underway. When Azzghayer asked whether the lease was in danger, she says management gave her no answer.
Azzghayer believes money settled it. She suspects the incoming tenant simply outbid them for the space.
“They’re looking for more rent than what we’re paying, and they brought somebody else in and told us, basically, bye,” Azzghayer said. “We were committed to San Francisco, we believed in San Francisco, and I guess we paid the price for it.”
This isn’t a story about a business that couldn’t make it. Oasis Grill survived the swings of downtown San Francisco’s economy for nearly three decades. What it couldn’t survive was a landlord choosing a bigger check.
The loss stings financially in a particular way. In 2015, the owners spent about $2 million and a full year rebuilding the counter-service space from scratch, down to installing new commercial gas lines. Not long after that buildout was finished, COVID-19 hit, gutting foot traffic as remote work emptied out the Financial District for years.
The owners absorbed that hit and kept going. Now a corporate landlord has taken the location anyway.
Oasis Grill isn’t gone from the city. Three other locations remain open, on Drumm Street, 4th Street, and Market Street.
