Clement Street's New Restaurants Are Splitting Into Two Very Different Blocks
Walk Clement Street on a Sunday morning and you will fight for space near 3rd Avenue, where the farmers market has run every week for years. Walk the same street on a random Tuesday near 24th Avenue and you might have the sidewalk to yourself. That gap in foot traffic used to just be how Clement worked, busier near the park end, quieter as you head toward the ocean. This year it started shaping where new businesses are willing to sign a lease.
Six new food and drink spots have opened or announced plans on Clement in 2026, and they are not scattered evenly across the strip. Four have landed within a few blocks of the Sunday farmers market. Two have picked a stretch further west that only gets a comparable crowd one Saturday a month, and only from May through August. If you live in the Richmond, that split tells you something concrete about which end of your street is betting on a weekly audience and which end is betting on something newer and less proven.
The Clement Street Farmers Market has run every Sunday, year round, since long before any of this year's openings were announced. It's organized by the Agricultural Institute of Marin across three blocks between 2nd and 4th Avenue, with more than 40 farm vendors plus bakeries you cannot find anywhere else in the city, including Saltwater Bakeshop and Marla Bakery. That is 52 guaranteed high-traffic mornings a year, rain or shine, before a single new restaurant does anything to earn attention.
Four of this year's openings sit inside or right next to that footprint, and by now three of them have doors open. Clementina, at 343 Clement, opened in April as San Francisco's first fully celiac-safe Italian restaurant, from the team behind SoMa's Montesacro Pinseria, with a rice-flour pizza crust and a menu built by a chef and two restaurateurs who all cook around celiac disease in their own families. A few doors down at 324 Clement, Cafe Reveille brought its fifth location to the block this spring, aiming for a May opening when it was first announced, the same laptop-and-latte format the chain is known for elsewhere in the city. Right where Clement begins at Arguello, Rose Pizzeria signed a 20-year lease, an unusually long commitment for a San Francisco storefront, and opened its first San Francisco location this spring in the former Village Pizzeria space. The pizzeria, previously a Berkeley-only operation that the New York Times named one of the 22 best pizzerias in the country, now sits directly across from Arsicault Bakery, another nationally recognized name on the same corner. A fourth, Evermore, is bringing lifelong Inner Richmond resident Amy Lee's new cafe to 200 Clement this year, the spot that sat dark for nearly two years after Cumaica closed, kitty-corner from Giorgio's Pizzeria, the pizza fixture that's been on Clement since 1972 and Lee's own childhood dinner spot.
Not everything on this stretch is expanding. The Spanish Table, an Iberian goods shop on Clement, closed temporarily this past winter after its Berkeley and Marin locations shut down for good, and it hasn't said when or if the San Francisco location will fully reopen. Check before you make a special trip. New openings are not the same as a guarantee that every longtime shop survives the same stretch of sidewalk.
Further out, the street's other big draw is the Heart of the Richmond District Night Market, now in its third year. It closes Clement between 22nd and 25th Avenue on the third Saturday of the month from May through August, hosted by the Community Youth Center of San Francisco with support from the Civic Joy Fund. The 2026 season ran May 16, June 20, July 18, and wrapped for the year on August 15, with organizers adding more hot food vendors than in past summers. May's edition doubled as a block party for Alamo Elementary's 100th anniversary, with the school taking over 23rd Avenue between Clement and California for the afternoon.
That is a real crowd, but it's a monthly one, four Saturdays spread across four months, not a weekly one. It's into that gap that this year's two western openings are stepping, and neither one has opened its doors yet. Roots & Craft Tea Roasters, run by Maya Mori, formerly of Neighbor's Corner, signed a lease at 17th and Clement in February and was still building out the old Brewcraft space as of this spring, for a shop centered on tea she imports and roasts herself from farmers in Japan. A few blocks further, at Clement and 26th, Hologram has announced plans for a cafe and bistro from the couple behind Snowbird Coffee and Malama Matcha, with no opening date set yet. Neither business will have the built-in Sunday crowd that Clementina or Rose Pizzeria inherited just by picking their address.
What they do have is the Clement Lunch Lane, a weekday program from the Richmond Neighborhood Center's Shop-Eat-Local-First initiative that runs specifically from 19th to 26th Avenue, offering lunch specials from noon to 2pm at participating restaurants. It exists precisely because this stretch of Clement doesn't get the reflexive weekend foot traffic the inner blocks do, and it's the kind of steady, unglamorous programming that keeps a storefront afloat between night markets.
Line the two clusters up and the pattern gets easier to see. The market end is filling storefronts next to businesses that have already proven the model for decades, Giorgio's since 1972, Arsicault as a national name, Green Apple Books as a browsing anchor that predates all of this. Three of the four new spots there have already opened, and the fourth is close behind. A new restaurant opening at 200, 324, or 343 Clement isn't discovering foot traffic. It's borrowing it, and it can start collecting on that loan the day the doors open.
The night market end is doing something closer to building its own audience from scratch, and it's still mid-build. Roots & Craft and Hologram are betting that a tea shop and a cafe can turn occasional Saturday-night crowds and weekday lunch specials into daily regulars, the same way the farmers market blocks did over years, not months, but neither one gets to test that bet until construction wraps. That is a slower, riskier sequence, and it's the reason this year's openings look less like one continuous boom and more like two separate experiments running on different timelines on the same street.
For anyone who already lives here, the practical takeaway is simple. If you want the newest food on Clement right now, walk the three blocks around the farmers market, where Clementina, Rose Pizzeria, and Cafe Reveille are already open and Evermore is close behind. If you're curious what a business looks like before it has any of that traffic built in, keep an eye on 17th and 26th, where Roots & Craft and Hologram are still turning empty storefronts into something new.
The Sunday market keeps running through the fall and winter regardless of what opens around it. The night market won't be back until next May. That gap is exactly why the two ends of Clement Street are having such different years.
If you own a rental property near Clement Street and want to know how shifts like this affect what tenants are willing to pay for location, or if you're weighing whether a unit near the market blocks leases differently than one further west, Ray Amouzandeh tracks these changes block by block across the Richmond and the rest of San Francisco. Reach out for a free consultation and a leasing plan built around what's actually happening on your street, not just the citywide average.
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