If you walk Fillmore on a Saturday morning between Clay Street and Pine Street, you are walking through the most coordinated stretch of retail change San Francisco has seen in years. That is not a marketing line. It is a description of who holds the leases. The openings arriving this fall are not scattered luck. They are sequenced.
Here is the piece most residents miss. The Korean barbecue room going into the old Noosh corner, the theater restoration two blocks north, and the small-business grants funding both of them are all tied to the same investor and the same project office. Once you see the sequence, the construction fencing, the moving trucks in April, and the new marquee planning start reading as one story instead of five.
A single-owner block, in table form
Venture capitalist Neil Mehta spent the last two years quietly assembling properties on Fillmore Street in Pacific Heights, and a Mehta-linked fund, Friends of Fillmore LP, raised $50 million in March 2026 to advance the Upper Fillmore Revitalization Project. That is on top of an earlier private equity fund, Aegis Reserve Partners LP, which raised $100 million from a single undisclosed investor in January 2024.
Cody Allen runs the project on the ground. Here is the map, kept to the addresses that are actually moving this year.
| Address | Space | What's happening |
|---|---|---|
| 2001 Fillmore (at Pine) | Former Noosh | Monami build-out, ground-floor construction started June 1 |
| 2261 Fillmore (at Clay) | The Clay Theater | Restoration approved April 1, 2026 |
| California & Presidio | Former Ella's American Kitchen | Maria Isabel opened February |
| 2417 California | Former BUBU | DON DON, takeout-forward sushi, already open |
| Fillmore & Sutter | Former NONO space | Now the combined BUBU/NONO room |
Five changes, three blocks, one point of contact for two of them. If your dry cleaner or your dog walker mentioned "construction on Fillmore" in May, this is the row they meant.
What Monami is, and what it is not
The room going into 2001 Fillmore is not another Korean barbecue chain. The next restaurant from the owners of Michelin-starred Ssal in San Francisco is a modern steakhouse dedicated to premium beef, and owners Junsoo and Hyunyoung Bae will open Monami this fall at 2001 Fillmore St. in Pacific Heights.
Bae has been clear about the reference point. "I want it to be a Korean barbecue version of House of Prime Rib," Bae said. Read that sentence twice. He is not describing a Koreatown grill or a tasting-menu flex. He is describing a room where the same table gets the same experience every night for thirty years.
The specifics back him up. Monami will steer away from the all-you-can-eat format often seen at Korean barbecue restaurants, serving both an a-la-carte and tasting menu focused on premium cuts of Californian, Japanese and Korean beef, and diners will be able to cook their own meat on tabletop grills that discreetly pull smoke through the bottom of the grill. Non-barbecue dishes will include seafood such as oysters, raw marinated spot prawns and Dungeness crab when in season, and banchan will incorporate seasonal ingredients. The 3,500-square-foot restaurant, which will be open for lunch and dinner, can accommodate 80 diners, plus two private rooms.
The cost of that fall opening was borne mostly by the neighbors upstairs. The small businesses in the upstairs offices at 2001 Fillmore all got letters on April 24 that they had to move by the end of May to accommodate construction of Monami, with the ground floor restaurant tenant scheduled to start construction work on June 1, and the upstairs tenants, some in their spaces for decades, were taken completely by surprise. Petsche, the hair stylist on the second floor, had been on Fillmore for close to twenty-five years. If you noticed unfamiliar salons popping up on Sacramento or California in June, that is the diaspora.
The Clay's timeline, in the order that matters to you
The Clay approval is the piece most likely to be misremembered as "reopening this fall." It is not. Here is the actual sequence, tightened.
- April 1, 2026. San Francisco's Historic Preservation Commission officially approved the restoration of the Clay Theater with a unanimous vote, marking a significant step in the broader Fillmore revitalization project.
- This summer and fall. Building permits sought, construction begins. Project director Cody Allen told the commission his team hoped to be finished "in early '27."
- Early 2027. Doors open, if the schedule holds.
- Ongoing. The auditorium, with all-new seating, will retain its present size and historic features. Crews plan to cut seating from 380 to about 200 to offer guests a more comfortable viewing experience.
What the reopened Clay will be is worth knowing now, because it changes what "walking to a movie" means from your front door. The Clay will present more than 500 film screenings each year, with best-in-class digital and 35mm projection, plus another 100 talks and other performances. Ted Gerike, the new director and chief creative officer, founded the acclaimed Los Angeles cinema-bookstore hybrid Now Instant and has led digital content for New York's Metrograph since 2021. The team also has a letter of intent with a restaurateur for an elevated all-day dining concept offering breakfast, lunch and dinner to theatergoers and to the neighborhood as a whole.
If you were hoping to catch a film there over the holidays, plan for spring instead. If you want to weigh in on programming before it locks, the tours have been small and quiet, and the project office's email is public.
The quieter openings that already happened
Two rooms opened while everyone was watching the Clay hearings and the Monami eviction notices.
The first is a return. Wife-and-husband chef team Laura and Sayat Ozyilmaz, who have been winning over diners since 2023 at their Presidio restaurant Dalida, expanded their footprint with Maria Isabel, a 58-seat Pac Heights restaurant taking over the former Ella's American Kitchen that explores the culinary traditions of Laura's home country, Mexico, drawing on family dinners that featured aguachile, chilorio, and machaca, translated through the lens of California cuisine. There is wine from underrepresented regions, including Baja California and Querétaro, while cocktails go beyond tequila and mezcal to explore less common agave spirits, like sotol, bacanora, and raicilla.
The story worth carrying to dinner is that the Ozyilmazes are the same team who once ran Noosh in the corner space Monami is now taking over. The Baes took over the long-vacant corner space last occupied by Noosh, which closed in 2019 after a legal dispute between the restaurant's owner and chefs Laura and Sayat Ozyilmazes, who now run lauded Mediterranean restaurant Dalida. Same chefs, walking distance from the corner where their San Francisco story started. If you have been on Fillmore long enough to remember Noosh's opening, this closes a loop.
The second is smaller. The tiny former sushi bar BUBU at 2417 California Street, near Fillmore, has a new name, DON DON, and a new purpose, because owner Kevin Chen says the original BUBU space was simply too small to hold enough tables, so he moved BUBU to join forces with the NONO space at Fillmore and Sutter, combining the two restaurants under one roof, and the original BUBU is now DON DON, a takeout-friendly spot stocked with ready-to-go sushi made fresh throughout the day, with appetizers and made-to-order items including ramen, udon, and Japanese-style sandos. Two tables inside, two outside, Tuesday through Sunday. It is the kind of place you learn about from a neighbor, not a review.
A note on La Mediterranee
One reason the block still feels like itself is that not every old tenant left. The decades-old La Mediterranee restaurant negotiated a lease extension. If you use La Med as your Wednesday-night default, that default holds.
Your fall calendar, tightened
A few dates worth pinning to the fridge.
- Now through fall. Monami build-out at Fillmore and Pine. Expect scaffolding, delivery trucks in the loading zone, and roof work overhead.
- Early fall. Monami opening window, per the Baes' announcement.
- Winter. Clay permitting and interior work.
- July 3 and 4, 2027. Fillmore Jazz Festival returns July 3 and 4, 2027. The 2026 edition drew tens of thousands over the July 4 weekend, and the 2027 dates are already posted.
- Early 2027. Clay's target reopening.
"The block you walked in June is not the block you will walk in October."
That is the operating assumption. Two of the openings landing this fall share an investor. One of the openings closing out the year, the Clay, shares that same investor. The rest of the corner, from La Mediterranee to Mattina to SPQR, is doing what it has always done, which is stay put and cook well. Both facts are true at once.
If you own here
Most of what changes on a block like this changes slowly, and the reason to pay attention now is not urgency but timing. When a stretch of Fillmore adds a Michelin-track steakhouse, a restored single-screen theater with a curator poached from Metrograph, and a returning Mediterranean team all inside three blocks, the leasing conversation for the side streets that feed into it changes too. Sacramento, California, and Pine all touch this corridor. So do the flats above the storefronts.
If you have wondered whether to hold, refresh, or list a Pacific Heights home or rental this fall, the answer depends less on the median and more on which corner you are closest to. That is a walking conversation, not a spreadsheet one. When you are ready to have it, Stephanie LeBeau knows the block, the operators, and the timing. Name Your Price when you call.
