Polk Street Is Building Two Different Kinds of Bakery, and Only One of Them Is For You

"You're eating them literally within one to four hours after they came out of the oven." That's how Bageletto cofounder Kiki Theodorides describes the promise behind her new Polk Street cafe, and it says more about how this stretch of Russian Hill actually works than any list of openings could.

Walk Polk Street between Broadway and Union this month and you'll pass a grocery store that just signed a lease running into the 2050s, a bagel shop that bakes nothing on site, and a storefront being gutted for a bakery that won't primarily be selling to you. Three businesses, three different relationships to the block they're standing on. That's the part worth understanding before you decide which one earns your Saturday morning.

The Grocery That Bet on Fifty Years

Bi-Rite Market opened at 2140 Polk Street in the same building that housed Real Food Co. from 1976 until the site went dark. When Bi-Rite signed on, it wasn't a short-term test. Owner Sam Mogannam took a 26-year lease and made the location the company's new headquarters, its largest store yet at 4,000 square feet, with a kitchen, sandwich counter, and fish and meat cases built into a century-old facade the team worked to preserve.

That kind of commitment is the baseline against which everything else on the block should be measured. A grocer doesn't sign a quarter-century lease on a hunch. Mogannam framed the move as a bet on the neighborhood's independent businesses staying independent, telling reporters that supporting locally owned shops around the store would help keep money in the local economy. Two years in, that bet looks like it's paying forward: two new bakery concepts have now chosen the same three-block stretch to make their next move.

Two Bakeries, Two Different Jobs

Here's where the block gets interesting. Bageletto and Lorella are opening within a few doors of each other on Polk, and they are not doing the same thing.

Bageletto is a Mission District bagel shop that opened on 14th Street in February 2025. Its Polk Street location, a sit-down cafe at 2193 Polk in the space that used to be Peet's, isn't a production kitchen. Bagels are boiled and baked at the 14th Street commissary and trucked over in small batches twice a day, more often if the counter runs low. The Polk Street shop exists to sell what the Mission kitchen makes. It's an import operation, and Theodorides is candid about the tradeoff: freshness measured in hours, not a from-scratch bakery on site.

Lorella is doing the opposite. Chef Melissa Perello, who opened Frances in 2009 and the Michelin-starred Octavia in 2015, is turning her sellout weekend pastry pop-up, Saturbake, into a permanent bakery at 2139 Polk, the former home of the neighborhood's old Bagelry. Pastry chef Melissa Loar has been running Saturbake out of Octavia's kitchen since spring 2024, and the lines told the story before the lease did.

"We sold out in like 10 minutes," Loar said of the early Saturbake sales. "Oh my God. I felt so bad."

Lorella won't just sell croissants and sourdough to Russian Hill regulars. It's built to double as the pastry commissary for both Octavia and Frances, neither of which is on Polk Street. That means the bread Loar bakes here will show up on plates across the city before it shows up in a Russian Hill pastry case. Architect Seth Boor, who recently redesigned Octavia's dining room, is handling the build-out, including a second skylight cut into the ceiling.

So one new bakery on Polk exists to bring product in. The other exists to send it out. Same block, same commercial category, opposite direction of travel. That's not a coincidence of two entrepreneurs picking the same street. It's a sign that Polk Street has become useful commercial real estate for people whose customer base and reputation were built somewhere else first, whether that's a Mission storefront or a Michelin-recognized dining room.

Where Things Stand This Fall

For anyone trying to keep the timeline straight:

• Bi-Rite Market, 2140 Polk St. Open and anchoring the block since 2024, on a 26-year lease.
• Bageletto, 2193 Polk St. A sit-down cafe serving bagels and Italian sandwiches trucked in from the Mission kitchen, targeting a summer 2026 opening after its April announcement.
• Lorella, 2139 Polk St. Chef Melissa Perello and pastry chef Melissa Loar's brick-and-mortar bakery, under construction and aiming to open before the holidays.
• Handroll Hawker, 2360 Polk St. A new handroll bar a few blocks up, part of the same wave of fall openings reshaping the corridor.

None of these are speculative concepts hoping the neighborhood notices them. Every operator involved already had a following before they picked Polk Street.

The Park Nobody Has to Drive To

A few blocks north, Francisco Park does its own quiet work. The 4.5-acre park at Hyde, Bay, Francisco, and Larkin opened in April 2022 on the site of the old Francisco Reservoir, which had sat fenced off since 1940. It took a $9.9 million land purchase from the Public Utilities Commission and $27.5 million raised by the volunteer-led Francisco Park Conservancy to get there, and it remains the largest public park to open in San Francisco's urban core since 1983.

What makes it a daily habit rather than a tourist stop is the dog run under the old cypress tree, the community garden, and terraces that put the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and Ghirardelli Square in the same sightline while a Powell-Hyde cable car dings past on Hyde Street below. The playground closed for a resurfacing project from June 22 through late July this year, replacing the safety surfacing under the tire swings and rope course. If you haven't been back since spring, the ground under your kid's feet is new.

Saturday Mornings on Filbert and Hyde

The block's other rhythm is quieter and doesn't show up on any restaurant map. Russian Hill Neighbors, the volunteer group that's been organizing advocacy and events in the area, runs recurring neighborhood cleanups that meet at the northwest corner of Filbert and Hyde. Volunteers grab coffee from Saint Frank and doughnut holes from Bob's Donuts before splitting into crews to sweep sidewalks and clear litter around the neighborhood. It's a small, unglamorous ritual, and it's exactly the kind of thing that tells you who actually treats this hill as home rather than a backdrop.

What the Block Is Telling You

None of this is really about restaurants. It's about what kind of commitment a business is willing to make to a specific three-block stretch of Polk Street. A grocer signing a lease that outlasts most mortgages. A Michelin-pedigree chef choosing this street, not her own restaurant's neighborhood, to build the kitchen that feeds two other dining rooms. A neighborhood group that shows up on a Saturday morning with coffee and a trash bag because that's what keeping a place matters looks like when nobody's watching.

Russian Hill isn't reinventing itself this fall. It's doing something quieter: proving, storefront by storefront, that the people willing to bet on it long-term keep choosing the same handful of blocks.

If you're weighing what a home on this hill is actually worth, in dollars and in daily life, Gail and Brad know this stretch of Polk Street the way you know your own kitchen. Request a complimentary home valuation and let's talk about what your Russian Hill property means in today's market.