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. He 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.
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 and 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 thee but not for me
Union Square features two permanent kiosks on opposite corners across the street from iconic department store Macy’s (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 cafes, 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 upgrading 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 Recreation 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 Sept. 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 seek damages if he still closed, but lamented that could result in “bad publicity” for both Florence and the city. Alternately, 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 Feb. 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 lease 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 percentage 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 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 cafes, 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 cafes 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 P.R. 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.”
In part 2: Rulli’s interaction with complacent city officials