When it comes to food, Chinatown is a wonderland of bakeries, seafood restaurants, Dim sum houses, and tea shops, but now it's about to break ground on what the Chronicle is calling “the most ambitious culinary development project the neighborhood has seen in 30 years." It's a 20,000-square-foot, $15 million gourmet food emporium called China Live, which will open at 644 Broadway.
The ground floor will include a Chinese market and café that features organic products. Cyprus Properties Group, which backed the purchase of the building in 2013, describes it as a “Ferry Building-style food emporium.” Others have compared it to Eataly, New York’s Italian food market. The second level will feature a cocktail bar, private dining area, and Eight Tables by George Chen, which will have a seasonal tasting menu for about $200 a pop.
Disher Music & Sound, an audio post-production group, has claimed space on the third floor, while the Telling Pictures film production company will join the San Francisco Film Society’s FilmHouse Residency program for independent filmmakers on the fourth floor. The experimental production group Boxcar Theatre will take up the building’s basement as a home for their Speakeasy performance and other shows.
Largely unoccupied for years, the building was once home to dim sum eatery Gold Mountain and a bustling 437-seat theater. The space, on the cusp of Chinatown and North Beach, is certainly desirable for developers; Zagat, SFist, Refinery29, and others have already deemed it among the city’s most anticipated restaurant openings of 2015. A second China Live is likely to open in New York, followed by one in Los Angeles.
It’s uncertain how this project will impact a neighborhood mostly untouched by gentrification. Though those involved in the project say it will generate hundreds of jobs and attract tech money to an area that's struggled in recent years while the rest of San Francisco has boomed, the offerings at China Live seem incongruous with the surroundings. Chinatown residents, whose average income is less than that of the city at large, are surely not the target demographic for this upscale development. Moreover, it's likely China Live will siphon tourist dollars from the many small, family-owned Chinese restaurants nearby.
In this case, as in countless others, the line between revitalizing an area and turning it into a playground for money — between encouraging new business and preserving a neighborhood’s culture — remains unclear, and will until China Live opens later this year.
[via SF Chronicle; photo courtesy of Aurimas/Flickr]
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